“It’s a very smart show, and a show that’s very big with critics, but it’s not a very big ratings hit,” Chris says. “If you’re doing Two And A Half Men or The Simpsons, everybody knows about the show, what it is, and a lot of people have seen it at least a few times. Not 30 Rock. It doesn’t have a very big audience; people aren’t familiar with it.

“So how do I broaden it out? It’s a niche-y, cable kind of show, even though it’s on a broadcast network. I’ve got to grab people who’ve never watched it. How do you do that?”

For one series of promos scheduled for large urban markets, 2C created an animated subway map, then added clips of comic 30 Rock mishaps like Fey losing her phone and Morgan getting lost. “In that one, you get people’s attention with a place that they relate to,” Chris says.

“Then we created some spots that revolve around the characters — for instance, a promo made of clips of nothing but Tracy Morgan’s epic bizarreness. It’s made to hook people who aren’t necessarily interested in a show satirizing a TV network but might be interested in this funny, weird character.

“And everyone’s had a hard boss. So we did one with just clips of Alec Baldwin being mean and unreasonable.”

Building promos around themed clips requires so much studying that 2C’s offices sometimes resemble a college library full of students cramming for a final exam.

“Carla and I watched 30 Rock and loved it, so we had a lot of ideas,” Chris says. “But when we got the contracts for Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy, I didn’t know anything about them. If a show’s popular enough to get into syndication, there’s generally somebody on the staff with encyclopedic knowledge of it. But when there’s not, we watch DVDs, we look at fan sites and YouTube, we read old issues of Entertainment Weekly. We read entire books about some of these shows.”

With new shows, the problems are different. If the network isn’t far along in production, promos have to be vague and fascinating at the same time. When HBO asked for a promo for the third season of Eastbound & Down, a sitcom about a former baseball player, the network was still months away from getting its first script.

“There was an unusually long period between the second and third season, and they wanted to get some buzz started and remind people the show was coming back,” says Ben Frank, a 2C Media producer. “But how do you do that when you don’t have any footage and don’t know where the show is going?”

About the only thing the 2C Media team handling the project knew was that Kenny Powers, the show’s party-hearty main character, was moving from Mexico to Myrtle Beach, S.C.

“One of our first concepts was to get a Confederate flag into the promo somehow,” Frank said. “That suggests the South. Then we started thinking: What is Myrtle Beach about? And what is it about Myrtle Beach that fits Kenny’s character? Somebody mentioned beach boardwalks, and we started thinking about the kind of businesses you find there. Hey: How about tattoos?”

Initially, the team thought about a woman clad in a Confederate-flag bikini getting a tattoo of Kenny Powers’ face on her back. That morphed into something less grisly: a bosomy girl panting suggestively as Kenney’s face is air-brushed onto her T-shirt. Then the shot moves to her back, revealing a tattoo of the show’s logo.