• GigaOm, Thursday, September 29, 2011 4:45 PM

You've no doubt heard by now that Fox's "New Girl" is the fall's first new series to get a full-season pickup. Could the show's success be due to a large marketing push via digital distribution and social media?

Ryan Lawler notes how Fox built buzz for "New Girl" before its premiere by making episodes available for free on iTunes, Hulu, Fox.com, cable VOD, and Zooey Deschanel fan sites.

With over 2 million people viewing the show before its premiere, even Fox executives were worried about depressed broadcast ratings, but word-of-mouth and positive reviews on Twitter and Facebook apparently had the opposite effect.

As a result, Lawler writes, "we're likely to see more networks experimenting with sneak previews and early digital distribution."

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