Seinfeld on the Web, Portion Controlled

That will change on Friday with the debut of his Web site, JerrySeinfeld.com, an online home for video of nearly every recorded comedy performance given by its creator and namesake, who at 57 is hardly in his autumn years but is contemplating posterity.

“I really thought, ‘Where’s my stuff going to be when I’m dead?’?” Mr. Seinfeld said Tuesday in an interview. “Is it just gone for all time? Who could sift through it? I thought, I should filter this out and be the judge of what I thought was good.”

For the site Mr. Seinfeld has opened his vault and come back with more than 1,000 clips of his stand-up act and comedic interviews. One segment dates to 1977, when Mr. Seinfeld, wearing glasses and wide lapels and speaking with a distinct Noo Yawk accent, made his television debut on “Celebrity Cabaret.” The others range from his first network television appearance, on a 1981 broadcast of “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” (an occasion whose 30th anniversary coincides with the site’s opening day) to the present.

But each day the Web page will offer only three of these videos, chosen by Mr. Seinfeld, a strategy that reflects his theories about online content as well as his concerns about what he called “portion control.”

“I don’t want everything,” he said. “Burger King now has a burger where you decide how many patties. How disgusting is that? That’s the problem right there. That’s the cultural moment that I am repudiating here.”

Seated in a conference room at the Union Square offices of Ammirati, the advertising agency that designed the site for him, Mr. Seinfeld offered a demonstration of the project.

Beginning with a home page that features a simple black-and-white photograph of him in mid-performance and covered in the names of his characteristically quotidian routines (“The Pharmacist Is Two Feet Higher”; “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Us In It”) the site links to a mission statement and a roster of Mr. Seinfeld’s current tour dates.

Clicking on the titles of three routines at the top of the page — the only elements in color — brought up video of those performances, including a youthful Mr. Seinfeld in that momentous “Tonight Show” debut, riffing about the holder of the Guinness record for world’s fattest man. (“Fourteen hundred pounds, ladies and gentlemen, the man has let himself go.”) Mr. Seinfeld said the site had been inspired in part by his interactions with a young nephew and his 10-year-old daughter, Sascha, who have become interested in the personas and routines of stand-up comedians at about the same age he did.

Though much of Mr. Seinfeld’s material exists in unauthorized forms around the Web, he said: “Who can go through the ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ catacombs of YouTube? It’s completely random.”

Mr. Seinfeld spent several months gathering recordings from his personal archives and industry colleagues (one vintage tape was still lodged in a producer’s VCR, he said) and having them digitized. Meanwhile the Ammirati agency created a content-management system for the site that allowed Mr. Seinfeld to search the clips by title, source, running time or a one- to four-star rating that he assigned them. (Very few that he scrolled through appeared to have four stars.)

Matthew Ammirati, the agency’s president, said he and his team initially tried to talk Mr. Seinfeld into a flashier Web site with far more bells and whistles.

“We were saying, ‘We want you Twittering, we want to do apps for you, we’ll have a video camera on your head,’?” Mr. Ammirati said, exaggerating somewhat.

But Mr. Seinfeld made clear that Twitter was not his thing (“That’s stand-up with a net,” he said) and that he had no interest in writing a blog of his thoughts and observations, as many other comedians do.

“Everybody’s doing that easy stuff because that’s easy,” he said. “I want to show something that I worked hard on, and was really hard for me to do.”

Though he acknowledged that he is a latecomer to having a full-fledged Internet presence, Mr. Seinfeld said he had often been approached about creating Web sites, usually envisioned as platforms for him and his comedian friends to produce original online content. He turned down those opportunities, he said, because “they just got out of control.”

At the same time, Mr. Seinfeld said, he is fascinated with the Web’s potential for delivering his ideas to an audience exactly as he envisions them.

“Why would I talk to a TV executive at this point, and ask them what they think?” he said. “If I have this idea for a TV show,” he noted, “I can just put it up on the Internet.”

He said video clips from the “Seinfeld” series might be used in another, unspecified Web project. (Only his stand-up segments from that show will appear on JerrySeinfeld.com).

For now if a visitor spends only five or six minutes per day at the site, Mr. Seinfeld said, that is about as much interaction as a user wants with an application on a tablet device or smart phone (a device he said he uses mostly for making appointments with friends and conversing with other car enthusiasts).

But Mr. Seinfeld has devoted far more time poring over the video archive, forgetting sometimes that the occasionally unpolished but deeply committed entertainer seen in its footage grew up to become him.

Reviewing some of his performances from the early 1980s, Mr. Seinfeld said he saw in them “a newborn fawn — the knees were very wobbly.”

But when he reached the end of that decade, just before he was offered the television series that changed his life, Mr. Seinfeld said: “I’m watching it and thinking: ‘Boy, he’s really got it together now. He knows how to write and how to perform. Something should happen to this guy at this point. I hope something breaks for him.’?”

View the original article here

Seinfeld on the Web, Portion Controlled

That will change on Friday with the debut of his Web site, JerrySeinfeld.com, an online home for video of nearly every recorded comedy performance given by its creator and namesake, who at 57 is hardly in his autumn years but is contemplating posterity.

“I really thought, ‘Where’s my stuff going to be when I’m dead?’?” Mr. Seinfeld said Tuesday in an interview. “Is it just gone for all time? Who could sift through it? I thought, I should filter this out and be the judge of what I thought was good.”

For the site Mr. Seinfeld has opened his vault and come back with more than 1,000 clips of his stand-up act and comedic interviews. One segment dates to 1977, when Mr. Seinfeld, wearing glasses and wide lapels and speaking with a distinct Noo Yawk accent, made his television debut on “Celebrity Cabaret.” The others range from his first network television appearance, on a 1981 broadcast of “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” (an occasion whose 30th anniversary coincides with the site’s opening day) to the present.

But each day the Web page will offer only three of these videos, chosen by Mr. Seinfeld, a strategy that reflects his theories about online content as well as his concerns about what he called “portion control.”

“I don’t want everything,” he said. “Burger King now has a burger where you decide how many patties. How disgusting is that? That’s the problem right there. That’s the cultural moment that I am repudiating here.”

Seated in a conference room at the Union Square offices of Ammirati, the advertising agency that designed the site for him, Mr. Seinfeld offered a demonstration of the project.

Beginning with a home page that features a simple black-and-white photograph of him in mid-performance and covered in the names of his characteristically quotidian routines (“The Pharmacist Is Two Feet Higher”; “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Us In It”) the site links to a mission statement and a roster of Mr. Seinfeld’s current tour dates.

Clicking on the titles of three routines at the top of the page — the only elements in color — brought up video of those performances, including a youthful Mr. Seinfeld in that momentous “Tonight Show” debut, riffing about the holder of the Guinness record for world’s fattest man. (“Fourteen hundred pounds, ladies and gentlemen, the man has let himself go.”) Mr. Seinfeld said the site had been inspired in part by his interactions with a young nephew and his 10-year-old daughter, Sascha, who have become interested in the personas and routines of stand-up comedians at about the same age he did.

Though much of Mr. Seinfeld’s material exists in unauthorized forms around the Web, he said: “Who can go through the ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ catacombs of YouTube? It’s completely random.”

Mr. Seinfeld spent several months gathering recordings from his personal archives and industry colleagues (one vintage tape was still lodged in a producer’s VCR, he said) and having them digitized. Meanwhile the Ammirati agency created a content-management system for the site that allowed Mr. Seinfeld to search the clips by title, source, running time or a one- to four-star rating that he assigned them. (Very few that he scrolled through appeared to have four stars.)

Matthew Ammirati, the agency’s president, said he and his team initially tried to talk Mr. Seinfeld into a flashier Web site with far more bells and whistles.

“We were saying, ‘We want you Twittering, we want to do apps for you, we’ll have a video camera on your head,’?” Mr. Ammirati said, exaggerating somewhat.

But Mr. Seinfeld made clear that Twitter was not his thing (“That’s stand-up with a net,” he said) and that he had no interest in writing a blog of his thoughts and observations, as many other comedians do.

“Everybody’s doing that easy stuff because that’s easy,” he said. “I want to show something that I worked hard on, and was really hard for me to do.”

Though he acknowledged that he is a latecomer to having a full-fledged Internet presence, Mr. Seinfeld said he had often been approached about creating Web sites, usually envisioned as platforms for him and his comedian friends to produce original online content. He turned down those opportunities, he said, because “they just got out of control.”

At the same time, Mr. Seinfeld said, he is fascinated with the Web’s potential for delivering his ideas to an audience exactly as he envisions them.

“Why would I talk to a TV executive at this point, and ask them what they think?” he said. “If I have this idea for a TV show,” he noted, “I can just put it up on the Internet.”

He said video clips from the “Seinfeld” series might be used in another, unspecified Web project. (Only his stand-up segments from that show will appear on JerrySeinfeld.com).

For now if a visitor spends only five or six minutes per day at the site, Mr. Seinfeld said, that is about as much interaction as a user wants with an application on a tablet device or smart phone (a device he said he uses mostly for making appointments with friends and conversing with other car enthusiasts).

But Mr. Seinfeld has devoted far more time poring over the video archive, forgetting sometimes that the occasionally unpolished but deeply committed entertainer seen in its footage grew up to become him.

Reviewing some of his performances from the early 1980s, Mr. Seinfeld said he saw in them “a newborn fawn — the knees were very wobbly.”

But when he reached the end of that decade, just before he was offered the television series that changed his life, Mr. Seinfeld said: “I’m watching it and thinking: ‘Boy, he’s really got it together now. He knows how to write and how to perform. Something should happen to this guy at this point. I hope something breaks for him.’?”

View the original article here

Seinfeld on the Web, Portion Controlled

That will change on Friday with the debut of his Web site, JerrySeinfeld.com, an online home for video of nearly every recorded comedy performance given by its creator and namesake, who at 57 is hardly in his autumn years but is contemplating posterity.

“I really thought, ‘Where’s my stuff going to be when I’m dead?’?” Mr. Seinfeld said Tuesday in an interview. “Is it just gone for all time? Who could sift through it? I thought, I should filter this out and be the judge of what I thought was good.”

For the site Mr. Seinfeld has opened his vault and come back with more than 1,000 clips of his stand-up act and comedic interviews. One segment dates to 1977, when Mr. Seinfeld, wearing glasses and wide lapels and speaking with a distinct Noo Yawk accent, made his television debut on “Celebrity Cabaret.” The others range from his first network television appearance, on a 1981 broadcast of “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” (an occasion whose 30th anniversary coincides with the site’s opening day) to the present.

But each day the Web page will offer only three of these videos, chosen by Mr. Seinfeld, a strategy that reflects his theories about online content as well as his concerns about what he called “portion control.”

“I don’t want everything,” he said. “Burger King now has a burger where you decide how many patties. How disgusting is that? That’s the problem right there. That’s the cultural moment that I am repudiating here.”

Seated in a conference room at the Union Square offices of Ammirati, the advertising agency that designed the site for him, Mr. Seinfeld offered a demonstration of the project.

Beginning with a home page that features a simple black-and-white photograph of him in mid-performance and covered in the names of his characteristically quotidian routines (“The Pharmacist Is Two Feet Higher”; “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Us In It”) the site links to a mission statement and a roster of Mr. Seinfeld’s current tour dates.

Clicking on the titles of three routines at the top of the page — the only elements in color — brought up video of those performances, including a youthful Mr. Seinfeld in that momentous “Tonight Show” debut, riffing about the holder of the Guinness record for world’s fattest man. (“Fourteen hundred pounds, ladies and gentlemen, the man has let himself go.”) Mr. Seinfeld said the site had been inspired in part by his interactions with a young nephew and his 10-year-old daughter, Sascha, who have become interested in the personas and routines of stand-up comedians at about the same age he did.

Though much of Mr. Seinfeld’s material exists in unauthorized forms around the Web, he said: “Who can go through the ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ catacombs of YouTube? It’s completely random.”

Mr. Seinfeld spent several months gathering recordings from his personal archives and industry colleagues (one vintage tape was still lodged in a producer’s VCR, he said) and having them digitized. Meanwhile the Ammirati agency created a content-management system for the site that allowed Mr. Seinfeld to search the clips by title, source, running time or a one- to four-star rating that he assigned them. (Very few that he scrolled through appeared to have four stars.)

Matthew Ammirati, the agency’s president, said he and his team initially tried to talk Mr. Seinfeld into a flashier Web site with far more bells and whistles.

“We were saying, ‘We want you Twittering, we want to do apps for you, we’ll have a video camera on your head,’?” Mr. Ammirati said, exaggerating somewhat.

But Mr. Seinfeld made clear that Twitter was not his thing (“That’s stand-up with a net,” he said) and that he had no interest in writing a blog of his thoughts and observations, as many other comedians do.

“Everybody’s doing that easy stuff because that’s easy,” he said. “I want to show something that I worked hard on, and was really hard for me to do.”

Though he acknowledged that he is a latecomer to having a full-fledged Internet presence, Mr. Seinfeld said he had often been approached about creating Web sites, usually envisioned as platforms for him and his comedian friends to produce original online content. He turned down those opportunities, he said, because “they just got out of control.”

At the same time, Mr. Seinfeld said, he is fascinated with the Web’s potential for delivering his ideas to an audience exactly as he envisions them.

“Why would I talk to a TV executive at this point, and ask them what they think?” he said. “If I have this idea for a TV show,” he noted, “I can just put it up on the Internet.”

He said video clips from the “Seinfeld” series might be used in another, unspecified Web project. (Only his stand-up segments from that show will appear on JerrySeinfeld.com).

For now if a visitor spends only five or six minutes per day at the site, Mr. Seinfeld said, that is about as much interaction as a user wants with an application on a tablet device or smart phone (a device he said he uses mostly for making appointments with friends and conversing with other car enthusiasts).

But Mr. Seinfeld has devoted far more time poring over the video archive, forgetting sometimes that the occasionally unpolished but deeply committed entertainer seen in its footage grew up to become him.

Reviewing some of his performances from the early 1980s, Mr. Seinfeld said he saw in them “a newborn fawn — the knees were very wobbly.”

But when he reached the end of that decade, just before he was offered the television series that changed his life, Mr. Seinfeld said: “I’m watching it and thinking: ‘Boy, he’s really got it together now. He knows how to write and how to perform. Something should happen to this guy at this point. I hope something breaks for him.’?”

 

Advertising: SnackWell’s Nudges Up the Portion Pack

In 1995, sales reached about $490 million, and the brand topped both the cookie and cracker categories — but then SnackWell’s got an object lesson in how the cookie crumbles. Competing brands, which had dabbled mostly in sugar-free products to attract dieters, introduced their own successful fat-reduced temptations, and SnackWell’s sales plummeted.

Revenue for SnackWell’s was $32.3 million in the 52 weeks that ended March 20, a drop of 8.6 percent from the previous year, according to SymphonyIRI Group, whose totals do not include Wal-Mart. Advertising for the brand, which totaled an estimated $60 million in 1998, ceased after 2005 as parent company Kraft aggressively marketed its 2004 introduction of another craze for dieters: the 100-calorie pack.

Now, in what Kraft marketers are calling a reintroduction of SnackWell’s, the brand has new products, and a new advertising campaign aimed at weight-conscious women.

The first print ad in the campaign features a closely cropped photograph of a pair of stiletto-heeled black leather boots with the new slogan for the brand, “Be bad. Snack well.” The ad, by McGarryBowen, New York, a unit of Dentsu, introduces Fudge Drizzled Caramel Popcorn, and a new approach for the brand: portion control.

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“Deliciously indulgent, perfectly portioned,” says the new ad, which is scheduled to begin appearing Friday in magazines, including People, Cosmopolitan and Glamour. “At 130 calories, they let you be bad, and still be good.”

SnackWell’s will continue to sell in two older varieties, Devil’s Food Cookie Cakes and Crème Sandwich Cookies, in standard packaging. But in a new twist on premeasured portions, the brand is nibbling past the common 100-calorie limit. Another popcorn snack with white chocolate is also packaged in 130-calorie portions and two other varieties, Fudge Crème Brownie Bites and Rich Vanilla Crème Brownie Bites, contain 150 calories in a portion.

“There is a group of women out there who struggle with temptation and want responsible alternatives that allow them to really enjoy sweets, but with an off switch because they have a difficult time stopping,” said Steve Siegal, a senior brand manager for SnackWell’s, who added that sometimes the cutoff should exceed 100 calories.

“When it comes to portion control, consumers really want satiating products, and at the end of the day they don’t want to feel deprived,” Mr. Siegal said. “They will have a few more calories if it satisfies their sweet craving.”

Women are far more interested in snacks and drinks sold in portion-controlled packages, with 19 percent of women saying they buy such products, compared with 8 percent of men, according Mintel, a market research firm. But prepackaged portions are often too small, in the opinion of 25 percent of men and 20 percent of women.

Brian Wansink, who wrote “Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think,” said in a telephone interview that in his research, when experiment subjects were presented with 100-calorie packs, about 70 percent were satisfied with just one, while the remainder helped themselves to seconds or thirds.

In another experiment by Dr. Wansink, who directs the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, participants who had eaten at around noon were gathered for snacks of either chocolate or cheese and crackers between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. With no inkling that their intake was being monitored, “most people stopped between the 170- to 190-calorie mark,” said Dr. Wansink. Applying that to SnackWell’s 130- to 150-calorie portions, “that might present a happy medium” because it is midway between 100 calories and what seems to be a natural point of satiation, he said.

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But SnackWell’s two popcorn snacks that combine sweet and salty flavors could undermine “sensory-specific satiety,” the term for the feeling of having had enough of a certain flavor, he said.

“Sensory-specific satiety causes you to get bored if you just eat potato chips, but if you take a break from potato chips and then eat chocolate, you want more potato chips again,” said Dr. Wansink.

Sweet-and-salty snacks “are very tasty, but I could see this combination of flavors triggering a gigantic craving for more than just 130 calories of it,” he said.

Four varieties that had been sold under the Nabisco 100 Calorie Packs label — Petites Fudge, Petites Mint Fudge, Fudge Drizzled Chocolate Chip Cookies and Fudge Drizzled Double Chocolate Chip Cookies — will now instead be sold under the SnackWell’s label (still in 100-calorie portions.) All of the new SnackWell’s products have a suggested retail price of $3.19 for a box of five servings.

The brand declined to reveal what it will spend on the new campaign, except that it’s “a significant investment in the millions of dollars,” Mr. Siegal said.

As for why Kraft elected to introduce the products and approach under a brand it had not advertised in five years, rather than a new one, Mr. Siegel said that 85 percent of consumers still report being familiar with SnackWell’s.

“A lot of snacking companies would die to have 85 percent brand recognition for a brand that has stood for better-for-you indulgent snacking,” Mr. Siegal said. “It’s been a long time since the brand was out there in a big way, but this really is all about a new attitude and edge for the brand.”