#tim whatley

[doyouknowthisjewishcharacter]

Do you know this Jewish character?

Dr. Tim Whatley from Seinfeld (tv show)

I know them

I've heard of them

I don't know them

I know them but didn't know they were Jewish

Voting ended onMay 22, 2025

[velvet4510]

Favorite Seinfeld recurring character/couple?

Frank & Estelle

Morty & Helen

Newman

Jackie Chiles

Tim Whatley

Uncle Leo

Kenny Bania

J. Peterman

Mickey

Mr. Pitt

David Puddy

Jack Klompus

Voting ended onMar 17, 2024

(This is a re-post since last time I accidentally set it for a day instead of a week…)

[jabronibaloney]

Hollywood loves to reboot things. They should reboot Breaking Bad. But Bryan Cranston would play his character Tim Whatley, the dentist in Seinfeld. And it’d take place it the Seinfeld universe.

[galaxynjanaki]

Did you guys realize

That Bryan Cranston, the actor who played Walter White, played Tim Whatley, the dentist, in Seinfeld??? Crazy stuff, huh?

[verygoodstuff]

Can advertising be useful? The true value of content.

Content, native advertising, virals, advertorials; whatever the current buzzword of choice, ads that don’t look or feel like regular ads seem ever prevalent in marketing rhetoric at the moment. But is this actually anything new, interesting and useful; or just a rehash of the way advertising has always worked?

The general idea behind content marketing seems to address two presumed issues. 1) Advertising is expensive 2) Advertising needs to be more engaging. Let’s think about those two points briefly.

With the explosion of social media, and the internet age expectation that content should be free as habits move online, and away from traditional media platforms, you should be able to sidestep that tricky and expensive business of getting a large number of people to see your advertising by getting other people to do it for you. Social sharing, in other words.

Problem is, as Martin Weigel of W&K Amsterdam puts it – people just aren’t that interested in your brand. Assuming that they will want to “get involved”, or show your marketing to everyone they know is a nice idea, but in most cases a fallacy. Media works simply because it gets the most, and the right kind of eyeballs on something; because while some people will spread things online and give you some free reach to other like-minded souls, most people won’t, and it’s that most people that you need to reach to succeed. As advertising people it’s easy to think that everyone thinks like we do, finds ads interesting and contributes online, but we have to remember that we are a minority, and as Thinkbox has found, most of the population is not like us.

That’s not to say that advertising should just be a hard sales pitch of course – far from it. Common definition would have “content” as communications from a brand that are meant to be entertaining or compelling – but this begs the questions what the bloody hell was advertising supposed to be before the term content came along? It’s not like all we had before was a salesman spoon feeding lines into the listless ears of a passive dullard consumer. Using creativity to make a brand message compelling enough to pay attention to? Sounds an awful lot like plain old advertising doesn’t it…

A common concern voiced around content marketing is where do we draw the line between entertaining and compelling advertising, and entertaining and compelling editorial? Is content that looks like editorial, but the direction of which has been paid for by an advertiser inherently deceptive? John Oliver certainly thinks so, vocally denouncing advertising influence in the media on his HBO show recently. Objections of this sort seem to me to be doing a disservice to peoples intelligence, suggesting that people are bound to believe whatever they see in the media – that the average person requires babying and protecting and is unable to make their own judgement on the value of a piece of media.

Howard Gossage (1914-1969) fabled copywriting sage, once said "people read what interests them, and sometimes it's an ad" – so we can see that this concept of advertising needing to be interesting to the reader, of the necessity of an exchange of value between both parties, is not a new one. Longer form advertising used to be the standard up until around the 1980’s, primarily in print, but to some extent through infomercials. The reason for this wasn’t that copy writers had more time to sit around and write the ads, it was an attempt to make advertising interesting enough for people to pay attention to it. It got normal, so people stopped reading, so we moved to film and images.

Brands have always needed to have a level of value exchange with consumers – after all, establishing a mark of value is what they began as in the first place - but in an increasingly complex and competitive market the concept of consumer utility is more important than ever. People devote such a small amount of their brain power to advertising, it had better offer them something damn good if you want them to pay attention. This can be functional, emotive, funny, interesting, it doesn’t matter – but it has to deliver a disproportionate level of utility to consumers ahead of your competitors.

This concept of brand utility is often viewed as a proxy for entertainment value, but of course it doesn’t have to be. An interesting area of growth for the industry in general is the idea of brands and advertising as product and services instead of promotional elements. Promoting something tends to be a one way exchange, it’s the service itself that delivers a value exchange – but why can’t the promotional effort delivery consumer utility? Google is the typical example of this, they invest hundreds of millions of pounds into their mapping platform, email service, online office tools and myriad other products, then give them away for free. All of these things build utility of the Google brand, indirectly driving use of its core revenue generating search advertising. The definition of what is content, or even what is advertising, may start to look a little hazy.

Johnnie Walker released quite a nice little film last week with Jude Law and Mathis from James Bond loafing around the Med in a priceless sailing boat. Whether you call it content, or advertising, or content marketing I don’t think especially matters. But it is an interesting brand to deliver something like this. Of course 98% of people who watch the film won’t go out and buy a £150 bottle of whisky, so you might reasonably ask why is Johnnie Walker wasting it’s time on making lovely YouTube movies, when it should be sponsoring yacht shows or something? Where’s the value to Johnnie Walker? A lovely stylish piece of film asks nothing of an audience, it’s offering up a bout of escapism to another world we can only aspire to. It gives more than it takes, which means some people will want to watch it, which means the image of the brand in popular culture grows around this idea of elite stylish beauty, which means people who can afford to buy it, want it. It’s how luxury brands work – nothing about the strategy is fundamentally different. Justify a price premium for a niche product and you can build a halo effect around the whole brand, so a Jude Law content film for the 1%ers indirectly sells millions of bottles of £15 Red Label to build your bottom line.

That’s where the value of content is, not holding it up as anything particularly revolutionary, but as a way of thinking about increasing a brands utility to consumers – their usefulness, and their value on all levels. Advertising often asks too much of people while offering little in return; while content isn’t a fundamental change in the way advertising works, it’s a laudable way to restore the balance.

  Sources

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2013/july/apple-long-copy-ads

http://www.slideshare.net/mweigel/the-conquest-of-indifference?related=1

http://www.thinkbox.tv/research/tv-nation-ad-nation-attitudes-behaviours-and-motivations-summary/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False-consensus_effect

http://mediatel.co.uk/newsline/2014/08/11/dont-panic-native-is-not-the-ebola-virus-of-advertising/

http://www.psfk.com/2013/08/kevin-spacey-ediburgh-television-festival.html#!bDjXLt

http://billhewson.com/2011/03/24/advertising-as-a-service/

[entertainmentweekly]

Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston tops our list of Emmys acceptance speeches.  See the rest, in order, here.

[buzzfeedent]

ANOTHER SEINFELD ALUM cleanin' up tonight

[giterdonenews]

New Post has been published on Giter Done News

A noo artikle has dunben rote ahn WWW.GITERDONENEWS.COM CALT

Here's Bryan Cranston as the dentist on 'Seinfeld'

(Fraz'r Harrisen/Gettee Images ;Jeff Vespa/WireImage) Thangs gut a lil awkward at t'Emmys wen Bryun Cranston an' Julia Looey-Dreyfus wuz presantyun' un award togeth'r. Julia Looey-Dreyfus: “Y'all look so much like t'ackter n' Seinfeld at wuz t'dantist, at I datid, Tim Whatley, who I datid who co...