AllThingsD » Sarah Silverman

Sarah Silverman Makes a Denny's Web Ad You May Not Want to Watch While You’re Eating

Peter Kafka — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 19:33:30 +0000

Here’s some more “branded entertainment”–Web video shorthand for “thing we made once a marketer gave us some money in exchange for featuring their brand”–from IAC and Ben Silverman’s Electus Studio. This one’s an interview series with comedians, sponsored by Denny’s, shot in a “live, working Denny’s restaurant.”

It’s good, too. The ads feature David Koechner, whom you’ve seen in a million things, like “Anchorman” and in a semi-recurring role in the “The Office”, and he’s funny and smart. Today’s installment has him chatting up Sarah Silverman, and she’s great as well.

I also like the fact that save for a post-roll at the end, the video has nothing to do with Denny’s, other than its location–there’s not even a Moons Over My Hammy reference, which seems very hard to resist.

Since the stuff preceding the mini-ad is funny and entertaining, this makes me feel vaguely warm and positive about Dennys.

Except for two words that Silverman uses right around the 3:08 mark here–those make me uncomfortable and not hungry at all.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Just to be clear: I like vulgar potty humor.* A lot! It’s just that if I ran “one of America’s largest full-service family restaurant chains, currently operating more than 1,600 franchised, licensed and company-owned restaurants,” I think I’d be a tad bit squeamish about associating my brand with that part of the body and/or that affliction.

Still! I’m writing about it now, and showing you the clip, so perhaps this is exactly what Denny’s and Electus had in mind. (Really?)

*And I’m pro-Silverman in general. I bet if I’d seen her TED presentation last year, I’d have thought it was great.

Viral Video: Fallon Does Sheen Does "Winning" Perfume

Kara Swisher — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 14:32:38 +0000

While BoomTown has had just about enough of the media frenzy around the wacky ruminations of actor Charlie Sheen, this spot-on impersonation of the high-on-life-and-other-stuff star by late-night television talk show host Jimmy Fallon is worth a watch.

It’s for a perfume called, of course, “Winning.”

(Also best Sheen-related tweet comes from comic Sarah Silverman: “If I hung out w 20 year old porn stars all the time time I’d think I was a genius too.”)

Enjoy:

Revolution CEO Steve Case at D8: AOL Could Come Back–Look What Happened to Apple

Peter Kafka — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 20:56:16 +0000

Steve Case is most famous for building America Online, which became the Internet’s first mega-company, and for merging it with Time Warner (TWX), which became the worst corporate marriage in recent history.

But AOL (AOL) is 25 years old, and the AOL-Time Warner deal is a decade old. What has Steve Case been doing since then?

Investing, in a lot of different stuff. His Revolution holding company has stakes in everything from Revolution Health, a wellness/fitness/medical advice Web site, to Cacique, a Costa Rican resort, to Clearspring, a Web widget company. Late last year, Case sold Revolution Money to American Express (AXP) for $300 million. And Zipcar, another portfolio company, has just filed for a $75 million IPO.

Liveblog

“We meet again,” sighs Kara. “I just can’t quit you.” “We’re off to a good start,” says Steve.

1:58 pm: Kara–Let’s go back 25 years. Talk about the beginning of AOL.

1:59 pm: Case–Well, Zuckerberg was one year old.

I got into this when I was in college, reading Alvin Toffler’s “The Third Wave.” It was riveting.

We started in 1985, in partnership with Commodore. It was a total bet on community. We believed the killer app was community. Chat rooms, bulletin boards, etc.

On the road show, no one believed us. Which was fair, because we didn’t have many customers seven, eight years into it. Needed lots of technology to catch up a bit. And needed people to catch up, too.

2:01 pm: Kara–What put you over the top? All of those discs?

2:02 pm: Case–It wasn’t the discs. It was the content. By 1992, ’93, many more people had computers in their homes, connectivity was better. The Internet was evolving–it wasn’t legal for us to connect to the Internet until 1991.

It took a while before we were considered an Internet company. Even when we went public, we were an interactive company, or online services. Had to morph as market evolved.

2:04 pm: And at some point News Corp. (NWS) sued you?

2:04 pm: Yeah, in 1998. they were upset about an online game they thought we were excluding. There was a lot of antitrust chatter then. Those were the good old days.

Kara: Well, you proved them wrong, the idea that you were too powerful.

Case: “I’m not going to comment on that.”

2:05 pm: On the Time Warner deal: Made sense for us and our shareholders at the time. It made strategic sense. But as Thomas Edison said, vision without execution is hallucination.

I’m recalling, by the way, that one of our strategies was to buy Apple (AAPL), hire Steve Jobs and put him in charge. It was an idea that was floated.

Big point is that with the right leadership, which my group, including me, couldn’t provide, we were set up to succeed. Look at stuff like iTunes, YouTube, etc.–all of that could have come from that company.

2:07 pm: I stepped down after the merger. After a couple of years, I started making one-off investments. Then created Revolution as a holding company. Runs through portfolio, which you can see on his site.

2:09 pm: Kara–You were early on a lot of important trends. Oh, and tell me about your favorite device that isn’t the iPad (thanks, Kara!).

2:10 pm: I’m interested in the social media side, and there’s some stuff bubbling there that reminds me of the early days. Also, mobile and location-based stuff, really. But really, how the Internet can be a platform to change the world. Even companies like Zipcar and our resorts properties only work because of the Internet.

Kara: What’s the relevance of the Internet to a company that helps rich people travel?

Case: Booking tickets on the Web [hmm]. Health care is the one that can really benefit from the Web. Runs through Revolution Health portfolio.

2:13 pm: Case–Turns out I’m much more interested in businesses that touch consumers. Like Steve Jobs said, I like that better than enterprise.

And health care is really a wellness push. Because health care as we define it is really sick care.

2:14 pm: Kara–Talk about Twitter and Sarah Silverman.

Case starts to answer, but Kara interrupts and steers him somewhere else.

Case: I really didn’t want to do a blog in the last 10 years, because that seemed like work. But Twitter made sense. I signed up early, like three years ago, but like a lot of people, it didn’t make sense to me. About a year and a half ago it made sense. Less about what you’re doing than what you’re interested in.

2:15 pm: I’ve always liked that interaction part. I wish we’d thought of Twitter–we were headed in that direction with buddy lists, etc.

2:16 pm: Kara–Tease out the different big Web businesses: Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare.

Case: Facebook’s obviously a real company with real revenue. Twitter and Foursquare are much earlier, but they could be on the cusp of a real business with real revenue.

Kara: If you were a 19-year-old college student, what would you be looking at?

Case: I’m hoping that the Internet just becomes everyday life. You don’t call it email, it’s just mail. Etc.

2:18 pm: Big opportunity for Web integration in health: Wi-Fi pedometers, Internet-connected scales, etc. In most cases, remote diagnostics would be able to help you solve and correct problems.

And I think letting people know about healthier choices can solve a lot of problems, and the Web can help with that.

2:19 pm: Kara–Make some predictions. You’re a visionary!

On Yahoo (YHOO): Case pauses. “I don’t know.” This industry changes a lot. I don’t feel like I’m in a good place to make a judgment. Do remember that iconic brands, with large audiences: You should never give up for dead. Remember what happened to Apple.

On AOL: Obviously it’s not what it was 10 years ago, which is disappointing to see. But still a lot of revenue, cash flow, visitors. A lot of assets for somebody to take forward.

On Apple: Nobody would have imagined this 13 years ago, when Steve came back. Remember that it was worth $1 billion and left for dead. By the way, I’ve told Steve this–I’d love to see Apple focus on health care.

2:22 pm: On Facebook, social networking: Really big. Not going away. That kind of communicating is fundamental to human behavior.

On Hollywood: I do think it’s puzzling. We had a hard time getting VC money into the Internet, but Time Warner would spend $1 billion a year betting on movies. They were very comfortable with that, and so many fail.

2:24 pm: Kara–How do you want to be remembered?

Case: “That sounds kind of like a gravestone question.”

Kara: “Okay.”

Case: I want to be remembered, and my team to be remembered, as mostly a force for good, able to get tens of millions of people to take the Internet seriously and integrate it into their everyday lives. We helped get America online.

2:26 pm: A question from analyst Mary Meeker: Please remind us of the market value of AOL when you went public. And please talk about challenges you had when you were growing (“America offline,” etc.)

Case: We raised $10 million or $15 million, had about $30 million in revenue and were valued at $70 million.

As to the challenges–all of them were double-edged swords. For instance, regarding downtime, it took a better part of a decade to get people to take us seriously, and we let them down. Then again, the fact that people cared about our service problems made it clear that they took what we offered them seriously. It took us a year or so to work through that.

2:29 pm: We had a lot of ups and down. Mostly downs. It was a decade of building. One of my worries now, is that there are so many companies that are built to flip. I wish people took a longer view, and I wish VCs did as well.

2:30 pm: Case: I went to school in Hawaii with Obama.

Kara: How was he?

Case: I don’t know. I was a senior and he was a freshman.

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as possible. It is not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

Kara's TED Video: No Sarah Silverman Cussing, but–Shocker–Rob Glaser Touts Bill Gates!

Kara Swisher — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:18:55 +0000

For goodness sakes, the controversy over Sarah Silverman’s appearance at the tail end of the TED conference last week can be distilled to this:

You either like the gutter-mouthed comic or you don’t.

BoomTown does and thinks the whole bit about adopting a mentally-challenged kid was very funny, although decidedly sick. If you listen to even a tiny bit of her act, this is pretty much what you might expect to hear from Silverman.

But, we press on!

Here’s a video I did from the event, the highlights of which were Nathan Myhrvold’s demo in which he lasered mosquitoes, Jake Shimabukuro’s masterful ukulele playing, chef Jamie Oliver’s wish for better nutrition and a lessening of obesity, and, perhaps, Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder and now megaphilanthropist Bill Gates’s interesting focus on stopping all CO2 emissions stat.

You can see the Oliver video below, and the rest of the talks soon on the TED site.

And here’s my video, in which I take a tour around TED and interview a variety of folks, including former RealNetworks (RNWK) CEO Rob Glaser–who used to work for Microsoft–praising Gates’s speech:

[ See post to watch video ]

Election Day 2008

Beth Callaghan — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 21:07:08 +0000

Thanks to the Web, 2008 marks a high point in the level of engagement between American voters and their presidential candidates. As Arianna Huffington declared yesterday, “I am ready to declare a winner in the 2008 race. The Internet.”

On Election Day itself, that statement is more apt than ever. Sites like fivethirtyeight.com and politicalwire.com will provide the virtually up-to-the-minute numbers on every race. It’s a level of immediacy that was hard to imagine before now–but it’s also hard to imagine we ever had it any other way.

Here’s a quick index of AllThingsD’s digital-eye view of the fracas:

An overview of the tech policies of both candidates.
Election in your pocket: Walt Mossberg discovered Election ’08, a data-packed app for the iPhone and iPod Touch that uses an algorithmic calculation of who’s winning in each state based on multiple available polls.

Some would argue that this race could be decided by viral video campaigns, rather than strictly political ones. Here is the evidence:

“Saturday Night Live” was the heavy hitter here, and it was kind of a toss-up whether John McCain and Sarah Palin’s respective appearances trumped the outright parodies of each one.
Then there was Hollywood’s ironic plea not to vote.
And Google’s plea (with help from The Donald) to employers for a “Vote Hour.”
No one came close to Sarah Silverman in terms of outright exhortation, though.

Last but not least, in what might be considered either a digital or a paper story, depending on where you live and vote, ongoing questions about the reliability of digital voting machines persist. Let’s hope this one’s over on Election Day.

Political Video of the Day: Sarah Silverman's Great Schlep

Kara Swisher — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:35:04 +0000

Is there anything comic Sarah Silverman will not say?

Apparently not, from this aggressively pro-Sen. Barack Obama video that has become a huge hit on the Web and seen by many millions of viewers.

It’s called “The Great Schlep,” which is also a political advocacy organization she supports.

In it, the viciously funny Silverman plans to blame–I am not kidding–old Jewish grandparents if Democratic nominee Obama loses the Presidential election. And she advises a very clever kind of blackmail as a way to prevent it.

You have to experience her logic to understand–and please be aware that Silverman pulls no punches.

And, if Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin goes on “Saturday Night Live”–as is rumored–to impersonate Tina Fey, BoomTown will get it right up.

Here’s the video (and below it, the other huge hit online spoof video Silverman did about her–um–friendly relationship with actor Matt Damon):

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

Don't Vote! (Except, It's Celebs Being Ironic, So Do!)

Kara Swisher — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:52:39 +0000

Here’s an interesting online video, in which a passel of celebrities urge young people to vote.

It begins with them urging youth not to vote, in that hipster, sarcastic, of-course-we-really-mean-you-should-vote-you-dope tone.

The nonpartisan PSA–well, honestly, it does lean decidedly liberal–has been produced by actor Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way and includes DiCaprio, Jennifer Aniston, Dustin Hoffman, Eva Longoria, Forest Whitaker, Ellen DeGeneres, among others.

Also, inexplicably, comic Sarah Silverman taking off her bra to prompt young people into civic action.

And if that’s not reason enough to prompt you to register to vote–deadlines are looming for the upcoming election–and get to the voting booths on Nov. 4, BoomTown does not know what is.

Here’s the video:

Dueling Online Videos a Hit About, Well, Just Watch Them

Kara Swisher — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 08:02:49 +0000

We got such a great reaction from our Obama Girl/Obamapology online videos that we posted yesterday, BoomTown has decided to reinstate our practice of showcasing excellent online videos that we started posting during the writers’ strike.

Our premise has been simple: That online video in both short and long form is the future and its development is important to pay attention to.

So here’s two slightly vulgar but still compelling examples of comedy–a particularly promising arena online–both of which first appeared on ABC’s late-night talk show “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

The first by comedian Sarah Silverman, which aired on Jan. 31, is a satire about her supposed carnal relations with actor Matt Damon. It has been viewed online over eight million times–grabbing a much larger audience than it did offline.

The second, a video rejoinder by Kimmel (who is Silverman’s boyfriend too), is now up to two million views since it was released Sunday night after the Oscars. His love interest? Why, Damon crony Ben Affleck, of course.

Kimmel’s is the better of the two and jam-packed with celebrities (Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt!).

Both, which are posted below, have quite a bit of profanity with lots of pixelation and bleeping, although that has not stopped ABC, which is owned by Disney (DIS), from putting the video front and center on its home page.

But be forewarned, although these are exactly the kind of videos that go viral online–funny, quick and hip–some might find them offensive.

Sarah Silverman/Matt Damon

Jimmy Kimmel/Ben Affleck