You are now entering Ad Space, a realm of commercials, brought before us so we might examine how they work, and discuss why we both love and hate them so. So it is written …

The Product:
TV series Seinfeld

The Promotions:

The Pitch:
It’s the early 90’s, so timeslots are still a big deal, and occasionally we’ll call Seinfeld “the Seinfeld show” in case people don’t know what we’re talking about.

Whenever I hear people talk about the YouTube algorithm, it’s to gripe about it. Either it’s recommending people stuff they don’t want (you liked that one trailer for a Disney movie, so we’re sure you’ll enjoy dozens of hour-long rants about Disney’s “woke identity politics”), or it’s driving content creators to madness as they try to find the right ritual that will make their videos be algorithm recommended.

But sometimes, y’know, that ol’ algorithm does its job quite well.

Recently, the Avocado’s own Drunk Napoleon has been doing episode-by-episode reviews of Seinfeld – and reading those has naturally led to me checking out some of my favorite Seinfeld clips on YouTube. I also regularly use YouTube to look for interesting commercials to put on Ad Space. And I guess the algorithm but two and two together, because this past week it recommended me these Seinfeld promos I’d never seen before.

I’m old enough that I watched the last few seasons of Seinfeld as they aired during the 90’s, and caught up on the rest of the show through syndicated reruns over the next several years. By the early 2000’s, I’d seen every episode of the show multiple times – I figured, it’s got nothing left I haven’t seen.

So to find, more than twenty years later, that there’s these Seinfeld sketches that are brand new (to me)? Feels like unearthing a lost treasure – except it was never earthed, these promos were always out there, it just took me giving the right info to the YouTube algorithm for it to point me towards ’em.

Sure, not all of them are great, but some really capture the characters and the humor of the show quite well – I particularly enjoyed Elaine modulating their perkiness and Kramer insisting the Cheers finale is some sort of fake-out conspiracy hatched by The Man. It just makes me happy these were shared with me, and now I’m paying it forward by sharing ’em with you.

(There was also a similar series of promos made for Season 4, which focused on them moving to the timeslot after Cheers, but … well, your tastes may vary, but I don’t think they’re quite as good.)