I cover audience and moviegoing trends. I wrote about the challenges facing the original megafranchise, horror’s influx of YouTube-native filmmakers and CinemaCon’s quiet wars. Email me at matthew@theankler.com
When the internet decided that “raw-dogging” a flight — no screen, no book, no nap, just you and the seatback — was a feat worth bragging about, Patrick Warburton had receipts.
His Seinfeld character, David Puddy, did it in the ’90s, staring serenely into the void while Elaine slowly lost her mind beside him. So Warburton’s digital-strategy agency, UpHigh, dusted off the clip and posted it. The headlines did the rest.
“It went so viral,” UpHigh founder Ryan Handelsman recalls, “that multiple media channels picked it up with the headline being, ‘Patrick Warburton claims that he is the original raw dogger of airline travel.’”
Warburton, a journeyman character actor, began clipping out his work as part of a strategic effort to launch his standup comedy career. People often knew him from one specific role, whether it was Puddy on Seinfeld, Joe Swanson on Family Guy or even as the pre-show announcer for a Disney World ride, without necessarily knowing his name.
When Warburton got more serious about his standup in 2025, he began working with UpHigh to help drive awareness and ticket sales. To connect the dots for audiences, UpHigh began posting short clips of his past film and TV work on his personal accounts, which effectively served as a reminder to viewers: “Oh, that guy.”
“It really brought a relatively fragmented community together, and the guy went viral almost overnight on social media,” Handelsman, whose company also works with the likes of Ken Jeong and Joel McHale, says.
Currently, Warburton has 673,000 followers on Instagram and 355,500 on TikTok.
Part of producers’ bargain with talent is that they’ll promote their projects when they debut, but this is something else entirely. Yes, it’s boosting series and films, but the practice serves primarily to bolster the actors’ own social media presence — an increasingly vital part of stardom or even, in the case of Warburton, thatguy-dom. There’s nothing new about talent seeking to beef up their online personas. They’re just doing it now in ways that mirror how the creator space at large operates.
So how does a decades-old bit part become a live audience, a paycheck, even a second act? I put that to agencies, editors and execs who do this for a living.
Today I’ll cut together for you:
- How a standup set from 1998 can pull in 50,000 new followers overnight
- Why the real money isn’t in the clips at all
- Why an actor’s follower count is the new audition
- The 90-second rule — and the three seconds that actually decide whether a clip lives or dies
- What’s left of stardom once the line between actor and creator disappears
- How to avoid getting flagged for copyright infringement when using Hollywood clips
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