Will It Blend? Yes. Will I Buy It? No, But These Videos Are Great!
In college and for most of my life I was what you called a “Night Owl”. I was always up late just doing stuff, playing video games, learning, reading, whatever I could get my hands on. As any other night owl knows being up that late, you get to see a lot of interesting infomercials and I would like to consider myself something of an infomercial onnoisseur. Yes, we all have our favorites whether it is the Ron Popeil “Set it And Forget It”, The Magic Bullet or the Jack LaLanne Juicer, but recently I stumbled upon not only the most interesting SET of infomercials that I have ever seen but also one of the most attention grabbing marketing ploys ever.
The company, Blendtec, makes blenders (Duh!) and in order to promote their product they decided that making some viral videos for YouTube would be the best route to promote their product (OK, so not the only way, perhaps a branding campaign or supplemental traffic). Regardless, these videos caught on HUGE, of the 25 or so, most of them have over 700K hits. Apparently Blendtec had a small budget, and by small I mean $50. These videos helped them to create brand awareness but also increase their sales five times over. Pretty Amazing!
Here are a few of my favorites:
Watch as he pulls a fast one with the crowbar
You can see the rest of them here.
Anyway I found this to be an pretty interesting phenomenon and it just goes to show the power of viral videos.
June 15th, 2007 at 11:56 am
This is definitely some viral material. Since you are a dedicated student of viral marketing, you may have seen this already: Woody Maxim recently shared another great example of viral marketing by NIN featured here: http://www.theplugg.com/2007/04/04/nin-and-viral-marketing/
June 15th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Daehee,
I think that NIN thing is way ahead of its time (as a whole) It was very, very cool and very under rated. I have never seen something so in depth and together before, definitely multi level.
Dean
June 17th, 2007 at 3:08 am
Dean,
I read about the NIN effort a few months ago in several places, and my intiial impression was that it was so ahead of it’s time, it’s a wonder it was recognized at all.
The thing that struck me is that with the effort that would seem to have been put into it, it also seemed to depend a great deal on luck.
It was amazing to me that the pieces were put together so precisely, and that so many different people found the items they put out there and got together. It says a lot to the power of the internet, for sure, but who is to say it wouldn’t of failed miserably if they weren’t found by people who didn’t use the internet or didn’t care to do anything with the USB keys they found in a bathroom?
I’m sure some of those buttons that hold “keys” to the puzzle that NIN’s marketing campaign was targeting were never discovered, leading to the effort not reaching it’s full goal.
So while it was brilliant and well ahead of it’s time, it was counting a certain degree of ingenuity that cannot be guaranteed in today’s society as well, atl least in my opinion.
June 17th, 2007 at 8:24 pm
Narcolept,
I agree with you on the whole. But I also think it was more for the hardcore fans of NIN. I don’t want to generalize but considering what NIN is about I would say that they are a rather intelligent group of people. So, yes there is a little bit of luck involved and the campaign certainly did not meet its full potential but I believe it reached the audience it was supposed to and gave them something very cool and brilliant to play with.
Dean
June 17th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
Dean,
I agree with that 100%, I couldn’t have said it better myself.