Viral Marketing Insights From WillItBlend.com by Rachelle Money, 11 June 2008
Creating great content means you have to look beyond the norms of written articles and blogs. Extending the possibilities to video can be a valuable and rewarding platform (and it doesn’t have to be expensive either), as the phenomenal success of Blendtec’s Will It Blend? has proven.
Key points
- Just like Blendtec has done with Will It Blend?, always back up your promotions with on-page SEO – lots of pages and text targeting relevant keywords.
- Blendtec piggybacks major events like the Superbowl, or the latest computer game release, to boost their search engine rankings.
- Be careful what you wish for. Remember, when a piece of content goes viral you can't take it back.
It’s amazing how far you can make $50 go. In November 2006 the guys at Blendtec bought a white lab coat, some marbles, a couple of McDonald’s Extra Value Meals, a rotisserie chicken, a garden rake and some safety glasses. They then set about filming five videos featuring their boss, Tom Dickson, who asked, “Will it blend? That is the question.” He then blitzed the various items into smithereens.
Five days after posting the videos on their specially designed website, Will it Blend?, and on YouTube, Dickson’s then marketing director, George Wright, came to him and excitedly said: “Tom, we’ve hit a home run. We just had six million views on YouTube.” Dickson replied: “Who Tube?”
Within weeks Dickson had created such a buzz that he became an online celebrity, giving interviews to the world press, and by June 2007 became a keynote speaker on the effectiveness of viral marketing campaigns. It goes to show what a few minutes on film can do for a company.
Speaking from Blendtec headquarters in Orem, Utah, Dickson told us that the video campaign grew from an idea on how to raise brand awareness.
“Even though we had the best blender in the world, people didn’t know who we were. We wanted to demonstrate the power and durability of the Blendtec blender.
“For years I’ve been doing a test where I start the motor and jam a piece of timber into the blades and test the strength of the drive component, the electronics, and the blade itself. We thought it might be fun to try out some other things that people might find amusing. “
As their videos on YouTube grew in popularity, Blendtec found their online sales grew by 500%.
A grandfather of 28 children, Dickson has blended an iPhone, iPod, glow sticks, a golf club, marbles and a Halo 3 computer game. Soon he plans to blend 4 Nintendo Wiis and a round of 12 and 20 gauge shotgun shells.
Dickson is an affable man and has the ability to fill a Dictaphone unprompted.
“What is the worst blend?” he ruminates. “Hockey pucks. That was a tough blend, and the smell was one of the worst smelling things I’ve ever done - it smelt like cow pies.”
He continues: “What will it not blend? A crowbar - it will not blend a crowbar.” He’s on a roll. “What’s the most popular request?” he asks. “To blend another Blendtec blender,” he answers with a laugh.
In SEO terms, Blendtec are in the enviable position of having tens of thousands of inbound links to their Will It Blend? website.
Jeff Robe, Blendtec’s current director of marketing, said their webmaster works hard to ensure each video and piece of content is optimized.
“We include keywords that are going to be relevant and put us higher up in the search engine rankings.
“It’s a viral piece that’s been out to so many websites, and probably tens of thousands of sites have a link to our YouTube videos or directly to our own site. That, as much as anything, has helped our optimization and boosted our rankings, and put us at the top or near the top for a variety of searches.”
He added: “We take AdWords with Google and with Yahoo and they have been effective too.” Robe said that at one point the search term for ‘iPhone’ would put the video of Tom Dickson blending the product before the Apple website. “That was pretty incredible and just shows the power of viral marketing,” said Robe.
When asked about his feelings towards viral marketing now, Dickson said, “The interesting thing about viral marketing is that when you put it out there there’s no way of taking it back - it’s gone. You might get people who say bad things but that’s just going to happen.
“Most of what’s said about the campaigns is very positive. In fact, if someone says something negative about me or the blender, we don’t have to do anything because others will come back and defend me and the product.”
Soon after the Will It Blend? campaign took off, Blendtec competitors decided they wanted a slice of the viral marketing action. They posted a video which compared their product to Blendtec’s.
“It was real obvious they were faking it,” said Dickson. “There was no voiceover, no motor sounds and they weren’t pushing the right buttons on our product. They had people write in and say it was ridiculous and within two days they had to bring the video down and they were crucified.
“It bit them really hard so people have to be careful. You have to build on your reputation, but it can turn on you and damage your reputation if you don’t get it right.”
Blendtec have a full time videographer who works on shooting these videos, as well as other promotional videos, which Dickson says are “more professional than the hokey Will It Blend? ones.”
Hokey or not, Blendtec’s down-to-earth style is obviously working. They’ve had more than 100,000,000 views in the last year and around 60,000 subscribers to their videos on YouTube. Not bad for a company who simply filmed what they’d been doing for years - demonstrating their blenders to the public.
In fact, so popular is this worldwide phenomenon that 210,000 people logged on to eBay to view the leftovers of a blended iPod and iPhone. The dust of each of these products fetched $800 and $901 respectively. The company quadrupled the value and donated it to a sick children’s hospital in Utah.
The iPhone video is the most popular on Will It Blend? – probably because it was and still is a very sought-after product. This piggy-backing is deliberate on Blendtec’s part. They say they try to be “timely” and shoot skits which relate to the Superbowl, the Hollywood writer’s strike or the latest computer game. Tapping into what people are most likely to be searching for helps them in terms of search engine rankings.
So after destroying a number of Apple’s products doesn’t Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, have a few choice words for Dickson?
“When I threw the iPhone into the blender, it was still playing a video even when it was halfway destroyed, so I think Steve Jobs was pleased that it lasted that long. This is the ultimate test and it did very well.”
The 61-year-old engineer believes Will It Blend? has the capacity to run for a long time as new products are released onto the market.
“There’s no limit to what will blend. We have hundreds of thousands of requests of things to blend. When we walk into a store I am always looking for things to blend and we never know what’s going to happen.”
About Rachelle Money
Rachelle Money is a freelance journalist based in Scotland, UK. She graduated from the Scottish School of Journalism in 2005 where she was awarded an internship with two national publications - The Sunday Herald newspaper and The Big Issue magazine. Rachelle has been working with Wordtracker since August 2007 and is a regular contributor to the newsletter.
22 comments
Six million views! That's incredible. It may be kind of hard for a website copywriting agency to create a similarly funny video, but I'll do my best. Great post, thanks.
Great post :-)
I'm in the natural health world, so I've seen these videos plenty of times. I use a competitor's product and recommend it... but because of the viral aspect of these videos, I get dozens of questions about the BlendTec. It's an amazing marketing job :-) One that I can only hope to emulate with my daily shows...
Live Awesome! Kevin
Blendtec was magic and is a viral phenomenon very hard to repeat. We at http://pc-doctor.com liked it so much we did our own "will it melt" video http://www.pcdoctor-community.com/blog/posts/2008/05/06/Will-it-Burn-Episode-1/ using a 3'x4' Fresnel lens. It is on youtube, but really just doesn't compare to the novelty of willitblend.com nor does it quite align with our business, so the buzz is interesting but hasn't yet affected our bottom line.
Great piece Rachelle.
Very good....I liked it a lot. Viral marketing is a tricky thing to create, so it's great to get as much thorough info on successful attempts as possible. THanks for covering it!
Hi, The Will It Blend story is phenomenal. I'm trying to figure out how to make it work in dentistry. Perhaps a "Will It Decay?" website, where we put teeth into different liquids and see how mong they last. Hmmmm, maybe not. Dr. Chris Bowman Dental Insiders Alliance www.DentalInsiders.com/blog
Fascinating. It's a classic example of subliminal marketing where the principle messages of power and durability were delivered inside the trojan horse of entertainment. The viewers bought entertainment but the subliminal message was delivered nonetheless.
Great inspirational story. This is one of those success stories that keeps you thinking. What basic clever idea can I use to promote my industry.
That's It! I wonder if Will It Blend could be used to mix decorative concrete overlays. Might solve the problem of lumps on the bottom of a bucket that mess up the mix.
Thanks for the story.
That was a great story.
For Dr. Bowman, my mom use to always tell us a story of putting teeth into various liquids when she was kindergarten teacher. The teeth were practically dissolved after 5-days in Coke. Maybe some time-elasped video would be effective.
It certainly gets the creative juices flowing.
Great story,thanks Rachelle! 各位中國人，希望我們之間也有這樣的一個故事！
Excellent story. I've never seen the video, nor heard of the blender, but now I'll take a look. But more importantly, the marketing behind the blender is really the story and I'm always looking for new ways of doing things. Thanks
Yes, I have seen a couple of those will it blend videos but I didn't realize that they were actually marketing the blender... Now I know what to buy when my current blender dies :-). As far as taking the concept and using it in my line of business, no clue. Selling used mobile homes in parks and making it blend?! Thanks for stiring up my creative juices.
Actually, according to Yahoo, willitblend.com only got 26k links, last time I checked. Not too much of links for such a widely successful website - though they probably drove insane amount of traffic, all being natural and topical ones.
So I'd still focus on the ROI, not on links. Some sites have hundreds thousands of links, so what.
It is one of those amazing things to see a viral idea grow into something huge. Even more so when it is a "simple" idea. Good work Blendtec!
What an inspirational story. I'm a proud owner of a Blendtec and in a world where you can buy milk that will outlast your computer equipment, Blendtec has built a machine that will last like my grandmothers Fridgedaire. It's no wonder they have come up with a viral marketing plan that may have a lifespan of squeezing toilet paper. Genius, pure genius.....
At first when I saw the video I thought this man has gone crazy or what. But it was amusing for sure and now when I read the idea and hostory behind it, it makes a lot of sense. Good post!
Another good example of Viral marketing affecting political cappaign is the case of OBAMA Girl. http://walsiv.blogspot.com/2008/06/viral-social-networking-affecting.html
Viral marketing is an excellent tool. The tough part if finding something that will stick. Tools such as youtube, digg and myspace make viral marketing easier, however the virus is still needed.
The Will It Blend guys are the absolute kings of viral marketing, and their story is so inspiring. It's kind of like the people who invented Post-Its. The rest of us sit around scraching our heads saying, "Now if only I could come up with something like that!"
I remember the first time I heard about 'Will it Blend'. I was totally blown away.
At the time I was working for a PPC company and the account director for our retail sector was amazed that nobody was bidding on 'Will it Blend' terms (including us). We were representing a high profile electronics company and immediately set about placing ads on their terms.
Just goes to show the domino effect this kind of marketing can have.
The fact they started their own 'Will it Blend' website shows they recognise the importance of brand recognition.
Genius.
That was a great story. Awesome! brand recognition strategy. We recognize this face and created a video "Mr. Crab goes to the office" (http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzu8obY2Y4s) video on Youtube very recently and got some hits, though hasn't made any difference yet to the site. Check it out. We are making some more videos, will be released shortly.
Great article Rachelle.
I'm inspired that every so often someone clever comes up with something so simple it's genius....I guess we all like to hear about success stories....so here's a challenge. What can be done with something as basic as an arthritis treatment?
I'm inspired that every so often someone clever comes up with something so simple it's genius....I guess we all like to hear about success stories....so here's a challenge. What can be done with something as basic as an arthritis treatment?
That is a great story! Thanks for sharing it. It is always good to hear of creative and successful ad campaigns. I need to get those creative juices going for something like that. Thanks again.