The keynote today was George Wright, VP Marketing of Blendtec, the Will it Blend people.
Here is the video of them blending an iPhone:
The Will It Blend videos are probably one of the most successful application of brand awareness through viral marketing on the Internet.
Blendtec is a small Utah manufacturer of blenders, mostly commercial products, but they also have a line of home products.
The idea came from George who is their first marketing person. About 2 months after he started, he asked why there was wood shavings all over the demo room. He was told the founder, Tom Dickson, had been testing an engineering change by sticking 2 x 2's into a blender. George thought we should film this.
The initial budget was $50 for a domain (willitblend.com), a white lab coat and a rake (to be blended). They put the video up on YouTube and it went viral. The results have been amazing:
- The videos on YouTube have 58 million views
- The videos on the willitblend.com site have 101 million views
- They have 150,000 subscribers for new videos
- Sales are up 700%
- The brand awareness has also helped their commercial blender business.
Not only have the videos helped sales, they now are a profit center of their own. Blendtec gets paid by the video service they use for each view. Companies are paying to be blended, the video below cost Nike $10,000:
An Albuqerque radio station paid for ads that they then ran on broadcast TV that were co-branded.
The awareness even got the company a segment on the History Channel's Modern Marvels.
They also have a lot of interaction with their customers (who make suggestions on what to blend next).
The moral of this story is any company, with any pretty bland product, can come up with a creative marketing program. It needs to be entertaining, demonstrates a real product, is genuine and based on real people.