Grindhouse rules
It’s impossible not to watch.
A man in a white lab coat, safety glasses and a blissed-out grin stares straight into the camera holding a wooden garden rake. At his side, a simple tabletop blender. He turns on the appliance, then starts feeding the rake into it handle first. The handle slowly disappears into the blender, which is making noise like a dental drill…or a wood chipper. After 90 seconds, there’s little left but the metal rake head. The man empties the blender bowl, and we see a pile of well-masticated, garden-fresh wood pulp. Another shot of the grin; peppy theme music builds; and out.
It’s an episode of the Web video series “Will It Blend?” that appliance maker Blendtec of Orem, UT has been posting to its WillItBlend.com microsite and simultaneously to YouTube. Together, the six-month-old series has made an online star of CEO Tom Dickson, the guy with the lab coat and smile, who throws various unlikely objects into one of Blendtec’s standard units while the camera rolls.
Everything is grist for Dickson’s mill, from a handful of marbles or cubic zirconia to the collected cell phones of his staff, even his own iPod. Memorable videos in the series have Dickson blending a jar of pickled pigs’ feet or a half-dozen unshucked oysters, then getting marketing vice president George Wright to drink down the resulting tan sludge.
“It was awful,” Wright says of the pigs’ feet cocktail. “The stuff tasted like pure vinegar.”
But show biz is about giving the public what it wants, and the online public has expressed a real zeal for watching stuff like this. The rake video has been viewed more than 530,000 times on YouTube. Blendtec has posted several more videos each month since the first ones went up in November and, all told, they’ve scored 12.5 million YouTube hits. The “Will It Blend?” microsite has gotten a roughly equal amount of traffic in that time.
Blendtec’s version of grindhouse cinema is an example of the measures some tech marketers are taking to start a conversation with the masses. They’re sidestepping the usual lockstep progression of ad/message/offer in favor of creating a more involving, interactive experience with their wares.
A lot of these tools of engagement fall under the Web 2.0 heading: wikis, social networking sites, consumer-generated content. Those are sometimes dangerous areas for advertisers to intrude upon; users are pretty quick to spot a commercial in disguise. But marketers that get customers or prospects to relate to their Web sites in ways that offer undeniable value may find that the indirect approach pays off in better customer relations, stronger brand loyalty or even suggestions for future product development.
And video is the Web 2.0 tool with the greatest propensity to spread, the highest you-gotta-see-this factor. Think of all the videos your friends forwarded to you, from the Star Wars Kid and the Dancing Fat Guy to LonelyGirl15, Obama Girl and the Mentos-Coke geyers.
In particular, videos that involve products doing something surprising have shown a real ability to take off — literally so, in the case of the Mentos-Coke videos. If a company feels confident enough to link its name to those videos, it can catch a real breeze of Web traffic and brand awareness. When the Mentos-Coke videos first hit the Web, the candy maker linked to them but Coke held aloof — and took plenty of grief for its stiff upper lip. Now Coke sponsors a geyser contest on Google Video that’s gotten more than 5.6 million views.
Back at Blendtec, Grinding up oddball items was Dickson’s idea, but capturing it for posterity was Wright’s. “The original plan was just to have something for our salespeople to talk about with clients, showing how we test our blenders,” Wright says. “But we put the first ones out on YouTube last November to see if we could build some brand awareness and they just went crazy.”
A video star was born, for an initial cost of about $1,000. The “Will It Blend?” campaign has generated lots of chatter in blogs and in the media — mostly local news programs, although Dickson has done his mash-up thing on “The Today Show” and on the NBC iVillage Live program and Web site.
Blendtec’s video success, Wright points out, is that visitors are drawn in simply by watching something cool, like a bundle of green glow sticks getting pureed into radiant goo; but they’re also taking in a tech message about the power of Blendtec’s product.
“We’ve tried to keep the campaign real,” he says. “The blender really does what we’re showing it doing. I can talk all day long about motor sizes, blade design and programmable blend cycles, and people will just go to sleep. Throw 50 marbles in a blender, push a button and you’ve got their attention.”
Once the decision was made to mount WillItBlend.com, a Web site dedicated to the videos, Wright made sure that it including two other Web 2.0 elements: an RSS feed so fans could subscribe and be notified when new videos were added, and a feedback tool so they could write in and suggest other victims for Dickson’s blender.
“And we’ve gotten hundreds of thousands of suggestions,” Wright said. “They pour in at a mind-numbing rate.”
Blendtec also operates a straight-ahead Web site with product demos, customer service and lots of general-interest content about recipes and tips for healthy living. But Wright says it’s the crazy stuff that’s driving people into the tent.
The videos have spawned a few ancillary revenue streams. The “Will It Blend?” store lets visitors buy not only the blenders they’ve seen in action but “Tom Dickson Is My Homeboy” T-shirts as well.
Meanwhile, the videos themselves, originally hosted by Blendtec, now reside on the servers of video delivery platform Revver.com, which appends a display ad to the end of each and gives Blendtec a cut of any clickthrough revenue.
How’ve they done? Dickson told an audience at last April’s ad:tech San Francisco meeting that the company’s videos had reached 19.4 million viewers on YouTube and 18 million on the WillItBlend site. More than 30,000 people subscribe to alerts to notify them when another video goes up.
Impressive stats. But Wright says the company won’t simply churn out new videos simply to give audiences some new smash-’em-up thrills.
“The thing that’s important for us is that the ‘Will It Blend?’ videos continue to build our brand awareness,” he says. “If we get to the point where we’re just creating new ones to satisfy the demand of the people who love it and watch it on a regular basis, then it will have outlived its usefulness.”
Apparently that time has not yet come. In July, Dickson gave a patented Blendtec welcome to a new Apple iPhone, grinding it into iSmoke and posting the carnage on WillItBlend.com. The company then got further mileage out of the stunt by auctioning the shards on eBay and donating the $1,000 winning bid to a children’s hospital.
WIDGETS: ALWAYS ON
Want to get users interacting with your Web content without putting them through the trouble of going to your site? Want a permanent, possibly branded, presence on their desktop real estate? Then you may want a widget.
Widgets are chunks of portable code that can be downloaded by users and embedded on desktops or within personalized home pages, blogs or social Web sites — which is making them more and more prevalent in the Web 2.0 environment. Often run on RSS, they can automate functions that users perform regularly and pull useful information without requiring an active search.
That makes widgets particularly applicable to business-to-business marketing in technical disciplines. Indeed, B-to-B merchants are now creating widgets that help engineers compare product specs quickly and allow access to the latest information feeds.
For example, Avenue A/Razorfish has rolled out a widget for General Electric’s GE Silicones division. The tool gives engineers a quick lookup of product comparisons based on chemical specifications like melting points, viscosity, adhesiveness at different temperatures and so on.
The B-to-B sales process once began with a short list of trusted vendors. These days it usually starts with a search for online data, and the GE widget helps users in that search.
“Customers of our B-to-B clients almost always head to the Web first to do research, before calling vendors,” says David Friedman, president of Avenue A/Razorfish, central region. “The GE widget is meant to provide value to customers and put information they access often at their fingertips.”
— BQ
Case Study: Office Depot — Official Small Business of NASCAR www.thepromoevent.com
