$50 + blender + YouTube = huge marketing success

by on November 17, 2006

Brad Baldwin of Rocky Mountain Voices was hanging out with me today and told me about this story. Actually, you can check it out for yourself on PodTech, or over on the Rocky Mountain Voices blog. (They got interviews with the people involved).

But, here’s the short version of the story.

There was a company that made industrial blenders. One day the CEO was trying to find new ways to test the blender. That gave another employee an idea “video the tests and put them on You Tube.”

Five days later their little video series (they blend things like marbles, full cans of Coke, rake handles, and other weird stuff) was viewed five million times and had 10,000 comments.

That was a month ago. Cost $50. Crazy. But I want one of those blenders. Imagine the margaritas!

  • This is absolutely brilliant! I cant believe I did not think of this myself!
    What a way to advertise your product, i wonder is this kind of free thinking god given or a genetic thing?
    cool report, love this blog :-)
  • Raj
    I can't figure out why you guys don't have an instant Flash player option on PodTech because the "click here to watch" does not appear to stream the data to the client and play simultaneously. And downloading a file that is sometimes > 200MB is for the birds. Why don't you guys put the videos on Revver or YouTube? You would probably get many more views without requiring such large downloads.
  • Raj: we're working on all of that. Coming soon.
  • FYI the blenders Starbucks uses for frappuccinos have more RPMs than a Ferrari. I know because I used to work there and we compared when some guy was bragging about his car.
  • I can't believe I'm posting a first-ish post on this, heh, but I found this a few weeks ago, not through YouTube, but through their actual site Will It Blend? is a corporate vlog. A great one.

    Something to note that even corporate videos, plainly marked, are being put into the category of user-supplied content; advertising it seems, is part of our pop culture that we celebrate, especially when the entire content is the ad-- and entertaining.
  • Posted this a while ago... $50 or not, the blender itself costs $400. One commenter I found had actually bought it, quite amazing.
  • Jenny
    This is designed by Kelly Dobson at MIT.

    http://web.media.mit.edu/%7Emonster/blendie/

    Her blender is voice controlled; and her video is pretty funny.

    I'd love to have a monster-voice activated franken-blender for my summer parties.
  • Hi all!
    very good site!!

    http://myblog.es/jennajameson
  • hooniebear
    If you like blender videos, you should check out this commercial (not for the squeamish...)
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow7N40V4HkM
  • Awesome site!
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