Will it blend an iPod?
I love “Will it Blend?”
This CEO of a Blendtec puts weird things into his blender.
Today he put an iPod in there.
Yes, it blends! “That’s one smoking iPod.”
Blendtec is gonna have copycats. Seagate’s Rob Pait, who runs marketing for its consumer electronic storage devices, told me today that they are already working on a video where it tests its hard drives to weird things and sees if the hard drive survives (like a jackhammer, mountain biker, etc).
If you want to hear the story behind this highly successful YouTube video series, listen to Rocky Mountain Voices who interviews the guys who came up with the concept. Six million visits in five days.
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December 13th, 2006 at 10:30 pm
Dare he put a sony battery in it?
Really? You like this?
Two questions that come to my mind:
Why would I want to blend my ipod?
How is this different from the late night guy who cuts everything with his knife or the late late night woman who brings trash into her house so that she can test her vaccum ?
December 13th, 2006 at 10:34 pm
Met: what’s different is that it got six million visits on YouTube and 10,000 comments (and that was in the first few days, I’m sure there’s more now).
It’s entertainment. Or YouTube. Or whatever.
December 13th, 2006 at 10:43 pm
ok! fair enough.
Two more questions:
Any stats on the amount of sales that has increased due to this.
What can sustain interest in this? Blending can get a bit boring, you know.
- You should watch Dave Letterman’s “Will it float?” shows, too :) They are fun.
December 13th, 2006 at 10:51 pm
Sustain interest? It’s YouTube! There’s no sustained interest there. You gotta earn it again and again.
Not sure it’ll be hot 30 days from now. Maybe they need to blend something bigger. Say a TV. Or a car.
December 13th, 2006 at 10:54 pm
Met: they have seen sales from it. Not sure how many.
December 13th, 2006 at 11:12 pm
“Sustain interest? It’s YouTube! There’s no sustained interest there. You gotta earn it again and again.”
hehe…read that again.
If I buy the blender and it is the best thing that has happened to me. Then this strategy might work.
My point being that Seagate might not succeed with this kind of marketing. ‘Coz I wouldn’t realise the difference between my new seagate drive and the other drives I have lying around, even if I buy one.
Would I notice higher transfer speeds? Are they bundling any out of this world softwares that could hook people to seagate drives? Do their drives look ultra cool that people around me will want one?
If not - the short attention they might get will be wasted.
December 13th, 2006 at 11:12 pm
There’s a british show called Brainiac where a girl comes on and asks “will this float?” …and drops it in the water…any kind of item. Kind of reminds me of the video.
It pains me to see the IPOD in such ways :( but yet…it is so amusing…and yet addicting somehow
December 13th, 2006 at 11:46 pm
They’re in the running for my next blender buy!
December 14th, 2006 at 7:37 am
I’ve seen the ‘Will it blend?’ videos for some time now. A personal favorite are the glass marbles one and the rake. Both have been circulating my group of friends and part of my office for at least a month now.
I think there’s sustaining interest there. Very viral.
December 14th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
[...] # How to do Viral Advertising: Scoble on Will it Blend? Aren’t you dying to know what happens when you put an ipod in a blender? (spoiler warning: the blender wins…) [...]
December 14th, 2006 at 10:22 pm
I wish I had the disposable income to waste on the senseless destruction of various items. Is this the 21st century version of Gallagher and his Smash-O-Matic? hahaha
December 14th, 2006 at 10:49 pm
These are some of the greatest videos on the internet. That blender has a lot of power(and some really sharp blades!) I want this blender just to see what all I could blend!
December 14th, 2006 at 11:23 pm
Maybe they can get Chunk to put his hand in it?
December 15th, 2006 at 10:31 am
Yeah why don’t we show these videos to the estimated Billion people who get by on 1 dollar a day. We could film there faces and upload them to Youtube while we boast how many antibiotics an iPod could buy. Please think about the difference between cool and visually arresting. One iPod filmed for fun? Fine… a whole genre of the West’s disdain for material value?
I’m not convinced