This is because Blendtec worked directly with AT&T to tape part of that episode outside one of its stores the day the 3G was released. Watch the recent iPhone 3G shredding 1.5 million views and counting and you’ll notice Dickson pausing to enumerate the great features in the gizmo’s new version. Godin and Blendtec created a video in which Godin added a couple of pages of his own book to a smoothie. Meanwhile, “Will It Blend?” has arguably become a kind of media property unto itself. But percentages can be misleading, and the private company doesn’t get more specific than that Robe concedes that commercial buyers still make up the lion’s share of Blendtec’s revenue. Is there an overlap between that consumer and the “Will It Blend?” audience? Robe replies that sales have risen 600 percent since the videos started. Last year, Consumer Reports, noting the device’s price and “earsplitting” performance, suggested there may be better choices “unless you need to regularly pulverize baseballs or plungers.” Robe says that the typical home-use buyer either makes a lot of ice-based drinks or hews to a whole- or raw-foods diet and needs a mighty blender to handle apples and turnips thoroughly. (To my knowledge, the only thing that Dickson has publicly conceded will not blend is a crowbar. And reducing 50 marbles to dust does suggest that the device sure is powerful, in a 1970s infomercial sort of way. It all sounds less like an ad than like a skit the old Dan Aykroyd “Bass-O-Matic” bit on “Saturday Night Live” crossed with the recurring “Will It Float?” segment on “Late Show With David Letterman.” Then again, Dickson will, with deadpan delivery, touch on a product attribute here and there. Each short episode is similar: Dickson sets up the scenario with all the panache of a high-school science teacher, stuffs some hockey pucks (or a bunch of magnets or a golf club) into the blender, gazes blandly at the camera while the thing whirs and squeals and eventually dumps a pile of detritus on his work table, often adding, “Don’t breathe this.” Then the verdict: Yes, it blends. With theme music and graphics that seem transported from a 1970s game show, the “Will It Blend?” series (at ) is hosted by Tom Dickson, founder of Blendtec’s parent company, K-Tec.
The makers of the Blendtec Total Blender have dropped many items into their $400 product over the past two years, and videos of these absurd experiments have, at the very least, made the brand famous on YouTube. For instance, why not just drop a new iPhone 3G into a blender and put it online? But sometimes the solution doesn’t seem very complicated. Ad pros are paid a lot to create commercial expression that’s both genuinely popular and good for sales.
0 kommentar(er)
