One of the fields that were changed in the most extreme ways is the one of advertisement. At the beginning, add spots on the internet were sold according to how many people visited the supposed internet-site. Along with the WEB 2.0 revolution, changed the pricing system, and in most cases ads are sold according to "how many clicks" instead of "how many visits".
But sometimes what started as a funny commercial ad, ends up as something completely different. Such that is the story of Blendtec.com (TM). This company is a normal commercial company for benders, mixers etc. but about 3 years ago, Tom Dickson, the Blentec founder, started a new advertisement campaign for the company new product - total blender.
It is hard to know if he was serious about it at all, but the final result is rather funny!
"Will it blend? - that is the question!" this is how every video start. And what started as a blender commercial video soon became a hit YouTube channel.
Tom Dickson blend all sorts of things - food & drinks, but mostly thing that you should NOT put in a blender - marbles, glowsticks, golf balls, action figures (this one is funny - and relate to a whole other transmedia topic - Chuck Norris =) ), and all sorts of commercial products - namely apple product.
You may look at it as a "consumerism critique"' or you can just look at it as a vandalism act, but in any case it is very funny. Some of the most viewed videos are those who are related to apple - an i phone (and later ipone 3g and ipad) was blended, and surprisingly the "iphone dust" was bought in eBay!!
The iphone-ipad "Will it Blend?" was some of the videos that were widely disscussed on blogs, forums, and articles all over the web, what realy shows how much impact those silly videos have!
Tom Dickson managed to step aside from his commercial spot as a blenders-company-manager, and became a YouTube character, one that gets tributes from other users, and also made some advertisement for other businesses based on the "will it blend" platform (like this one and this one).
some of the tributes are funny just because they are trying to imitate the original videos, but some went a few steps forward, and founded other YouTube channels (or just a series of videos) such as "is it OK to microwave this?", "will it toast?", "will it copy?", etc.
The interesting thing in this whole story from the media point of view is how a commercial ad became something completely different. I don’t now how many blenders have been sold due to this campaign, but this is not the question. The power of viral marketing is that it doesn’t matter what are you selling, but how good can you spared your videos. The audience reaction on the iphone video and in this video shows that he got it right! And this is why later on he made some side-advertisement for other companies (friends of "will-it-blend"). The fact that other users create tributes to his "work" is in a way, a "produsage-marketing" – other users that just find his videos funny, contribute to his long term business plan by enlarging his views-counts, and his market share for selling blenders (or other ads)!
The fact that other businesses also ask him to promote their businesses in his videos really demonstrates the power of viral marketing – in a way, it is a step backwards, again, what matters is how many views you get, and not how many clicks, but if someone watches the video, it is because he intended to.
On the same topic, I wanted to show another example of someone who tries to do viral marketing, but it is all in Hebrew (I think there must be an English one as well but couldn’t find one...). Basically what the guy's doing is to take a short video of himself wearing a t-shirt with some company's logo on it and talks about it. It is a nice example also as a Transmedia marketing, as the guy gets money to wear the shirt all day long, so basically the company gets both on line exposure from his site, YouTube, his and his friend blogs, FB, Twitter etc., and real-world advertisement.
So, Will it spread? The answer is YES it will! =)
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