The latest obsession running rampant through our home and business is the 86 (and counting) videos in the “Will It Blend?” series by Blendtec. It’s gotten to the point where our 20-month old son now raises his arms in triumph and says, “Yes, It Blends!” Our 6 1/2 year-old can’t bear to watch Mario Kart get blended, but he already wants to try blending stuff in our (non-Blendtec) blender…gonna have to watch out him on that one.

Of course, Lani and I get geeky on this stuff, too. As Lani said to the assembled audience at Monday’s “A-Ha!” NH Social Media Business Summit, we had to stop ourselves from watching them all while we were prepping for the event, and were probably going to watch all of them in our post-event downtime.

Well, that was slightly ambitious - we’re about halfway through them. And here’s why they’re awesome:

1. They’re a perfect example of content in bite-sized chunks. Each video is between 1 and 2 minutes, and they’re all very tightly produced.

2. They started with a simple format, and rather than sticking rigorously to it, they’ve allowed themselves to play within it. Sometimes they’ve had people come in on set to sample the blended items; at other times, they’ve gone outside the studio; and they’ve added goofy things like nuclear explosion footage when they blended the Bic lighters and a green x-ray skeleton when they blended the glow sticks.

3. The whole campaign is rooted in LEVITY. It’s dry, it’s silly, it’s absurd, it’s self-knowing, it’s a master class in pop-culture trend-surfing (with a thread of satire in there, too).

My personal favorite so far is the one where Tom blends Esquire magazine’s Esky Award for outstanding musical achievement - I won’t spoil the why for you:

Now here’s the embarrassing bit. I watched about a dozen videos and said out loud, “This is amazing! Is there ever going to be anything that doesn’t blend?” And I was so totally into the videos as a viewer, as a potential customer and user, that it wasn’t until I’d watched another eight or so before I finally “got it.”

Of course there won’t be a video where it doesn’t blend. D’oh!

Thanks to Blendtec for engrossing me so well that I forgot for a time that I was watching for business purposes in the first place.

Posted in Social Marketing |

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 10:22 am and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.