ShareThisOREM, Utah -- George Wright and Tom Dickson have managed to do two things on the Web that advertising execs worldwide have yet to achieve: launch a successful viral video campaign -- and make money from it."We're Madison Avenue's biggest nightmare," says Wright, marketing manager at Orem-based Blendtec Inc.That's because the Blendtec campaign contradicts the conventional wisdom of online viral marketing experts. For Blendtec, there was no long-term strategic plan, just a fun and happy accident, a measure of good humor and lots of plain common sense.Blendtec's off-the-charts success and Wright's "aw-shucks" approach flies in the face of trends in online video advertising. Upstart startups worldwide are attempting to bottle what makes an online video "go viral." "Virality" is the key ingredient in a recipe for return on investment.A viral video is something you love, embrace and want to share. Christine Beardsell, a leading analyst of online video at Incisive Media in New York, says that "it's something that gives people a good feeling or a sense of curiosity and they just have to talk about it."Enter a new industry: a class of "seeders" and "trackers" promising to virality as a concrete deliverable and dismissing amateur or "organic" self-launches like Wright's."The Wild West days of (early viral hits) Lonely Girl and 'Ask a Ninja' are over. You simply can't expect to post great videos on YouTube and have them go viral on their own," says Dan Ackerman Greenberg, co-founder of the West Coast-based video marketing company Comotion Group, which aims to help guide online video virgins to big bucks.There's no shortage of new middlemen. ViralTracker.com offers to "track the reach and response of your viral campaign with the accuracy of a Swiss watch." ViralVideoCompany.com claims companies can achieve significant market penetration "without spending a pretty penny," something Beardsell says "is just plain naive."Wright is fond of a phrase coined in 2007 by Geek Squad founder Robert Stephens: "Advertising is a tax you pay for being unremarkable."Blendtec manufactures industrial-strength blenders for use in the food-service industry. The company experienced growth in the '90s during the so-called "Smoothie Revolution."By the time Wright came on the scene two years ago, Blendtec was doing decent business but had no money for marketing."I remember I used to call the Food Network but they would say, 'You know what, call our advertising department.' "That's when Wright blended up one of the Internet's most viral marketing campaigns of all time.It was November 2006. "I was walking past our demo room," Wright explains, "and there's sawdust coming out of it and I go in thinking it's a construction project but no, it's Tom (Dickson) testing blenders. I mean he's got this two-by-four and he's shoving it in the blender and it's turning to sawdust."Wright had never seen anything like it. It cracked him up. And it was visual proof that Blendtec made an "awesome" product. "So I say, 'Tom, the next time you do this, I want to watch, OK?' "Wright went out and spent $50 on "a white lab coat, a McDonald's Value Meal, a supermarket rotisserie chicken, a rake and a 12-pack of Coke." Then, with the help of a videographer named Kels Goodman, Wright filmed Dickson wearing safety glasses and blending the heck out of just about anything."Kels went off, edited the stuff, came back to me and we just laughed and laughed and laughed," Wright says. "I figured if we thought the spots were funny, then probably other people would think they were funny, too."Wright and Goodman uploaded the first video to YouTube, and in one week the first "Will it Blend?" had over 6 million views, with many to follow.Dixon blended golfballs. Barbies. An IPhone, which he pulverized into a black cloud of nothingness. Blendtec challenged YouTube viewers to challenge the company to blend anything and everything. In the course of a year, Dickson was a viral-video hero and his company's sales had increased by 500 percent.Other companies paid Blendtec to put Blendtec's campy videos on their Web sites.Mark Rotblat, vice president of sales and marketing for Tubemogul, a site that "deploys" fledgling videos, offers potential Blendtecs all the help he thinks they need to go viral. Tubemogul provides specific information on the number of "clicks" that video receives and where. "Clicks," Rotblat says, are impressions, and "impressions are still the gold standard" in advertising.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Going viral
Submitted by SHNS on Fri, 04/11/2008 - 16:18
Paying taxes unites us. It also divides us. People can pay five and even six times more in state and local taxes than other folks in similar circumstances making similar incomes.
Who's got your number?
In one of the fastest-growing forms of identity theft, crooks are stealing tax refunds by swiping personal information and using it to trick the Internal Revenue Service.
