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Will It Blend?

Video URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8H29jU8Wrs

Summary: This series of videos was produced for a blender company which has such a great blending product, that it will blend just about anything. When Blendtec Marketing Manager George Wright saw Tom Dickson, Owner and CEO of Blendtec testing the blender, he suggested putting videos of it on the web. The CEO agreed, and the rest is history.

Their videos have gotten over million views and 10,000 comments which have resulted in an unprecedented level of internet traffic, many media placements, contacts and increased sales.
The initial video only cost the producer $50 to create and the YouTube promotion literally built a brand for their home products. There is a lot we can learn from this promotion.

It appears that the element of ‘humanness’ mixed with a bit of strange humor is responsible for the success of this promotion. The company took a risk when using this video as a promotional tool, and it appears to be a risk that few stuffy, stodgy corporations are willing to take. Instead of obsessing over ‘professional’ they took a practical approach and showed their product in action, and did it in a funny way.

Things to take note of:

• The simplicity – A simple experimenter in a white lab jacket.
• The catchy 50’s music soundtrack (you will learn how to add music later).
• The watermark for ‘willitblend.com’ at the bottom left hand corner of the video.
• The company logo on a banner in the background.
• A bit of humor.

It should also be noted, that part of the brilliance of this campaign is that it can be repeated dozens if not 100’s of times, all with blending different items. This means that they can make as many different video commercials as they want and get an even wider viewership.

When asked for marketing advice in an interview about the marketing campaign, the marketing manager George Wright offered this gem: ”Any time you find yourself saying “that is cool” – or “I want to watch”, pay attention - you may be on to something amazing.”

If you want to get an idea of all the exposure gained from these videos, you can search:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=will+it+blend&search=Search and sort by view count. You will see the videos have garnered millions of views.

Real Estate Marketing

Video URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py1RLRYzgcs

Unfortunately, we don’t have the original video for this case study. However, we can gain ample insight into the success of the marketing campaign just from hearing about this story in various credible news sources.

Real estate agent Krista Miller, who had already experimented with innovative online marketing ideas for her Real Estate business, was inspired to do a walk-through tour of a client’s house and post the video tour on YouTube. After Miller put her video tour on YouTube, her client received multiple offers…And one of the people who viewed the video on YouTube eventually purchased the home.

One of the most interesting parts about this case study is the fact that the video was not professionally created. In fact, the agent created the video herself using the video function on her digital camera (which we will discuss in the chapter on equipment).

While many companies offer to create digital real-estate tours, often for hundreds or even thousands of dollars, here we have an example of a low-budget YouTube video, without any special lighting or special editing which successfully sold a property.

It should also be noted that even if a buyer does not find the video themselves by directly searching YouTube, videos can still be extremely useful and time saving as a sales tool. Instead of having to show preliminary tours to interested house-shoppers, Miller used YouTube and had success selling a high-ticket item…A house.

• Over 80% of home buyers start their search on the internet
• The buyer was from out of state (obviously the video helped the buyer a lot to gain interest).
• The seller got multiple offers and sold above asking price
• The video probably did not get very many views compared to popular YouTube videos but was still a financial success
• The seller used a combination of Craigslist.org + YouTube to make a more powerful sales presentation.

If you are interested to find more information about this story:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Real+estate+agent+Krista+Miller&btnG=Google+Search

Windward Reports

Video URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeTuQDJDqdM

This is an interesting example of a professionally created commercial for a company that provides Microsoft .NET-based solutions for custom reporting.

It is obvious that there was some budget invested in this commercial which is slightly over 2 minutes.

As of writing this report, the commercial has been viewed about half a million times, and possibly much more owing to the fact that widely successful videos are often uploaded to other video sites by fans.

This is a humorous commercial, and takes a light-hearted look at office life. Due to the fact office workers are spending more and more of their free (or on-clock!) time at video sites, and less time using chat, it follows that funny videos about office life can become immensely popular.

It seems that savvy companies like Windward Reports have recognized the talent of funny short film makers and harnessed it as an advertising workhorse.

What’s also interesting to note is that there are talented-smalltime-hobbyist movie-producers out there who can created quality videos for you on a budget if you want to outsource your video production (we will cover outsourcing in a later chapter).

Lessons:

If you see funny-film makers who can produce consistently funny, hip videos, you might consider hiring them to make a commercial for your product or company.

Really funny commercials on YouTube can get thousands or even millions of views without any additional ‘after-production’ costs. A funny, well produced commercial could be a great investment for almost any product you are considering selling.

Company: http://windwardreports.com/

The video was created by a video production group called ‘Barats and Bareta’.
http://baratsandbereta.com/
http://barney.gonzaga.edu/~lbarats/videos.html
http://www.youtube.com/user/BaratsAndBereta