I started following this after Seth Godin mentioned it back in November last year. I think it is interesting how advertisers start spending money on totally new ways to market their products. The fact that the advertisers now have their own distribution channel thanks to the internet change their dependency on traditional media to reach out.

They start spending money that never reach the newspapers, magazines, television channels and distributors that have eaten a part of that pie before.

“Will it blend?” is another example of how you can reach out using this new channel. The idea is simple. Blendtec produce high quality blenders but have a relatively unknown brand compared to the competitors. So, they start willitblend.com in addition to heavy distribution on YouTube and Revver and probably a lot of other sites.

The videos are incredibly cheap to produce (compared to full fledged commercials). And they reach out. With a message that says clearly “we make high quality blenders”. And, “we are a cool company”. And what is it? You just have to watch one video to get the point. One of the most popular. “Will it blend? – iPod”. Here it is.

http://flash.revver.com/player/1.0/player.swf

And the numbers? About 3 million views on the iPod video alone on YouTube?. More than 20 000 people subscribing to the commercials from this company on the same site.

Hundreds of thousands of views on Revver. And by the way, on Revver Blendtec earns money every time people click on any of the commercials after the clips. Interesting, earning money off commercials on your own commercials…

And the traffic? Here is Willitblend.com compared to the total traffic of NBC.com for the last six months.

Remember that this is a site dedicated to the commercials for one company. The fact that their traffic is even visible compared to the total traffic of NBC is remarkable.

And do they sell? I don’t have their numbers, but the traffic on their online shop seems to play well along with the traffic of willitblend.com…

I think this is going to be a huge challenge for the media industry. Advertisers are using traditional media because they want to reach out. Traditionally this has been the only way to do this. Now, there are a lot of new ways to reach out. Blendtec and a lot of other companies are already using them.

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