blendtec will it blend chuck norris
Will It Blend is a viral marketing campaign / infomercial series for a line of mixer/blenders starring Tom Dickson, the founder of Blendtec. In each episode of the series, Dickson attempts to blend all sorts of items that can fit inside the container, from Chuck Norris action figures and Barbie dolls to iPods and camcorders. Blendtec, a company which produces blenders, uploaded their first “Will it Blend” video to their official YouTube channel on October 30th, 2006. In the video Dickson tries to blend 50 marbles on the blender’s lowest setting. It successfully crushes the marbles into glass dust, enabling the video to declare, “Yes, it blends!” As of March 2014, the video has over 6.4 million views. The Internet media coverage of Blendtec’s infomercial series and its positive impact on the company’s revenues began in mid-2007, shortly after Dickson’s guest appearances on NBC’s The Tonight Show in March, with Esquire publishing an interview article with the host on May 3rd and tech site Mashable reporting on the company’s five-fold increase in sales on September 27th.
The episode was uploaded on October 31st, 2006. With more than 3.5 million views as of March 2014, the “Cochicken” experiment remains one of the most famous episodes in the series.
hamilton beach 51102 single-serve blender with 2 jars and 2 lids whiteIn the April 3rd, 2007 episode, Dickson placed a camcorder in the blender, giving viewers a first-person look inside the container in action (right).
cuisinart poweredge 700 blender reviewsShortly afterwards, the production team, Kels Goodman and Ray Hansen, attempted to return what was left of the camcorder to Best Buy, though without success.
blendtec costco roadshow schedule In another episode uploaded on July 10th, 2007, Dickson put the then-newly released iPhone to the “Will It Blend” test (shown below, left).
The remaining fragments of the iPhone, along with a brand new Blendtec blender and a DVD compilation of the commercials, were subsequently placed for a charity auction on eBay and sold at $901 USD. On July 25th, 2007, Dickson placed six Bic lighters in the blender (right). In a matter of seconds, the mixture of butane, metal and plastic ignited into a ball of fire inside the container, making the episode one of the most extreme editions of “Will It Blend?” The online popularity of “Will it Blend” soon led to the creation of parody videos. On October 26th, 2011, Richard Ryan uploaded a Will it Blend parody titled “Is it Bullet Proof?” (shown below, top left) on his gun themed YouTube channel RatedRR. The video features Ryan shooting a Blendtec blender with a semi-automatic rifle, then adding a tannerite exploding target, which demolishes the jug portion of the blender but only damages, but does not destroy the base. In addition to parodies of the original series, a handful of copycat web series modeled after a similar format and title were eventually launched on YouTube.
On March 12th, 2014, action film star and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger uploaded a video to his official YouTube channeltitled “Will It Crush?” It features Schwarzenegger crushing items like a piano and taxi cab with his army tank. In the video, he explains that by donating $10 to his page on the charity site Omaze viewers are entered to win a chance to crush things in Schwarzenegger’s tank, with the money benefitting After-School All-Stars, an organization that funds after school programs for underprivileged kids.The requested page title contains invalid characters: "%3F". Return to Main Page. More Will it Blend? Don't try this at home. Try this at home.Blendtec Total BlenderAd pros are paid a lot to create commercial expression that’s both genuinely popular and good for sales. But sometimes the solution doesn’t seem very complicated. For instance, why not just drop a new iPhone 3G into a blender and put it online?The makers of the Blendtec Total Blender have dropped many items into their $400 product over the past two years, and videos of these absurd experiments have, at the very least, made the brand famous on YouTube.
) is hosted by Tom Dickson, founder of Blendtec’s parent company, K-Tec. Each short episode is similar: Dickson sets up the scenario with all the panache of a high-school science teacher, stuffs some hockey pucks (or a bunch of magnets or a golf club) into the blender, gazes blandly at the camera while the thing whirs and squeals and eventually dumps a pile of detritus on his work table, often adding, “Don’t breathe this.” Then the verdict: Yes, it blends.It all sounds less like an ad than like a skit — the old Dan Aykroyd “Bass-O-Matic” bit on “Saturday Night Live” crossed with the recurring “Will It Float?” segment on “Late Show With David Letterman.” Then again, Dickson will, with deadpan delivery, touch on a product attribute here and there. And reducing 50 marbles to dust does suggest that the device sure is powerful, in a 1970s infomercial sort of way. (To my knowledge, the only thing that Dickson has publicly conceded will not blend is a crowbar. ) Jeff Robe, the company’s marketing director, says Web popularity has created “a brand presence that we did not have.”
Before October 2006, Blendtec had spent more than a decade selling blenders to the commercial market (restaurants and so on) but had little name recognition with mainstream consumers. Millions of YouTube views later, Dickson has been on the “Today” show, the company’s marketing has been praised by the business guru Seth Godin and the blender recently had a cameo in a Weezer video (albeit a video made up almost entirely of Web-famous goof-offs). Surely all this has made the Total Blender — sold online, in specialty shops and sometimes by way of demonstrations at warehouse-club-style stores — more recognizable.Last year, Consumer Reports, noting the device’s price and “earsplitting” performance, suggested there may be better choices “unless you need to regularly pulverize baseballs or plungers.” Robe says that the typical home-use buyer either makes a lot of ice-based drinks or hews to a whole- or raw-foods diet and needs a mighty blender to handle apples and turnips thoroughly.
Is there an overlap between that consumer and the “Will It Blend?” audience? sales have risen 600 percent since the videos started. But percentages can be misleading, and the private company doesn’t get more specific than that; Robe concedes that commercial buyers still make up the lion’s share of Blendtec’s revenue.Meanwhile, “Will It Blend?” has arguably become a kind of media property unto itself. Godin and Blendtec created a video in which Godin added a couple of pages of his own book to a smoothie. Watch the recent iPhone 3G shredding — 1.5 million views and counting — and you’ll notice Dickson pausing to enumerate the great features in the gizmo’s new version. This is because Blendtec worked directly with AT&T to tape part of that episode outside one of its stores the day the 3G was released. Longtime devotees may have noticed a gradual drift toward the blending of hot products and pop-culture artifacts. Blendtec responded to that Weezer star turn by blending the band’s new CD, and Dickson has lately destroyed a copy of “Grand Theft Auto IV” and a “Guitar Hero III” attachment.