Video has come along way since it first made the leap from tape to pixels with animations from South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s video shorts “The Spirt Of Christmas” back in the early to mid 90’s, but it wasn’t for another decade until YouTube put the marketing into ‘video marketing’ and brands, promoters, marketeers and technology giants raced to be the first to harness the value that video continues to provide.
With the launch of YouTube came the era of the viral video!
The earliest forms of video marketing itself were in fact the overlay and display ads positioned alongside popular YouTube videos - This revenue stream allowed creators who were previously making content for free to potentially make a living.
In the early days of YouTube very few brands and businesses had really figured out how to make good use of video in a meaningful way, one trailblazer of the time however was Tom Dickson, Founder of Blendtec.
Dickson created what’s considered to be one of the first and best viral marketing videos to promote their range of kitchen blenders. Each episode would see Dickson setup a scenario with all the enthusiasm as a high school science master, proclaiming “will it blend” as he stuffs a suitably unsuitable object into one of their ridiculously powerful $400 kitchen blenders.
It all sounds more like a comedy short than a piece of serious advertising, but over the following two years their ‘Will It Blend’ videos turned a brand with little mainstream recognition into one of the most recognised and talked about brands on the planet, attracting over 1.5 million views on Youtube and helping to increase sales of their Total Blenders by over 600%.
Keep yours eyes peeled for our next post on the history of video marketing!