Will It Blend?
"Will it blend? That is the question." Blendtec founder Tom Dickson, in a white lab coat, fed marbles, a rake handle, golf balls and eventually a brand-new iPhone into his blender and reduced each to dust. It started in October 2006 on a $50 budget and became the viral campaign every marketing class studied.
Blendtec of Orem, Utah, made commercial blenders and, before that, wheat mills, and its founder, Tom Dickson, had a habit of testing his motors on scrap wood. In 2006 a new marketing director, George Wright, noticed the sawdust on the factory floor and saw a show in it. He took $50 and bought a lab coat, marbles, a rake, a six-pack of soda, a fast-food value meal and golf balls, and the first Will It Blend? videos went up on YouTube in October 2006. The format never changed: Dickson in the coat, "Will it blend? That is the question," the item dropped in, the roar, a slow-motion replay, and a card reading "Yes, it blends!" The marbles became glassy dust and the rake handle a pile of slivers. "We had 6 million hits in the first week," Dickson said later, "and it didn't take us long to realize we had hit a home run."
Then came the gadgets. In April 2007 he blended a camcorder while it was recording, and the crew tried, without success, to return what was left to Best Buy. In July 2007 he blended an iPhone, and that episode has run up more than 13 million views on YouTube alone. He blended a rake handle on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in March 2007, aired three episodes over Super Bowl weekend that year (calling it "The Big Game" to dodge the trademark), and invented the "cochicken," half a rotisserie chicken whirred with 12 ounces of Coke, a version of which was served to Meredith Vieira on Today. An iPad went in on April 5, 2010, smashed first to fit, and an iPhone 4 on June 25, 2010.
It paid. Blendtec's retail blender sales reportedly rose 700 percent within two years, the series was nominated for a 2007 YouTube Award and took a Clio for viral marketing in 2008, and the company sold a T-shirt reading "Tom Dickson is my Homeboy." By early 2013, when Dickson stepped down as CEO, the channel had passed 217 million views. Every new Apple product got its turn until the last episode in 2020, shortly before Blendtec was sold to Wasatch Group.
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