Will It Blend?

» see willitblend.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The videos reached Turkey and the blender never did. A Blendtec cost roughly what a decent used computer cost, sold through American kitchen retail, and it was not a purchase anyone around me was weighing up. The clip was another matter entirely. If you were online in 2007 you watched a man in a lab coat drop a camcorder into a blender, and you probably sent it to somebody.

The series started on 30 October 2006. George Wright had just taken the marketing job at Blendtec, a Utah company that made commercial blenders, and walked past the founder, Tom Dickson, feeding a two by four board into one of them to test the motors. Wright spent about fifty dollars on things to destroy and had Kels Goodman film it. The format never changed after that: Dickson in a lab coat asking whether it blends, then the lid coming off so the powder inside could be described.

The numbers people quote are large and most of them come from Blendtec, which is worth saying out loud. Around sixty five million views on YouTube, with another hundred and twenty million on willitblend.com. Sales up seven hundred percent against a starting budget of fifty dollars. Wright ended up giving marketing keynotes about it, and in September 2007 the campaign earned about fifteen thousand dollars from Revver, back when a revenue sharing video host was a plausible way to get paid for a clip.

It collected the recognition of its moment, including a 2007 YouTube Award nomination for best series and a bronze Clio in 2008. Dickson went on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and turned up on Modern Marvels. A man who built commercial food equipment in Utah spent a decade as a minor television personality because of a rake handle.

~ the record ~

~ the apple ones ~

The Apple episodes are the ones people actually remember. The camcorder went in on 3 April 2007. The iPad followed on 5 April 2010 and the iPhone 4 that June, each of them within days of being a thing nobody could get hold of at any price.

That timing is the whole trick. Destroying a scarce object on camera makes a stronger claim about your motor than any specification sheet can, and it borrows an audience that is already searching for the other product's name. Blendtec never had to explain torque to anyone.

~ the funny part ~

The joke worked because Dickson was not a performer. He was a middle aged engineer reading his own copy, and the deadpan was less a choice than a limitation that happened to suit the material. Plenty of brands have tried to fake exactly that since, and it does not survive being faked.

~ the legacy ~

Every company with a camera spent the following decade hunting for its own version, and most of them discovered that the format needs a real product claim underneath the stunt. The ones that worked were the ones where the demonstration was true, which is a much harder brief than it sounds.

The series ended on 10 November 2020, after fourteen years, shortly before Blendtec was sold to the Wasatch Group. There was no announcement, because a web series does not shut down. It stops having a next episode, and then the channel just sits there with the question still in the title of every video on it.

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