When does a virus run its course?

April 27th, 2009 by Charlotte McCabe

When my daughter recently told me about a super-duper blender given away in a culinary contest at her college, and my preteen son told me about a series of YouTube videos involving a blender, I figured there had to be a connection.

Sure enough, they were both part of Blendtec’s long-running multi-faceted viral campaign, “Will it blend?” This campaign has been around long enough to have its own Wikipedia entry and to have spawned numerous spoof videos. Its oft-repeated phrases have become so recognizable, I’m waiting for them to show up in Mr. Webster’s dictionary (online version, of course).

So what’s the half-life of a viral campaign? If it’s a really good one, apparently it can go on and on, especially as there will always be new Web users and new generations to discover it. Years from now, people will probably look back on this campaign with the same sense of nostalgia as ad campaigns of, say, the ’40s and ’50s. Which makes me wonder: When blending an iPhone becomes passé, what it will take to grab our attention?

— Charlotte McCabe

This entry was posted by Charlotte McCabe on Monday, April 27th, 2009 and is filed under Advertising, Interactive, Marketing, Technology, Viral Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.