Riding the wave with viral marketing
Apple is to gadget lovers what the Beatles once were to teenage girls. Sure, Apple fans may not be screaming ‘Beatlemania’ style, but they are queueing up at the crack of dawn for brand new releases. The team from Blendtec were recently in one such queue for the iPad.
Blendtec make blenders, but they’re also pretty good at viral marketing. Their YouTube campaign ‘Will It Blend?’ has seen them ride the iPad mania wave all the way to the bank. The premise is simple: they take various items – from light bulbs to glowsticks – and ask ‘Will it blend?’ The iPad was their latest victim, and incase you were wondering, yes it does. As of last month, Blendtec’s videos had a staggering 101,239,081 views. To date, their iPad video has had over 6 million views, which has been great for Blendtec’s brand awareness as well as sales, which have skyrocketed since the campaign began.
iPad: the future of healthcare?
The iPad copped its share of criticism when it was unveiled in January this year, but some believe it is the next big thing in healthcare IT. The Washington Post says that the iPad’s superb visual quality makes it well suited for reading diagnostic images like patient X-rays and MRIs, that its touch screen could make recording and reviewing patient data easier, and that existing medical iPhone apps made for doctors and consumers, which were impractical on the small iPhone, will work beautifully with the iPad’s generously sized screen.
The iPad could be used for a range of healthcare marketing activities, like communicating with and sharing information between physicians, providing better information to patients at point of care, replacing sales people’s laptops – the possibilities seem endless. The iPad claims to allow users secure access to company intranets, and Apple’s intuitive interface also means less user training.
Others, however, are not so convinced, citing a lack of stylus, the inability to multi-task and other incompatibilities as reasons why it won’t take off. The lack of Flash support is another drawback raised by users which Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, addressed recently. Will Apple’s stance be enough to tip the scales towards a faster adoption of HTML5?
One blogger sums up with a very nice point – “the iPad is a content consumption device, not a content creation device.”
Until next time,
The Content Formula team. |
