Roomba, the robotic vacuum cleaner developed by a group of MIT wonks, is busy conquering living rooms across America, thanks partly to a massive TV ad campaign that’s already won the ultimate hip compliment: a spoof on “Saturday Night Live.”
iRobot Corp., a Burlington firm made famous for its PackBot reconnaissance robot used to hunt terrorist thugs in the caves of Afghanistan and Iraq, says its undaunted Roomba cleaner is selling “huge” this holiday season.
Costing just north of $200 each, about 600,000 of the 9-pound, disclike Roombas have sold this year alone, pushing its total sales to more than a million since it was introduced in late 2002.
“It was was a solid performer throughout the year, but it just took off during this holiday season,” said Greg White, head of iRobot’s consumer division, which sells the dirt-buster through such retail stores as Home Depot and Sears.
The hit holiday gift is popular among the tidy-impaired, neatniks and even tech geeks, who use the cordless wonders in mock fights whose results are recorded on Internet sites.
Using sensors that allow Roomba to mathematically map out a room and its obstacles, the R2-D2 wannabe can clean under beds, around tables and over rugs – as long as those rugs don’t have tassles. Roomba doesn’t like tassles.
As popular as it was becoming, sales of Roomba really took off last month, after iRobot launched a major TV ad campaign, starring alleged customers giving tongue-in-cheek accounts of the miracle cleaner as if it were a UFO from Roswell.
“The dirt was there – and then it was gone,” one awed lady says in the TV ad, available for viewing on iRobot’s Web site, irobot.com.
“It’s been overwhelming,” said Doug Gladstone, chief executive of 2-year-old Hub ad agency Brand Content, creator of the ads.
Company officials didn’t say how much they’re spending on the ad campaign, but it’s big and visible enough to have caught the attention of the staff of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” which parodied the Roomba ads during last Saturday night’s show.
Founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology grads Colin Angle, Helen Greiner and professor Rodney A. Brooks, iRobot’s mission statement says its goals are to “Build Cool Stuff. . . . Make Money. . . . Have fun. . . . Change the world.”
They changed the nature of war when the Pentagon bought some 42-pound PackBots to hunt bad guys in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Now, with Roomba, they may be forever changing the nature of home cleaning.
From The Boston Herald