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Busy week…. We just announced that Sony Pictures will license select catalog titles from its home video library for production and distribution via HP’s DVD manufactured-on-demand service – making Sony the first major Hollywood studio to present its home video titles using HP’s service.
Phew, what a busy few weeks!! We announced this morning that we were acquiring Exstream Software, a privately-held provider of enterprise software that streamlines the creation and delivery of personalized documents and other communication materials.
This acquisition is a great proof point of our Print 2.0 strategy and positions us as a leader in the fast growing document automation and variable data publishing market.
In late December, we cut Snapfish’s everyday price on 4x6 prints to 9 cents from 12 cents in the US. We continue to offer the best value in photography for our 45 million members! This represents more than 50% savings compared to prices on other photo sharing sites.
Now is the time to print those Holiday pictures…. www.snapfish.com
Halloween is right around the corner and HP is bringing you some great ways to teach your kids about the environment. We are jointly promoting with World Wildlife Fund (WWF) a U.S. online pumpkin carving challenge to raise awareness for endangered species.
You can download on the HP Activity Center stencils to help you carve beautiful wildlife-themed jack-o-lanterns: check out the Gorilla or the Tiger (tigers reside in only 7% of their historic range). After carving, you can take photos of completed projects, upload to the Snapfish photo site as well as vote for your favorite photos. Prizes will be awarded to the photos that receive the top 100 overall ratings. Prizes include HP products and WWF panda t-shirts.
Very cool and sleek Serena ad.
Our new marketing campaign features key achievers such as Gwen Stefani or Jake Burton. But every person I know has a story -- lots of ‘em, actually. Some are good. Some are funny. Some should be made into Hollywood movies. We are leveraging the stories of our customers as part of our marketing campaign and allowing them to express what they have to say. I decided to ask Angela LoSasso who is running this part of the campaign to discuss our plans.
I have never been enamored with the name of this blog – Marketing Excellence – and I am taking the opportunity of the shift in content and focus to change its name. I have been looking for a name that was a better reflection of the web 2.0 focus and was also a little …. jazzier… Here are the names I considered:
- Digital Photography – pretty boring, but great from a search engine optimization perspective
- Digital Snapshot – great name, but maybe too centered on photography
- Pixel Marketing – Could be confused with Pixar
- Digital fish – this one was my favorite. A long running joke in Silicon Valley was that if HP was to market sushi, they would name it “cold dead fish”. The name “digital fish” would have been a tongue in cheek recognition that we have come a long way since then. But I quickly came to the realization that it took too much explanation and that I did not want to attract fish fans!
I eventually decided to select “digital Mindset” to highlight the recalibration Marketing has to go through to adapt to a digital world. Let me know if you like it!
Barry Bonds from the San Francisco Giants hit his 756th home run on August 8, 2007 to the deepest part of the ballpark from a 84 mph pitch from Washington’s Mike Bacsik. He made instant history by breaking Hank Aaron’s storied record.
Together with Major League Baseball Productions, we are announcing today that complete game footage of Barry Bonds' record-breaking home run will be sold immediately on DVD via HP's DVD manufactured-on-demand services.
Fans may purchase a copy of the Collector's Replay Edition, featuring the historic 756 home run game, on DVD at San Francisco Giants Dugout Stores and online at www.shop.mlb.com , www.walmart.com , www.fye.com and www.suncoast.com .
We are very excited to be able to deliver so rapidly to all baseball fans a broadcast quality DVD of this historical moment!
Being French myself, I could not resist sharing HP’s new Michel Gondry ad. You may have heard of him through his Björk videos, his pioneering of the bullet time technique or his image manipulation techniques in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or The Science of Sleep.
Etant moi-même Français, je n ai pas pu résister a l envie de vous montrer notre nouvelle publicité avec Michel Gondry. Vous avez sans doute entendu parler de lui à travers ses vidéos de Björk, son utilisation de la technique de bullet time ou ses techniques de manipulation d images dans ses films, notamment Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind et La Science des Reves (Gael Garcia Bernal, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alain Chabat et Miou-Miou)
BusinessWeek published its annual ranking of top global brands and HP gained one spot from #13 to #12 with a 9% increase in brand value. BusinessWeek works in partnership with Interbrand to evaluate brand value, using a combination of analysts' projections, company financial documents, and its own qualitative and quantitative analysis to arrive at a net present value of company earnings.
HP was named one of the five brands that staged a turnaround in the past year. Congrats to my colleagues Satjiv Chahil and David Roman for leading the charge on the PC front (extracts after the jump).
I promised that I would not turn this blog into a HP shopping catalog (I swear!), but I will highlight from time to time product reviews (good and bad) from our new introductions. LCD touchscreens have become a major development in consumer electronics with the Apple iphone or our HP Touchsmart PC and Katherine Boehret at the WSJ Mossberg Solution recently reviewed our digital camera HP Photosmart R937, which will have the largest touchscreen on the market.
Key takeaway: the device is too heavy to be compared to a slim camera, but its incredibly large touchscreen changes and simplifies the digital photography experience. Here are the key extracts.UPDATE: purchase the HP Photosmart R937 at hp.com
Thanks to Pete and Marianne for their suggestion to go multimedia. Here is a start!
I am starting a new job today at HP as Vice President, Marketing for our Digital Photography and Entertainment businesses. Think digital cameras, photo compact printers, Snapfish, retail photofinishing and DVD on demand. I am very excited by the tremendous growth opportunities in all these businesses for HP and by the market disruptions that digital technologies provide us. I look forward to leveraging my customer centricity and web 2.0 experiences to compete with the likes of Kodak. So here are my recommendations for your summer vacation shopping.
Welcome to NUWOM, the class blog for Andy Sernovitz's of Word of Mouth Marketing class at Northwestern University's Integrated Marketing Communications program. This blog is a promising repository of WOM initiatives and experiences and they are doing a great job of driving WOM for themselves (I found them through Mack).
I was particularly interested by their HP and Snapfish WOM experience: “Vacation pictures the easy way” (read full post after the jump)
Congrats to my British colleagues for this great partnership with the National Gallery in London. HP has reproduced masterpieces from Caravaggio, Le Nain, Monet, Botticelli and others through innovative and creative imaging and printing and turned London into a giant art gallery by hanging the full size paintings in the most unusual places.
Very cool announcement this morning from our Digital Entertainment business of the launch of our DVD Manufactured-on-Demand Service and our agreement with TWE, a leading specialty retailer of entertainment software, including music, home video and video games and related products.
I must admit that I have always considered Facebook as a college focused social network and did not pay much attention to its marketing potential beyond that specific target audience. However a few events and stats caught my attention recently.
My blogging friend BL Ochman recently criticized Dell and HP for “hiding in plain sight”, by not linking to our blogs from our corporate home page. She went on to argue that “lawyers, CFOs are other suits” still worry about the loss of the message control and therefore hide it from the homepage.
Although I understand BL’s perspective, I think it is more valid for tightly managed, unique corporate blogs like Dell’s or Southwest’s , where one single multi-authored blog represents the voice of the company. At HP, we have chosen a different approach by allowing any employee to blog on any topic, from Sundance, Corporate Social responsibility, LaserJet or Professional photography to name a few. In our case, search optimization and landing pages become as critical as the often over-emphasized home page. Our readers and customers do not search “HP blogs”, they come across us through searches such as “HP advertising campaign”, “HP green strategy”, “HP blades” and search engines connect them directly to the topics that are relevant to them.
Following BL’s posts, I connected with Nandini Nayak, Director, HP.com Site Design & Research, our resident expert on web experience and usability (Congrats for joining the blogosphere, Nan!) to validate my assumptions. Extracts from our conversation after the jump. Let me know what you think.
