HP Goes Online to Promote Print

What do a snowboard company founder, a pop star and graphic designer have in common? They’ve lent their names to Hewlett-Packard’s $300 million Print 2.0 marketing campaign.

Singer Gwen Stefani, Burton Snowboards’s Jake Burton and graphic designer Paula Scher are each featured on a separate HP Web site. Burton’s and Scher’s sites offer tips for small- and medium-sized businesses on how to build a brand, and of course, how to use printed materials to accomplish that. Stefani’s HP site, aimed at consumers, provides templates to create greeting cards and other materials.

A spokesman representing HP won’t disclose, at least for now, how much is allocated to online, television, or print ads. She says, in an e-mail, that the $300 million figure includes “not only advertising spending, but also spending on Web elements (e.g. the Gwen Stefani, Jake Burton and Paula Scher Web sites), in-store elements, alliances, etc.”
HP, in touting those alliances, says it wants to make it easier to publish from the Web to printed media such as photo albums. Yahoo’s Flickr, a photo sharing site, for instance, will incorporate HP technology, to create customized posters and other products.

No doubt, print’s important to HP. The company’s imaging and printing division reported $26.8 billion in revenue for the fiscal year ended Oct. 31, 2006; that represents close to 30 percent of HP’s 2006 annual revenue.

A news release announcing the marketing campaign is sure to make a tree hugger cringe. HP says it’s trying to capture a bigger portion of the 53 trillion pages it expects will be printed by 2010.