HP Plans $100 Million Ad Campaign

Hewlett-Packard Co., the world’s No. 3 computer maker, said it will spend more than $100 million on its biggest-ever advertising campaign to show the world that it is serious about capitalizing on the Internet.

HP also will unveil new software to help companies organize banking, travel, shopping and other tasks into comprehensive online services, said HP marketing manager Nick Earle. He declined to provide details on the software.

“We will launch the biggest ad campaign in HP’s history,” Earle said in an interview at a conference in San Francisco. HP recently hired Allison Johnson, who worked on IBM’s “e-business” campaign, to help with its own effort.

HP sells many of the same computers as IBM and Sun, but it doesn’t have the image of an Internet company, Earle said. Marketing has never been one of HP’s strong points, Bloomberg News said, citing a joke in Silicon Valley that if HP had invented sushi, it would’ve called it “cold dead fish wrapped in seaweed.” Earle said it’s his job to fix that.