It’s really neat to receive a scoop from a blogger-friend (Thanks, Eric) on a hot news item before mainstream media outs the story. The story in question is HP’s recent forays into viral ad campaigns. In my opinion HP’s unique ad style started with the “You + HP: digital photography” ad series. Here’s further proof of similar ads (albeit viral):

1. HP’s European Viral Campaign (via Eric Kintz):

HP has had a phenomenally successful viral blog campaign in Europe during the World Cup Soccer Tournament. Here’s how it played out: On the eve of the World Cup Soccer 2006 craze, HP launched the Fingerskilz vlog, which purported to be home made videos of bored workaholic Dave B, and some of these videos you’ve gotta see to believe. Really cool stuff…

Anyway, long story short — here are the download stats for the viral videos thus created and spread over the web:

6.3 million hits, 180,000 unique visitors, average visit duration of 5.45 mins. It has also been selected in the top 6 World Cup virals by Boreme, a site that tracks virals. A google search produced 22,000 results and the blog has been featured on a number of publications, online and offline as well as in the blogosphere.

(Source: Eric’s blog). Those are pretty decent numbers for a marketing campaign and no wonder, HP’s enthused by the results.

To get a 3-D overview of the story & the buzz, check out TechMeme’s trail, which includes a NYT write-up as well.

2. Current HP Viral Campaign

The most recent viral ad campaign by HP is targeted at the MySpace generation and is called Personal Palmistry. The cool part about the viral ads seems to be that they are all strategically tied into an underlying theme, which in this case is “the Computer is Personal — again”!

On the flipside, the challenges corporations face with viral campaigns or blogs for that matter is in building the trust with the target audience. If the results of the above ads are any indication, it probably is possible to build that trust when companies initiate the conversation.

Do you know of any other Fortune 500 companies, experimenting with the viral phenomenon? Feel free to comment.
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In my opinion, HP along with AMD & Apple represent the “Silicon Valley Renaissance” where Tech Giants from the past, are riding a wave of “resurgent coolness” — due in large part to great products and stellar leadership.

Old IS Gold in good ol’ Silicon Valley!