HP scores with the youth

HP is targeting the Y-generation with party-anchored events and design competitions as part of its ‘The Computer is Personal Again' message while promoting its latest wares.

It held a music and design event, Inter-action: Live in Transmission, that was broadcast live across five cities and generated 561 articles through media coverage across lifestyle and youth magazines, event listings, broadcast and tech media.

On the night of 10 February 2007, 3,865 youths attended the parties in Korea (1,000), Taiwan (1,000), Hong Kong (350), Malaysia (815) and Singapore (700).

The event was aimed at connecting with the youth through their passions and encouraging interaction with technology. It also tried to facilitate interaction between featured artistes and party goers in the different cities and also with the HP brand.

Some of the markets used the event to launch the HP Pavilion tx1000 Entertainment Notebook PC which was designed to suit the personal, always-connected lifestyle and superior computing experiences young people require.

In addition to PR, the target audience was targeted using online banners, posters at school campuses, retail stores and the party venue.

Reactions from media and party goers were mixed with some feeling that the branding was weak while almost all felt the target group were well involved in the event.

HP also conducted the HP MTV notebook design contest, ‘Take Action. Make Art.', which invited youths to design, create and personalise a laptop.

It received 8,582 entries from 112 countries with 22% (1,984) from 19 countries in APAC. Ads for the contest reached 13 countries, but the competition spread to over 198 countries. 15 countries including Australia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines and Taiwan provided more than 200 entries.

Visitors accessing the contest website through WAP numbered 137,310, with APAC accounting for 33% (46,386) of that. The contest microsite garnered 5.7 million page views with just under a million (15.9%) of all traffic coming from APAC. The average length of each visit was over six minutes long, and over 10 pages deep, with over 411,350 page views of the mobile site and over 20,000 designs being downloaded to mobile devices.

To promote the contest, HP leveraged on its global partnership with MTV and entered all MTV properties and touchpoints, including on air, online and mobile.

The eventual winner was 20-year-old Joao Oliveira of Porto, Portugal, with his notebook-design titled ‘Asian Odyssey'. His design will be featured in a special-edition HP Pavilion dv2800 Artist Edition, and is expected to be available in Spring 2008.