http://www.internetnews.com/IAR/article.php/3086541

All I’ve heard about Compaq is terrible reports, until you get to some of their upper end servers. Then they actually become somewhat less sucky.

Our college runs rampant with broken Compaq laptops. The most common defect is the poorly designed headphone jack. It easily breaks, disabling the speakers and making headphones go mono (I’ve learned the reasons for this, but they’re too dull to mention here.) When this happens, the tech shop has to replace the system board. It’s the problem that took me to the shop over and over last year.

Suprisingly, most of my friends who own HP laptops have had similar experiences. HP/Compaq desktops are normally a nightmare. We won’t go there.

As to the campaign, its obviously effective. We’re here talking about it. It actually targets its audience pretty well. See, its not really aimed at US, its aimed at the kids and parents who are starting to blog. Who don’t build their own PCs (plenty of them) who can’t afford a mac (plenty of them) or even the teenager who uses a livejournal. Yes, thats a blog. Most of them might even recognize the term.

It reminds me of one of Mazda’s newer ad campaigns. Beautiful clean ads of their new cars (MP3, RX-8) and within a day or two…they were ALL graffetied. Who did it? They did. Drew traffic to their own enthusiast site. Very effective.

I wish they’d switch to Dell.

I was just at a little get together here in Boston sporting my “I’m Blogging This” t-shirt and had 5 or 6 (I was drinking a lot of booze that night) people ask me what “blogging” was, or exclaim “hey, I just found out what a blog was this afternoon….”

Screw HP ;)

Now, do I think that the HP ad people stuck a billboard out there knowing that at some point a picture of it would be snapped and placed on a blog — that the physical analogue would so easily transcend into the digital? I certainly think it’s possible… I mean, bloggers are an appealing market. Not only are they probably more likely to be early adapters, but they also spread word of mouth on a grand scale. However, marketing to the blogger presents a specific set of challenges; the most difficult to overcome would be the inherent cynical/critical nature of blogging.

There have been marketing campaigns that attempted to break into the blogging world, where the product was the focus of the blog, but those failed because they were so obviously, pitifully contrived. Unlike a fan-driven product blog, these blogs were too product oriented, too transparent and too unproven; some new milk product cannot support consistent quality conversation. Mostly they were panned by bloggers and a few bloggers even called for an all-out boycott. But that’s the thing, the dissatisfaction was spread instantly in several hundred blogs where people were investigating the product, culling links and notes — it was all negative, but it was also beautifully interactive.

Sure, their experiment had failed, but the real lesson was watching the dissemination of information across the web in blog after blog. The value is there, in getting linked to and talked about on blogs, but the active approach, when seen by the cynical/critical blogger, instantly loses any web-cred. The passive approach, however, if the campaign is clever enough will get picked up bloggers, it will get talked about and that could be exactly what HP is attempting with this ad.

I’m also in London, so I’m just guessing, but each ad *could* be set to target an individual sub-segment/slice/whatever of their target market.

you just got hit hard by one you respond to particularly well.

course HP could just be late onto the bandwagon…