EVENT AT A GLANCE Objective: Show how HP’s new Print 2.0 strategic vision will become reality. Generate media and industry interest in the strategy, and create positive word-of-mouth about HP’s brand. Strategy: Host a two-day event to demonstrate the Print 2.0 strategy in real-world scenarios, and to roll out the company’s new Print 2.0 ad campaign. Tactics: Focus the event elements around interactive “Experience Zones” with live demonstrations targeted to each consumer segment; offer one-on-one meetings with HP executives. Results: Eight hundred customers, partners, and influencers attended — twice the original goal of 400.

orget everything you’ve heard about print being dead in the digital age. In the year 2010, an estimated 53 trillion — yes, that’s trillion with a “t” — digital pages will be printed, according to internal research done by Hewlett-Packard Development Co. The trees still have it coming.

It’s no surprise then that printing powerhouse Hewlett-Packard wants to capture a significant share of those pages — and the $296 billion market they represent. So in May 2007, at HP’s annual Imaging and Printing Conference, Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice president of the company’s Imaging and Printing Group, introduced a concept called Print 2.0 that outlined the company’s strategic vision for making printing relevant and easy in the world of Web 2.0, which HP describes as “a broad trend of using the World Wide Web as a platform for users to create and share their own data, enabling essentially anyone to become an information provider.”

The Print 2.0 strategy is to extend what HP calls “the power of print” across its entire customer base — from home-office users to small and medium businesses to enterprise customers — by making Web-based printing easier, by extending its digital content creation and publishing platforms (such as photo service Snapfish), and by offering a digital printing platform that makes high-volume commercial printing faster and cheaper.

“Today, we’re introducing a new era in printing,” Joshi says. “We’re redefining what it means to print and further accelerating the transformation from analog to digital pages. In today’s world of ‘mashed media’ — words, pictures, video, songs — the question becomes ‘How will people publish this content?’ Print 2.0 is the answer. This vision centers on empowering our customers to create and consume content, their way.”

The concept sounded great — what’s not to like about a plan to align the Imaging and Printing Group with modern business practices? But there was one problem, says Glenda Brungardt, trade show and event manager, HP Imaging & Printing Americas Marketing: It wasn’t clear to HP’s customers and partners just how HP would translate Print 2.0 from executive vision to everyday reality.

Grounding a Vision

To offer that much-needed clarity, HP had to demonstrate what Print 2.0 meant to everyone from the stay-at-home mom printing family photos to an entrepreneur creating promotional marketing materials. It needed to show off the everyday applications and prove that Print 2.0 wasn’t just some pie-in-the-sky talk. In other words, HP needed to tether its big-picture vision to the real world.

A $300 million global marketing campaign — called “What do you have to say?” — was already in the works to support Print 2.0, and would certainly help express the vision. Optimistic HP executives even considered just rolling out the campaign and letting the ads do the talking, Brungardt says. But ultimately, based on the company’s internal and customer needs, executives decided that putting on an event — a global conference called Print 2.0: Extending the Power of Print — was the right solution for clarifying the concept and kicking off the campaign.

“When Print 2.0 was originally presented, it was an overview of where HP was going in printing and imaging,” Brungardt says. “What the event would bring to reality was that we were walking the talk and not just floating our vision at the 40,000-foot level. We would be able to show real examples of Web printing, of workflow streamlines, of in-house marketing. So we actually brought the vision to life. It was the natural next step for us.”

Brungardt was charged with creating an event that would meet that goal for the company’s customers, retailers, resellers, print service providers, partners, and influencers. HP also hoped the event would generate buzz for HP’s products, solutions, and overall brand, and drum up excitement for the new marketing campaign. It was no small task — especially considering that Brungardt and her 10-member core team had just six weeks to meet the event deadline thanks to the ad campaign’s predetermined launch date.

The Print 2.0 Experience

Brungardt and her team secured a floor at Seven World Trade Center in New York for the event, and began assembling a guest list hoping to attract about 400 attendees made up of HP’s customers and partners, media, and analysts. It issued online invites, and continued event prep. But as RSVPs quickly flowed in, HP decided to build on the apparent interest and double its list to 800, securing a second floor at the event site to accommodate the larger crowd.

On August 28, the conference kicked off with a keynote address by Joshi and a panel of global Web 2.0 leaders. The attendees were then broken into groups and rotated throughout the various event elements in order to ensure that every guest got to experience the full array of event offerings as it related to their particular business needs.

Key to HP’s “make it real” event strategy was a series of interactive, vignette-driven “Experience Zones,” which Brungardt crafted in order to bring the Print 2.0 concept to life for each of HP’s customer segments: Consumer, Small and Medium Business (SMB), Enterprise, Graphic Arts, and Supplies. In each of the zones, attendees were able to see, learn about, and test the products and services that Print 2.0 encompassed. “We really wanted the customers to feel that we understood what they were going through,” Brungardt says. “In each zone, a presenter gave a high-level overview of about 30 to 45 minutes, then product experts in each area could answer individuals’ specific questions and engage them in how such a solution would work for them.”

For example, the Consumer Zone focused on “bringing digital content to the masses” and was set up as multiple rooms in a family home. The SMB Zone was about “improving customers’ marketing effectiveness,” and was designed to resemble a small winery business. The Enterprise Zone brought home the goal of “improving workflow and global business effectiveness via the HP Halo system” with a working, live Halo room setup (Halo is HP’s videoconferencing product). Graphic Arts — “from postage stamps to building wraps” — featured elements familiar to print-services providers, while the Supplies Zone demonstrated how HP “provides both consumer and commercial customers with improved and new printing experiences as they migrate to the Web” by showcasing its solutions in mock home-office and real-estate-office settings.

Based on each zone’s tagline, such as the SMB Zone’s “improving customers’ marketing effectiveness,” the space was outfitted with specific working products. So as the presenters talked through the different technologies and solutions in each area, attendees were able to see them in action. In the Consumer Zone that meant printing pictures at home and accessing the Internet with an HP laptop, while in the SMB Zone attendees could create marketing materials online using HP’s Logoworks custom-design service. The Graphic Arts area presented solutions for photo, publishing, and direct-mail applications. In addition to the live Halo room, the Enterprise Zone also featured content that showed customers how to improve their workflow, and manage their print environments and their printing infrastructure. The Supplies Zone went beyond a simple showcase of HP digital-printing products and capabilities to illustrate the company’s environmental efforts — like recycling programs and more eco-friendly printer-cartridge packaging. Every attendee toured each Experience Zone to hear the high-level overviews, then had the opportunity to revisit the zones that were of particular interest to them.

Attendees also had the chance to meet one-on-one with HP management for 30 to 60 minutes (more than 250 meetings were pre-scheduled by attendees’ HP account reps), and to tour a product gallery that showcased HP’s product portfolio. Formal educational tracks addressed Graphic Arts, Channel Partner, and Enterprise topics. Even an on-site advanced screening of DreamWorks’ “Bee Movie” added to the real-life, real-applications tone of the event, as DreamWorks Animation SKG’s CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg described (via video) how the DreamWorks studio uses HP’s Halo technology to better connect its global animation teams and speed its production time.

A Campaign Comes to Life

To add to the event’s sense of exclusivity, attendees also got the first glimpse of the massive “What do you have to say?” marketing campaign that would support Print 2.0. “The goal of the campaign is to share real-life stories of how people use HP products to enhance their creative skills, or their everyday lives,” Brungardt says. Pairing the campaign launch with the conference allowed HP to optimize its resources while demonstrating how the Print 2.0 message would be carried far and wide outside the event-facility walls, helping HP’s channel partners benefit from increased consumer and professional awareness of Print 2.0 concepts and HP’s solutions.

The campaign features creative icons like Jake Burton, founder of Burton Snowboards, graphic design guru Paula Scher, and musician and fashion designer Gwen Stefani telling how they listen to that voice in their heads as it tells them to “make something” — and how HP’s tools make it easy.

To help customers engage with Print 2.0, HP created three campaign micro sites (still active today) with inspirational commentary from Stefani, Burton, and Scher, along with free, customizable and printable content. Stefani’s site (located at www.hp.com/gwen) lets fans print greeting cards, a scrapbook, and paper dolls; entrepreneur Burton’s www.hp.com/burton site offers brand-building tools; and graphic designer Scher’s www.hp.com/paula site offers customizable templates for business cards, letterhead, and brochures.

While none of the campaign personalities attended the event, they appeared in on-site video clips, photos, and campaign ads. The personalities crossed channels, as well: Stefani, for example, appeared in print ads and TV commercials, and created the original content for her micro site. Her iconic face with its shock of white-blond hair looked over attendees from oversized graphics in the event space.

“Customers receive information and content in many forms today, and having an integrated campaign effort allows us to leverage or take advantage of the various ways our customers choose to gather and receive that information for both personal and professional needs,” Brungardt says. “Every activity in the campaign is targeted to engage our customers with our Print 2.0 efforts. We want to engage them through activity or experience versus just driving demand to product pages online.” The event, of course, was the optimal place to launch this “engage through activity” strategy, which would then extend through the campaign to all of HP’s marketing channels.

Brungardt’s attention to detail ensured that every element of the event linked to this firsthand-experience mantra. For example, every on-site graphic element, from the labels on the wine bottles in the SMB Zone’s mock winery to the banners hanging outside of the venue, was created using HP printing technologies, further demonstrating the real-world applications of the company’s Print 2.0 vision, and giving attendees another touchable experience with HP output.

A Powerful Payoff

According to post-show survey results, a full 78 percent of attendees considered the event to be a “very valuable” or “extremely valuable” use of their time. Beyond attendee satisfaction, it was a valuable event for HP: Ninety articles were published within the first two days of the Print 2.0 announcement, and nearly 200 followed over the next two months in media outlets ranging from business and technology publications to snowboarding magazines: a testament to the event’s success in communicating the Print 2.0 position as a cultural and lifestyle story, not just technical news.

To date, there have been more than 3,000 blog posts on the Print 2.0 campaign and announcement, and the three campaign Web sites have received about 2.5 million hits since the launch. Furthermore, the printing projects each spokesperson created — Harajuku paper dolls from Stefani and an array of business-system templates from Scher — have been downloaded more than 200,000 times. The ad campaign has found YouTube fame as well, with Stefani’s ad alone garnering an additional 100,000 views.

Rodney Key, founder and CEO of R and R Images in Phoenix, an HP graphic-arts customer, called the event — especially Joshi’s keynote presentation — enlightening. “We believe in Web integration as a very big driver of printing,” he says. “It’s great to see that HP is 100 percent behind that, backing and driving that awareness. It takes powerful companies to deliver that very important message.” e