Acknowledging the power of online communities, blogs and social media, HP is releasing the next series of its “The Computer is Personal Again” campaign online before it hits TV. Unfortunately, the three commercials, starring Mark Burnett, Pharrell Williams and Mark Cuban, will not take full advantage of the web’s viral capabilities as, according to the press release, the spots will be released on the HP website and, apparently, not simply seeded out to YouTube, a far faster method of spreading them around. Surely, they will end up there anyway, but HP has chosen to launch them from a site that, on the plus side and the reason they are hosted initially on HP’s site, is said allow people to create personalized versions of the spots to feature on blogs or to send to a friend. This, of course, follows nicely with the personalization focus of the campaign.
People can upload an image of themselves as well as their interests and a spot will be created featuring the individual along with their interests. Unfortunately, when we tried, it was clumsy at best with the creating process hosted on another site and not integrated into the HP site. To make matter worse, the image upload process is a persnickety one require a very specific photo and one that can’t be of a person wearing glasses, more than half the population last we did an unscientific study.
To boot, the actual, unedited commercials don’t appear to be online yet.
UPDATE: They’re online now and have been seeded to video sites. Gee, I wonder where they got that idea?
