By Anastasia Tubanos, theWHIR.com
October 28, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — IT manufacturer Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.com), which recently launched its version of a portable data center – the Performance Optimized Data Center, unveiled on Monday a fairly unique video advertising campaign featuring its data center kit and services in a rather “ghoulish” light, just in time for the Halloween season.
Playing off the various archetypes usually associated with Halloween – in this case Dracula, The Blob, Frankenstein, Skeletons, Ghosts and a Werewolf – HP says it has created six short videos that “bring to life the serious problems that terrorize IT managers and data center administrators around the world.”
A screenshot from HP’s new Halloween-themed video campaign.
On its YouTube profile, HP explains that “not only do [these monsters] wreak havoc on businesses but they make data center management a living hell. Be warned though, they lurk in the dark waiting to bite your budget.”
Although at first glance one questions what classic movie monsters have anything to do with data center issues, once you look at some of the associations made, the campaign suddenly becomes rather clever, albeit mildly cheesy.
The Register was a little more scathing about its reporting of the campaign, calling it “a Halloween treat even less appealing than a circus peanut,” and explaining that “if you ever wanted to frighten children away from the tech industry, there’s a fine bit of unintentional nightmare-fuel here.”
Nevertheless, having Dracula,”the energy-sucking vampire,” discuss cost-effective solutions and Frankenstein, “the multi-vendor environment monster,” discuss how to manage and support all of his mismatched pieces, fairly effectively gets HP’s messages across and enables it to help its customers “innovate their data centers for greater efficiencies and cost savings while exorcising monsters like these once and for all.”
In addition to the videos, the company has also launched a HP Monsters fan page on Facebook as well as a HP Monster merchandise area on CafePress.
In the past year, we’ve seen a couple of other companies in the industry launch comedic video campaigns to market their products and solutions in a more engaging way than traditional advertising outlets.
In February VeriSign unveiled a set of segments titled “The Cart Whisperer” portraying a humorous approach to abandoned shopping carts.
And last December, PEER 1 launched a new “We get IT” Web campaign that focuses on the people behind technology and appeals directly to Web issues faced by business and tech communities.
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