2011 Winners & Shortlists

Results and Effectiveness

This creative integration and complex media buy (involving four other clients) has never been seen before on television. By incorporating the HP finger into entire ad breaks and physically repositioning the commercials of other brands, ‘Touch the Ads’ is the first of its kind in the World Not only was HP involved in a media first but it also benefited from the subsequent PR and column inches given to this innovative idea.

Creative Execution

Central to the Touchsmart (and any tablet) is using your finger(s) to navigate and scroll around the screen. With this in mind, our strategy was to replicate the onscreen movement for television and create an HP finger to demonstrate the product’s touch power during commercials. Working with media owner Showtime we took over entire ad breaks and the ads within them (other clients ads). After gaining permission to use other brands ads, we then used the HP finger as a branded divider between commercials. When an ad had finished, our HP finger would appear on the screen, pick the frame up and move it out of shot. When done, the HP finger would then pick up the next ad and play it out. This process was repeated until the last ad in the 3min break appeared – for the Touchsmart.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Consumer’s appetite for touchscreen technologies has reached epic proportions with the likes of Apple’s iPad and Samsung’s Galaxy turning niche devices into mainstream portable computers. With a number of ‘tablets’ on the horizon, this new segment will become a long-term threat to the traditional desktop PC market. The challenge was to capitalize on the publicity given to the likes of the iPad and draw attention to HP’s own range of touchscreen PC’s – ‘TouchSmart’.