As Hewlett-Packard approached a formal separation of its Printers and Personal Systems (PPS) technologies and its enterprise solutions into two distinct companies, the company saw an opportunity to clearly define its role as an innovative provider of enterprise and service solutions, independent of its consumer technologies.
On the heels of its major, twice-annual B2B customer/analyst conference (HP Discover) and fifth issue of its online thought leadership publication (HPE Matter), HPE premiered its new corporate narrative, describing a disruption environment called the "Idea Economy" and celebrated innovation by giving the spotlight to emerging leaders. As the result of a substantial collaboration between digital and brand leaders at HPE and Interfuse, the client enhanced its issue of unbranded, editorial content, which discussed the winners of the Idea Economy, with a series of short documentary films written and directed by award winning filmmaker Alison Klayman and narrated by actor Ed Burns. Simultaneously, Interfuse strategized ways to increase traffic to the HPE Matter site, share the custom content via discovery platforms and social channels and distribute the short films to create a surround-sound conversation linking HPE to those enterprise products helping innovators turn ideas into value faster than their competition.
Connect With Forward Thinking and Passionate IT Decision Makers (ITDMs)
We used the June 2015 HP Discover conference as an opportunity to introduce HPE's new corporate narrative—the Idea Economy—among its audience of ITDMs in-person and online in preparation for the company's separation.
With an entire issue of the company's thought leadership magazine, HPE Matter, dedicated to the Idea Economy, we commissioned unbranded articles and videos from Quartz Creative, Fast Co. Works, The Atlantic Re: Think, PSFK and award winning filmmaker Alison Klayman to shape the disruption conversation around HPE's enterprise product offerings. We created a distribution and promotion plan aligned with HPE's goals to include paid, owned and shared components that emphasize HPE as the enterprise of tomorrow.
Goals
Engage New and Existing Customers in Disruption Conversation and Drive Subscriptions to HPE Matter
HPE had the unique opportunity to set the standard for what fuels enterprises in the Idea Economy—where companies turn classic business models upside down using technology. Our goal was inspire ITDMs to view HPE as the right partner to help drive their companies forward and facilitate disruptive innovation, as well as convert HPE Matter readers into customers
Execution
Curtain Raisers and Sponsored Surround Sound
HPE premiered the Idea Economy issue of HPE Matter and the "Welcome to the Idea Economy" films on the main stage of its biannual conference for customers and partners and simultaneously launched the issue and film series on a custom-designed page at HPEMatter.com. The Interfuse team compiled a strategic and robust promotional program, spanning paid discovery, social and owned channels, to target the ITDM and business elite audiences.
In an innovative native advertising partnership with The New York Times: T Brand Studios and Mashable, HPE was able to reframe the disruption conversation, introducing the narrative of the Idea Economy, in the voice of trusted business and tech media outlets, and successfully targeted interested NYT and Mashable readers, driving traffic to the HPE Matter webpage and encouraging new subscribers.
Finally, HPE engaged research publication PSFK to profile innovators shaking up established industries across verticals and promoted this content on the PSFK webpage and through an executive networking event, at which Alison Klayman screened the three short films.
As the result of a robust promotional budget, smart planning and frequent paid media optimizations from launch through the end of the campaign on August 31, we achieved break through results. During this time, HPE Matter racked up 1.24M unique website visitors and 6.1K new subscribers to HPE Matter's weekly newsletter profiling the most creative uses of technology in the industry. Overall, we saw 33.4M impressions across all paid promotion.
Our trio of Idea Economy films were viewed a collective 1.8M times over the span of three months making them a hit. The films rose to be among the most popular destinations on our owned property—HPEMatter.com—with 356K visitors to our film-specific pages. Through paid media partnerships as well as social media promotion, we saw 114.6K engagements and 633K clicks for our groundbreaking series. Most notably, video distribution network Virool helped secure 200K video views which resulted in an impressive 10.09% CTR in just 3 weeks time crowning it among the most successful content on its network.
But there's more. Within hours of launching on Mashable, our native advertisement had almost 550 shares—64% above our pageview benchmark and 44% above our share benchmark.
In an experimental program with T Brand Studio, The New York Times' native content studio, we co-authored stories to echo the themes in the film series. As a result, we received over 74K page views, 71.5K social referrals and 1.5K social actions.
