Print 2.Oh!

Via Creativity Online I found this campaign made by Goodby for HP, in which the brand started an integrated campaign “as part of an overall effort to push the Print 2.0 movement, which merges the online and print worlds”

According to the press release, HP´s new corporate strategy has three main focus:

• Make it easier to print from websites, such as blogs and travel sites, and bring new printing capabilities to online properties;
• Extend the company’s digital content creation and publishing platforms – for example, Snapfish and Logoworks – across customer segments spanning from consumers to enterprises; and
• Deliver a digital printing platform that increases print speeds and lowers the cost of printing for high-volume commercial markets.

And although I find the campaign interesting and with great visuals, I think it´s concept falls flat. Why? Because it´s not innovative enough and certainly doesn´t embrace the “2.0” concept in all its plenitude.

“The idea behind the whole campaign is to change people’s behavior and give them new ideas on what to print. Rather than just printing out Word documents and things you typically do at home, we want to broaden people’s horizons.” explains Margaret Johnson, creative director at Goodby in the Creativity Online article.

So as you see, they aren´t reinventing print neither it´s an evolution of it. They´re just giving people a couple of templates so they can print what they think is “cool stuff”, because correct if I´m wrong but in an era when people is known by their creativity and capability of creating content, it´s seems silly to me that HP believes that all what people do is printing “Word documents and things you typically do at home”. What if they instead offer an app that gives people the option to print their Flickr photos with their comments and a geo-tagged map in one easy step and in one single page, or what if they join with Last FM and develop a widget that let users print the lyrics of the song they are listening. That seems a more interesting integration within interactive and print worlds.

Perhaps they should read more closely the branded utility and marketing as a service theories. What do you think?

UPDATE: I just found HP Print 2.0 Blog  and it has totally changed my mind about it. In this post, Patrick Spaglia, Chief Technology Officer for the Imaging and Printing Group at HP, explains the technological developments (widgets??) that comes with the marketing campaign, including a cool “Print It” application created by the guys over Tabblo, that will let people choose from different set of layouts to print the content they found over blogs, Flickr, etc… It´s a shame that this app isn´t available yet for wordpress.com (although it is to wordpress.org). So, now that´s what I call an evolution.