New Comm Biz

To start off I want to reiterate the disclaimer in my sidebar. This is all my opinion not HP’s. I have no real details that haven’t already been stated in the release, just my opinion.

Ron Coughlin (IPG’s SVP of Marketing) has been at HP almost exactly one month longer than me (he’s going on 10 months). VJ (SVP of IPG) has placed a lot on his shoulders since he came on board from Pepsi. IPG Marketing is going through the usual every other year re-org, which is being led by Ron and he has obviously been working on some very big deals.

One of the things that struck me about the communication around the deal is externally reports are talking about Omnicom being able to resell HP products. Internally the deal is focused on marketing collateral supply chain management.

Not exactly the kind of message you’d expect to hear from a SVP of Marketing and a giant Ad Agency.

Omnicom as a reseller? That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

HP offering stream lined print on demand services to Omnicom clients? That makes a lot of sense to me.

There are reports that the solution will not be about printers but about HP technologies and services. What does that mean exactly? I’m not completely sure but if I had to guess I’d say they would use some of HP’s recent acquisitions to manage the clients collateral and connect them to print service providers (PSP). The rationale behind this would be to allow customers to only print what they needed, when they needed it, in the quantities they needed.

Marketing collateral is one area where printing still makes a lot of sense. If you look at what HP has been doing in the SMB space, this is a very similar move that’s focused on large and mid market customers using PSP’s instead of an in-house printer.

The world of printed pages and marketing budgets are both huge and still growing, they’re just changing directions.

My first take on this is that it’s a smart move to follow the customers and provide value. But it is not without risk. Anytime your customer shift and you follow you leave yourself exposed to newcomers as well as your current competitors. But HP and Omnicom haven’t gotten to be the size they are by sitting around and avoiding risk.

Technorati Tags: HP,Omnicom,Partnership,marketing,agency,advertising,

Share This