For anybody that was in Europe in the last two months, it was difficult to avoid the football (soccer) World Cup craze and the massive amount of advertising surrounding it. We decided to launch viral campaigns to rise above the clutter and create an emotional connection with younger and more tech savvy customers, extending the relationship beyond product and price.

Meet “Dave B,” our finger footballer. The fingerskilz.tv blog teaches visitors how to become their own finger football stars, while subtly displaying HP notebooks and one of our new ad banners. Check out Dave’s best moves, these videos are truly amazing!!!

This was a real departure from our traditional approach. There was no HP branding on the blog (up to Thursday when we revealed the campaign and shifted to a HP branded site). We really wanted to create buzz and a teaser and have people ask themselves: is this from HP? Is it real or cg (even the cg society could not figure it out)? Sendtoafriend, a blog specialized in viral marketing, suspected in June that we were behind the blog.

We sprinkled hints here and there… and then revealed the HP sponsorship following my favorite Zidane video. At the same time, we were very careful to respect the ethics and rules of the blogosphere, by not invading anyone else’s space (rather, inviting them to ours), by being genuine and not misleading people. The idea, above all, was to provide fun for everyone!

Fingerskilz.tv has produced incredible results: 6.3 million hits, 180,000 unique visitors, average visit duration of 5.45 mins. It has also been selected in the top 6 World Cup virals by Boreme, a site that tracks virals: “The Fingerskilz clip is just dynamite - offering a miniature version of last week's featured ball skills”. A google search produced 22,000 results and the blog has been featured on a number of publications, online and offline as well as in the blogosphere.

We also launched recently another viral campaign - an online palm reader, playing with the image of the hand and the idea that your computer is an essential part of your life. You receive an email from a friend suggesting that you try this incredible service on personalpalmistry.com. The link takes you to a homepage where you are asked to place your hand on the screen for a computer palm reading, which discloses some personal information about you. You then realize later that it was your friend who had secretly submitted this information in advance, and you are offered to “freak out” another friend. Here again we wanted people to have fun, and went to a lot of trouble to reassure them and to “play by the rules”. We were careful not to ask for private information, and limited ourselves to such things as color of eyes, hair, build, etc. (we don’t even ask for a surname), and made sure that people realized that all that information is destroyed as soon as the “invitation” is sent.

We are still experimenting with viral marketing. But the first pilots show the promise - and the challenges - of these new marketing tools.