HP puts marketing into the cloud with Smart Marketing Suite

Stephen Withers
Monday, 19 September 2011 09:55

Business IT - Technology

Another sign of HP's determination to move away from hardware and further into the higher-margin worlds of software and services can be seen in the announcement of Smart Marketing Suite.

HP's Smart Marketing Suite (SMS) is a cloud-based service aimed at advertising and marketing activities. According to Vyomesh "VJ" Joshi, executive vice president of the company's imaging and printing group, SMS was the result of HP's efforts to work more effectively with advertising agencies, print service providers and so on.

The basic idea is to provide secure storage of content, which is made available for customisation and printing to support consistent branding around the world as well as more efficient marketing operations. SMS also includes analytics.

By using SMS, HP was able to go from 1000 agencies to 300 and from 850 service suppliers to 300, achieving savings of $US100 million in the process. "We're leading the way," Mr Joshi said.

Ron Coughlin, HP senior vice president for LaserJet and enterprise solutions, said that in times of flat marketing budgets it was important to increase campaign efficiency. HP had demonstrated how SMS could be used to leverage activity by running three ads around the world, he said.

Serge Dumont, vice chairman of the Omnicom Group which manage complex global campaigns for brands, said using SMS to manage and reuse content allowed faster time to market and means more money can go into actual marketing. Omnicom has begun using SMS with a select group of agencies and customers, but its use will become more widespread over time.

"It's the beginning of a process," he said, adding that he expected SMS will deliver value to agencies as well as customers.

Disclosure: The writer attended an HP event in Shanghai as the guest of the company.