Goodby Silverstein & Partners HP
May 23|2005

Steve Simpson, partner and CD at GS + P gave a really cool presentation on the origins of future of the now famous HP campaign.

What was cool was that he took us from step 1, a rough dopy sketchbook with photos, thumbnails, typographic inspirations and more, to the evolution of the very colorful HP campaign.

He was not hiding behind the fact that the HP campaign is really piggybacking on the great work of modern artists and photographers. Instead of trying to imitate them, they actually hired them whenever possible.

Emphasizing the need to be fun when you have boring client or products he quoted:

"One of the best-kept secrets in science is how unpompous scientists are at their science, and the amount of honest fun that for them is part of it. In doing an exhibition, as in Mathematica, one deliberately tries to let the fun out of the bag."

He also made not of how much they were pushing to get away from TV and print and do more installations, and he cited IBM doing public artwork in the 60's.

A funny thing was that he was a bit embarrassed about the business decision of HP's Apple iPod, which even to me doesn't make much sense, but he noted the difficulty of trying to make a campaign about a campaign that is already great (the iPod campaign). Steve Jobs had to approve it which must have been a bit weird since it's very different from the Apple campaign.

This was a great session on how to absorb modern art and culture and incorporate into traditional advertising.