The Future of Ads

Blogs moved news from paper to computer, but Hewlett-Packard hopes to move blogs from computer back to paper with Tabbloid, a free service that turns your favorite feeds into a personal magazine that you can print and carry with you.

As the world’s leading seller of personal computers, as well as the world’s largest technology vendor in terms of sales, why would HP want you to start printing out your news feeds and reading them away from the computer instead of pushing you towards the purchase of a laptop or other portable device?

Simple: In addition to computers, HP is also the world’s leading seller of printers, and if they can get you to print out every blog post from every feed that you want to read, you’ll go through ink much faster than you would if you just printed the occasional document, and return to buy their highly profitable inks much faster than normal.

In addition, Tabbloid allows HP to serve as the technology and software provider for your entire digital life. You can surf the web on an HP computer, add feeds to HP’s Tabbloid, and then print those feeds on an HP printer, and never once even look to another brand for a technology solution.

Tabbloid also shows that HP has a good side, since it’s easy to setup, requires no account information, and is surprisingly void of any HP branding. Besides the favicon in the location bar and the copyright notice at the bottom of the site, you might never know that Tabbloid was created by a multi-billion dollar corporation.

The Good:

• Free, easy to use, non-branded software builds user loyalty.
• Allows HP to position themselves as a digital life provider.
• Indirect link to product boosts sales without relying on advertising.

The Bad:

• Light branding means the message is often lost.

The Future:

• Added value applications allow companies to build trust with their customers while providing a service to the larger community and increasing sales of related products.

Tabbloid

Welcome back! If you want an easy way to read all of the new articles from The Future of Ads as soon as they're published, then you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks!