To celebrate the extreme performance and infinite possibilities of HP’s new Z8 Fury Workstation, our goal was to generate awareness among creative professionals and IT decision makers whose workflow demands high performance. The Z8 Fury is the machine for high-end rendering professionals with its 56 cores in a single CPU and 4 high-end GPUs helping professionals breeze through complex deep learning, virtual production, and VFX.
The campaign objectives were to generate awareness for the launch of the new Z8 Fury Workstation among creative professionals and IT decision makers as well as appreciation of HP’s technical prowess in being able to produce such a powerful computer. As a full-funnel influencer-led marketing campaign, we aimed to showcase how this machine offers furious speed and power for creative professionals, data scientists, product developers, architects who want to seamlessly perform their workflow anywhere. Our key success measures included driving (1) Awareness of the Z8 Fury (measured by Impressions) and (2) Interest and consideration for the unit (measured by engagements such as comments and clicks).
Our client team at HP are seasoned communications professionals with deep understanding of the potential for influencer marketing but also an awareness of common pitfalls. They encouraged us to go beyond standard product reviews from “generic” tech reviewers to make sure we were telling engaging, memorable stories.
Selecting the right influencer partners who fit with our objectives was key to our success. We sought out creators in varied disciplines ranging from filmmaking, architecture, technology and creative design who share their craft and workflow with their audience and the HP team listened thoughtfully to all of our ideas, providing encouragement to push the envelope. Each of our creative professionals came to the table with bold and showstopping ideas to bring this product to life and highlight its impactful technology. Our architect, Dami Lee, highlighted the rendering capabilities of the Z8 Fury through an entertaining design competition between AI and real human architects using the Z8 Fury. The video was one of the best-performing of the campaign and was cinematic and captivating. Our creative director, Karen Cheng created an entertaining short-form video using stable diffusion to upgrade her fashion choices - edited on the Z8 Fury. Our two filmmakers showed more practical day-to-day use cases (interspersed with humorous anecdotes highlighting the unit’s jaw-dropping technical specs) focused on how they use the machine in their everyday work and rendering. By engaging creators who truly understand the vast potential of the machine and could creatively showcase how it tackles the most complex workflows, we were able to bring the Z8 Fury to life through captivating creator content that went far beyond a typical product review.
One of the most striking pieces of content from the campaign was a LinkedIn post from Karen Cheng where she shared her video. The post had over 100 engaged and thoughtful comments - all from relevant professionals in the industry. Comments such as “Wow, this is such an amazing video! I'm so impressed with the way you used Stable Diffusion to upgrade your fashion choices. It's incredible how you were able to use the machine to iterate quickly and try out different ideas.” And, “I wonder how long it will take to do the same video on my PC, which has only rtx 3090 24Gb, i12 16 cores cpu and 32 gb ram…” HP allowed the creators to do what they do best - create, which led to the success and authenticity of this campaign.
The campaign coincided with the product launch in February 2023 and our influencers videos rolled out between February and March. We had individual briefing calls between HP and the creators which included product managers who could speak knowledgeably about the technology and answer the influencers’ questions in real time. This allowed for a bridge between the brand and creator which ultimately led to better product literacy and understanding between the two parties. The brand helped creators troubleshoot as they set their machines up and were great partners during the content creation phase.
This campaign successfully surpassed all goals for the program. We were 264% above goal on expected reach, 353% above goal on impressions and 36% above goal on clicks. Other qualitative KPIs that were indicators of success included above-industry benchmark engagement rates across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. The key learning our teams will apply going forward is our approach with the influencers: giving them the runway to create authentic content that resonates with their audiences beyond the “specs” and delivers a big splash for a new product launch.
