Print Videos on YouTube: Canon Goes Sentimental, HP Aims for Geeky Fun

I have a soft spot for printer and print-related advertising videos on YouTube. Some of them are surprisingly good. One big category in this genre is videos that are overtly sentimental in nature. I have been accused of being “a commercial crier,” but that’s clearly the goal of many of these ads—to elicit a tear; to tap into what pulls at our heartstrings, such as children, family, relationships, life’s challenges, and the passage of time; and ultimately associate those powerful emotions with print.

Canon’s “See Impossible” series is a great example of poignant videos related to print and imaging. I challenge you to watch “Canon See Impossible: Dad” and not cry or at the very least feel like crying a smidge. If you can manage to do that, congratulations. You are one heartless jerk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-mrR2G-JUE

HP does this sort of sentimental ad well too. Witness “Reinvent Encouragement with HP Printers.” While I like this ad and found it touching, I have to admit that I just kept pondering the logistics of all the print-related surprises the father and son set up for the mom in this video. These are not things my family or indeed any family I know could pull off.

But there is another very different side to the print advertising video and that is the humorous video. Recently, I was watching the “Toner Science Investigation by HP” series. This series is not laugh-out-loud funny, but it is definitely geeky fun. The series is modeled on shows like CSI and features a trio of crime scene investigators who investigate toner-related mishaps in the office.

The bottom line for HP, of course, is getting out the message that end users should use HP original toner rather than “bargain toner.” The series features four “episodes” about problems caused by third-party toner, such as cartridge failures, less precise printing, poor color output quality, and paper jams, with the bargain toner unfavorably compared to the quality of HP toner cartridges in which “HP puts up to 70 percent of the printing science inside the cartridge.”

Of course, remanufacturers will take exception to HP’s messaging about bargain toner, but it is important to bear in mind that the video series is a marketing vehicle for HP, not an unbiased comparative analysis of a wide swath of cartridge types. And if it were the latter, who would watch it? Those of us in the industry, perhaps, but not a broader audience.

The “Toner Science Investigation” videos offer nothing new from HP in terms of messaging, to be sure, but I liked the winking self-knowledge in this series—the nod that, yes, toner science is kind of geeky and weird, all while making toner’s importance clear and relatable to end users. There are even some very strange outtakes that have nothing whatsoever to do with printers or toner. My favorite of these additional videos in the series is “Norm’s Favorite Games.” Very strange, HP. Very strange.

Clearly, the hope with all these videos, even the unusual outtakes from the HP campaign, is to “go viral,” to create something touching enough or funny enough to be shared on Twitter and Facebook and even by good, old-fashioned email. It is not clear that happened with the “Toner Science Investigation” series. The most popular video in the HP series, episode 4, had over 800,000 views as of the time of writing, compared with nearly 7.5 million views for Canon’s “See Impossible: Author.” So maybe one possible lesson here is that print-related videos are better at making us cry than laugh. Still, even with HP’s lower view count, that means nearly a million people watched a video about toner, which is sort of remarkable when you think about it. In any case, if these two video series are any indication, millions of people are tuning into videos about print and imaging and sharing them with others, and that’s a good thing for the industry as a whole.

Do you have a great print/printer/consumables video to share? Let us know about by emailing editor@action-intell.com or post a link to it below.