HP is one of the world’s largest technology companies, and is traditionally associated with enterprise-level software, fighting off competition from the likes of IBM or Sun. Because of this, promoting a new range of stylish and reliable products that a younger audience also viewed as being relevant was always going to be a hard task.

The team at Porter Novelli have been working on this challenge since June with the Listen2U campaign, which will carry on till December with a hefty 175,000 Euros of budget behind it.

The objectives are clear; raise awareness of HP in the target audience of 18 – 25 year olds across EMEA, while driving traffic to the dedicated campaign website – http://hp.com/listen2u – which acts as both an aggregator and news centre.

“Pushing product and trying to be cool wasn’t going to work for this audience, so we created a multi-touch point platform that encompassed both offline and digital elements which would put HP in the places where the audience already is, inviting them to interact with the brand on their own terms,” said Kerry Gaffney, senior digital planner, EMEA at Porter Novelli.

The website features updates on the HP Listen2U Live tour (which takes technology around Europe, encouraging young people to play, learn and win along the way), as well as the latest competition and product news. The campaign also has in store presence, bridging offline with offline and extending its reach.

The site itself contains links to a Facebook Fan page and Twitter accounts, where special HP kit (such as ‘Artist Edition’ flip flops) is given away ad-hoc.

“It also challenges visitors to find out their digital IQ. As well as using blog outreach and traditional media tactics to raise awareness of the site, we created a flash game to drive awareness and direct traffic back to the main site,’ continued Gaffney.

RU a Digital Genius pits players against Mensa, the high IQ society, getting them to demonstrate their digital knowledge along with physical and mental dexterity. Each player can publish their Digital IQ to Facebook and challenge their friends to beat it. Mensa members have their own dedicated log-in so players can measure their performance against them as well as their own age group. There’s also an opportunity to enter a draw to win an HP laptop and to sign up for a regular newsletter, as well as links back to the main site.

There is also a series of competitions being run via video-sharing site YouTube, which aim to find the next ‘Inventor, Star or Director’, with the top ten videos from each competition winning the latest HP gear. For the first two, short videos were created to introduce the concept and were seeded across European blogs. Combined views for the entrants and the instructional shorts have now reached over 80,000.

The RU a Digital Genius challenge has already attracted almost two million players within the first four months, with followers on Facebook and Twitter at nearly ten thousand and even more attending the Listen2U Tour.

More impressive still is the 250,000 visitors to HP.com that have been directly linked to the campaign, as well as the fact that HP gained 2% in brand recognition in the 2009 Interbrand study (conducted each year by Business Week), reaching 11th place in the top 20 best global brands – a position it has never reached before.

It will be interesting to see the in-depth feedback from the 18-24 year old group (ideally from focus groups) as well as tallying up final statistics and – though its not one of HP’s objectives – seeing if the brand can ‘do a Dell’ to create some ROI from online activity.