New York — Rumors swirling around that ink cartridge manufacturer Hewlett-Packard has made an alliance with Yahoo on a test related to delivering targeted advertisements printed for the company’s latest line of web-connected printers.
According to reports from various sources indicate that the companies’ teamed on this pilot project will grant access to select users from their PCs or mobile phones to initiate jobs on a family of Web-connected printers that HP recently introduced. The companies apparently are using IP sniffing to get the sense of where the printers are located so they can better target the ads.
The company also envisions a potential growth for localized, targeted advertising to go along with the content. The company, apparently is challenging the traditional thinking about printing on a number of fronts.
During the experiment of its ePrint Web-connected printers, HP carried out two tests where consumers collected content from a U.S. national music magazine and major U.S. newspaper along with advertisements, said Stephen Nigro, senior vice president in HP’s Imaging and Printing Group.
“What we discovered is that people were least concerned by it [an advertisement],” Nigro said. “Part of it I think our belief is you’re used to it. You’re used to seeing things with ads.”
It seems that these ads will only be displayed when the users employs HP’s “scheduled delivery” where a user can regularly schedule printing, for example, to have portions of a newspaper or magazine printed every day at 7 a.m.
HP’s ePrint printers, some of which will become available next month, are connected to the user’s home router, which means they will have an IP address. Such printers will utilize IP sniffing to help pin down your location, although the user’s behavior as well as the content will also be taken into consideration.
“Through IP (Internet Protocol) sniffing, you have an idea about where those printers are so naturally it allows you to kind of already target your offers,” Nigro said.
Ads can also be targeted based upon a user’s behavior as well as the content, said Vyomesh Joshi, head of the HP’s Imaging and Printing Group. The trial with Yahoo is in its infancy, however, and Joshi said the program has to be done with privacy in mind.
“That is where we need to be very clear business rules in terms of privacy,” Joshi said.
“Mobile marketing and advertising is expected to grow significantly in the next several years, and network operators need to stake their claim in this lucrative opportunity area,” says Shira Levine, directing analyst of next-gen OSS and policy at Infonetics Research.
Nikesh Arora, Google president of global sales, said at the recent International Advertising Association conference in Russia: “The advent of the iPhone, the Android devices and the Blackberry have finally given people reason in the western world (to) start using the mobile data. And as you see that go up, you begin to see the relevance of advertising in those applications.”
Nigro said that “Part of it I think our belief is you are used to it. You are used to seeing things with ads.” This suggests HP’s decision to incorporate targeted ads is not motivated by a desire to improve the user experience. Instead the company is including advertising because people do not significantly object and it increases revenues.