I was working at my desk today at HP when I received a message from one of the Product Managers in the worldwide marketing division asking me if I was busy. I said I could spare a few minutes and he said that was good because there were some people who wanted to talk to me… I apologized in advance and insisted that anything that they might have heard was a dirty lie.

The manager explained that he was with a group of HP employees from the US who were here in Barcelona for a couple of weeks for a training session and they wanted to meet me. Why? Because they had seen one of the marketing videos that I made for HP and when they heard that the actor from the video also worked on site, they simply had to meet me. So I agreed to met them.

At first, I wasn’t sure if they were making fun of me or not. They all introduced themselves to me and wanted to shake my hand. I’ll admit that the video in question was not my best piece of work, but it wasn’t that bad either. It turns out that they really did like the video a lot, as did everyone from their home office back in San Diego. One guy even asked to take a picture with me. That was kinda weird.

I appeared in three different videos for this specific product introduction: a marketing video (sell sell sell), a how-to video (instructional), and a competitive video (why we’re the best). I’m afraid I can’t show you the one that they went crazy over – the competitive video – because is was for internal use only, but it was very funny. We’re allowed to spice things up if they’re not intended for the general public. I can show you the others, though. This marketing video is much more serious, and you don’t get to see too much of me. It’s mostly narration.

The how-to video can be found alongside this one at the bottom of the HP web page that is dedicated to the HP Designjet L25500 Printer. It’s a lot longer and pretty dry, but I’m on screen more often. Not sure if that’s a good thing or not. Both videos are also on the HP Graphic Arts YouTube channel. That L25500 marketing video is actually the most viewed video on the channel!

I spent a very happy couple of years mining technical specifications for Hewlet Packard’s large-format printers before someone in the marketing department found out I was an actor. Since then, I’ve done a whole bunch of other videos for HP that have featured on their web site and been sent around the company for training purposes. I’m doing another one next week.

Wanna see some of the other ones? Or have you had enough already?