Pilot Pens has created a very interesting,  high tech marketing campaign. Here’s how it works.

• You print a template from the site, complete the boxes in your own hand writing – or a different hand writing if you’re into calligraphy.
• Then position the template in front of your computer’s web cam.
• Visit the pilot website, to snap a picture and they will digitize the hand writing.

From there on, you can even edit your handwriting. That is pretty cool. And apparently you can send an email directly from that site to your friends in  your own hand writing… with a Pilot Pen strategically positioned in the email to advertise it of course.

It is not clear if you can download the fonts or not. It would be super awesome if it would. I could not get the template to print on two browsers for me because Adobe Flash plugin keeps crashing on me (very annoying). If you can print and test it out, let us know what your experience is.

Apart from the cool factor of this program – I found out by someone voluntarily sharing it, so it is viral in nature – I thought it was a pretty good example of a company using available technology to market their product in a non-in-your-face method. What’s even better, the product is quite low tech. Ok so the guys in the labs formulating ink may not agree with me about the low tech part but in consumer’s minds pens are low tech products. Which goes to show a little creativity + tech help can bring interesting campaigns.

I do not know how successful this campaign is for Pilot but considering I learned this from word of mouth and the person before me learned from word of mouth too. I imagine it must be doing OK if not quite well.