☕ Prince of posters
Why HP is advertising that Dan Smith will teach you guitar.
Marketing Brew <[email protected]>
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Morning Brew promotes a story about Dan Smith, a guitar teacher who has been advertising his services with simple flyers in New York City for nearly 35 years. The campaign is presented in partnership with HP, highlighting the value of their high-volume printer, the Smart Tank. Morning Brew showcases Smith's direct approach to marketing and his newfound presence on a Times Square billboard.
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574 words · about 2 min to read
October 08, 2026
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Presented By
Sponsor Logo: PwC
Today is Thursday. Start spreading the news: Nutella is making its Super Bowl debut in 2027. Parent company Ferrero announced the hazelnut spread will have its own spot, in addition to Kinder Bueno, which first appeared among the Big Game ads last year.
In today’s edition:
The OG poster 📄
In the cards 🏈
Name game 👩💻
—Kristina Monllos, Alyssa Meyers
BRAND STRATEGY
Just press print
Dan Smith holds up a flyer in front of a Times Square billboard that displays the same flyer.
If you’re in New York City, go out for a walk today and treat it as a scavenger hunt: See if you can spot a Dan Smith flyer.
Chances are, you can. Smith, a guitar teacher, has been papering the city for nearly 35 years, advertising his services to prospective students with simple flyers that read, “Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar.”
“That was me trying to be as direct as possible,” Smith told Marketing Brew of his copywriting style. Early on, “there were a few other guitar teaching flyers around, and a lot of what they talked about was the guitar teacher themselves…That seemed really irrelevant to me. I wanted to put the focus on the student and what they could expect when they called me.”
Smith’s direct and dogged approach with his flyers has made him a notable New York City fixture and a regular pop culture reference. Last month, his flyer got a new stage—albeit with the same plain-yet-familiar Word design—with a Times Square billboard that will be up through October 12, made possible through a partnership with HP.
Promoting Smith with a billboard isn’t an act of altruism, of course—instead, Smith’s posters are a way to highlight the value of a high-volume printer like HP’s Smart Tank. When we say high-volume, we mean it: Smith estimates that he’s printed around 1.5 million flyers over the years.
When brainstorming the campaign, the creative team tried to think of people who print at a high volume, ultimately landing on Smith, a “local legend,” Laura Morris, VP of marketing for North America at HP, told us.
For Morris, working with Smith in this capacity marked a new way for the brand to be a part of culture. “The ultimate goal in marketing is to be able to find relevant places where your brand can be inserted into culture and into local culture,” she said. “We all know what it looks like when it’s not a natural fit, and it’s forced. And we know what it looks like when it is such a natural fit.”
Smith was, of course, the latter, she said. “Printing for [Smith] is relevant,” she told us. “It is his entire marketing plan.”
For more on why HP is partnering with local business owners like Smith, continue reading here.—KM
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Sponsored By PwC
The agent-human relationship in B2B business models
Salesforce Dreamforce was chock-full of executive POVs, and we’re pumped to be spotlighting a few standouts. Consider this your rare sneak peek into their insights.
Today, we’re spotlighting Ian Kahn. He is a partner, global and US customer, and commercial excellence platform leader at PwC.
Kahn noted that CRM was built entirely around human relationships and human loyalty. So what happens now, when the entity making the purchase is an autonomous AI agent?
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