The Vision: Taking on the 800lb gorilla.
AMD asked us to create a new brand positioning and integrated global marketing campaign. It was designed to take on the mighty Intel, the company controlling 80% of the PC processor market. AMD’s chips were equal to Intel in performance, but their marketing spend was only a tiny fraction of Intel’s.
Intel had become the default choice, but we believed that was its Achilles heel. The brand had no ‘talk value’. AMD had the first of the new generation of 64 bit dual core chips and a traditional fan base amongst gamers. Listening to them, we understood that AMD processors enabled them to do what they wanted to do, play games, fast and smoothly. And AMD’s lower price allowed them to spec up their machines over an Intel based PC. For them, AMD was the smarter choice. More PC for less money.
Unable to outgun Intel’s advertising, My Agency proposed and executed a switch sell campaign based on the theme of The Smarter Choice. The strategy was to let Intel drive consumers into stores. And once in store we would switch them by making sure that sales associates felt smart about recommending and consumers felt smart about choosing AMD.
The Reality: The Smarter Choice campaign ran in over 50 markets and help drive up both global sales and margin to record levels, 70% in the case of sales. Importantly new PC manufacturers like Dell started using AMD along side Intel for the first time. And The Smarter Choice was adopted by AMD as their corporate mantra.
