Spotlight: Intel

Intel recently launched its new 3-year “Sponsors of Tomorrow” campaign, created by Venables Bell & Partners to replace the familiar “Intel Inside.” Intel’s goal is to reach 1 billion new customers, and reportedly, 40% of its ad spending for this new campaign is digital.

Intel has created an online world inspired by its “Clean Rooms” where not even a single fiber can enter the room. The site, www.intel.com/tomorrow/, provides a polished experience using a 3D, video and animation to let users explore Intel’s technology for tomorrow. Users can explore a range of 3D/Video rooms, from a virtual wind tunnel to the famous “clean rooms,” and can upload or SMS comments regarding what you envision technology helping make happen tomorrow.

Built by Grow Interactive, the site is XML driven and is being launched in multiple languages. A low bandwidth version of the site was even created for users with slower connections. In just two short weeks the site has been such a success that Intel are commissioning a range of new “rooms” to be added.

Set to launch in 30 countries by the end of this month, the campaign’s goal is to make us even more familiar with the Intel brand, rather than focus on its current products. Intel wants to send the message that while it’s still “inside” our PCs, it’s also outside them in many other ways – a shift from being “known as a microprocessor company, but as a move-society-by-quantum-leaps company,” as Intel spokesman David Dickstein told MarketWatch.
Despite declining sales – revenue fell 26% in Q1 2009 and profits fell 55% – Intel believes spending on marketing during a recession is a smart strategy to maintain market leadership.

The multi-platform campaign strategy positions Intel as a technology innovator that celebrates technophile culture and highlights the company’s engineering achievements rather than the products derived from them. The “Sponsors of Tomorrow” theme was inspired by Intel’s forward-thinking organizational culture, where much R&D is focused on projects several years away from hitting the market, and where there is veneration among engineers for the legacy of the company’s breakthroughs (watch the “Your rock stars aren't like our rock stars” ad here).

Intel’s most expensive campaign since 2006, platforms include giant digital billboards in New York’s Times Square, Berlin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and elsewhere with questions like, “What do you hope to see in the future?” Viewers can send text responses that will appear on the billboards a few minutes later. There was also a home page takeover on The New York Times Web site last week, where visitors saw a version of a paper as though it were 2040, with headlines like “Star Athlete Tests Positive for Android.” A series of worldwide print and television ads has also been launched.

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For more information you can contact the author at emma@maravedis-bwa.com

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