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But when Intel was developing its biggest advertising campaign in years, it handed a carefully thought-out brief to the ad agency Venables Bell & Partners, which said Intel's idea--to talk about the company's role in everyday life--was, in a word, bad.
Intel's notion was, "we're so important to your everyday life. Imagine a world without Intel. Your lights would go out. The world would stop revolving," said Deborah Conrad, vice president and general manager of Intel's corporate marketing group. "Venables Bell said, 'You got that wrong.'"
The campaign that Venables Bell fashioned, which begins Monday in the United States, focuses instead on the amusingly weird, technology-focused culture of Intel and celebrates the company's role in the future, rather than the present. The tagline is "Sponsors of Tomorrow," and the ads highlight achievements of Intel engineers in a humorous way.
The campaign is Intel's first that focuses on its brand rather than its products, Conrad said. It is Intel's most expensive campaign since 2006, and the company wants it to run for at least three years.
One of the company's challenges is that people do not buy products from Intel directly--it makes chips and materials that go into electronics made by Dell and Hewlett-Packard, among others.
"The fact that we're an ingredient, it's easy to get lost," Conrad said. "We really needed to put some meaning into Intel, so 'Intel inside' means something again."
Before it created the campaign, Venables Bell pulled together clips from 20 or so commercials for technology companies and realized that pretty much every company had talked about its role in the present.
"Every cell phone company, every printer company, gosh, even Web sites, even Cisco--Cisco makes routers!--they're all claiming to be the ones delivering that everyday life angle," said Greg Bell, co-creative director and founder of Venables Bell, based in San Francisco. "It's just really trite."
So the agency began looking at what Intel had actually produced in terms of research and development, and found that Intel's engineers really were not working on powering today's world. They were working on projects that were a few years from hitting the market. That inspired the tagline "Sponsors of Tomorrow."
As for the advertising, "we went into the pitch with our perception: 'Well, they're kind of just a big microprocessor company, so it should be interesting to put a shine on that,'" Bell said.
Then ad executives began spending time at Intel, and noticed its appealing culture. "We started thinking about Intel, like, 'OK, what's it like in the cafeteria when they're in there eating lunch together?' There's got to be a whole hierarchy of people in there who they admire," Bell said. That inspired the ads' theme: the odd technophile Intel culture.
In one television ad, a group of employees gape, scream and writhe as a middle-aged Indian man in a navy vest, an ID tag hanging from his neck, struts through a break room. One employee rips open his button-down shirt to reveal a T-shirt with the man's image on it, while another worker clamors for his autograph. "Ajay Bhatt, co-inventor of USB," an on-screen graphic reads as the man, an actor, winks at an admirer. "Our rock stars aren't like your rock stars."
commercials show employees drooling
over a tech inventor.
In a related print ad, photographs depict a group of rock musicians next to lab workers in white coats. "Your rock stars aren't like our rock stars," the ad reads.
The real inventors are not in the ads; they are played by actors. Bell said he wanted to ensure the commercials were humorous, and avoid arguments with Intel employees over which should be featured.
"When you are required politically to cast certain people and get everyone involved, you tend to get this watered-down, feel-good campaign that works really well internally and makes the company itself feel good," but does not appeal to consumers, he said.
The ads will run in about 30 countries by the end of June, with media buying handled by OMD, a unit of the Omnicom Group. Intel asked for ads where it would not have to change much besides the language from country to country. Still, when Intel hired a London company called Tag to advise it on adjusting the ads globally, Tag suggested certain changes.
What is seen as a funny comparison in the United States, Tag told Intel, could be offensive elsewhere. One American ad shows a little girl smiling over her neat bedroom, and another shows technicians wearing spacesuit-like outfits in an immaculate Intel factory.
"Your clean room isn't like our clean room," it reads. But in China, that comparison can be seen as offensive. "In China, you've got to appear like you're not talking down about another group for the sake of making your group look good," Bell said. "You've got to be careful if they think that comes off as arrogant." So the agency adapted that ad to show engraved jade next to an intricate Intel chip. "Your exquisite carving isn't like our exquisite carving," it says.
The campaign also includes digital elements. The company is doing a homepage takeover on NYTimes.com on Monday. Visitors to the site will see a version of a paper as though it were 2040, with headlines like "Star Athlete Tests Positive for Android." "We're really excited about it but we're a little cautious" Conrad said. "We think we've done this in a tasteful, fun way."
It also includes digital billboards in Times Square, Berlin, Los Angeles, San Francisco and several other locations, with questions like, "What do you hope to see in the future?" Viewers can send text responses to a special number. A few minutes later, after Intel has reviewed the answers for appropriateness, the responses will appear on billboards throughout the United States.
Despite sliding sales at Intel, where first-quarter revenue fell 26 percent to $7.1 billion and profit fell 55 percent, Conrad said this was a smart time to spend money on marketing. The co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore, has always encouraged spending in a recession, she said.
"His whole view was you should invest during the recession so when you come out of it, you're in a leadership position, not two steps behind," she said. "Year in, year out, you'll see us investing."