Please advertise more, AMD begs Intel

8 Feb 2008 | 17:25 GMT

By Paul Hales

ACCORDING TO Stephen DiFranco, vice president of worldwide sales and marketing at AMD, Intel's advertising campaigns help boost his sales.

"I wish they would advertise more," he told the Red Herring CMO 2008 gathering in San Diego this week. "I beg them publicly, please advertise more. Create more demand. Some weeks in the United States there are more AMD desktops and notebooks sold than Intel," he claimed.

He reckons most consumers barely know the difference between AMD and Intel chips and he's probably right. He says getting AMD chips into PCs on retail shelves is enough. Intel does the ads to get punters into the shops and once they're there they may well buy a box with AMD Inside.

"We went from five to 50 per cent market share in retail and didn't spend a dollar advertising to consumers," DiFranco claimed, according to Marketing Daily. "We also leveraged partners to gain access to channels, not customers."

What is apparent to a UK TV viewer is that PC World ads that feature AMD kit don't have a little bing-ding-bingly-bong thing at the end like the Intel-based ones.

But the viewer probably doesn't know why. And consumers usually buy on price unless they're buying trainers or Apples. As far as PCs are concerned they'll recite the name on the box, not the name of the chip inside.

And naturally by instinct, Cheapzilla is happy to exploit this. µ

© 2007 Incisive Media Investments Ltd. 2007