Advertising
By ROB WALKER
MAYBE you associate Intelwith the processor that makes your laptop work. On one hand, that’s a triumph of branding: For a slogan from a company that doesn’t actually sell directly to consumers, “Intel Inside” is a familiar idea.

On the other hand, it’s a potential problem. Years after the peak of the so-called Wintel era — when PCs with Windows operating systems and Intel chips dominated — Intel considers itself as a much more diversified technology creator and wants consumers to see it that way, too.

Intel’s effort to shift that brand perception has been going on for a couple of years. But perhaps the most interesting component of this push is only now establishing itself: an internal advertising group, formally started in February 2015, that is in a unique position to crank out stories promoting the most innovative happenings associated with Intel. In an amusing echo of the Wintel era, it is called Agency Inside.

This internal creative group is on track to have 90 employees by the end of the year, according to Teresa Herd, the Intel global creative director heading the enterprise. The company has also started an internal video and digital studio, Intel Global Production Labs, led by Yogiraj Graham. These entities have produced a slew of original content and have played a crucial role in some of Intel’s most mainstream branding efforts.

A video about a woman in India with an epileptic son who used an Intel Edison (a stamp-size minicomputer designed for the inventor audience) as a component in devising a glove that can detect oncoming epilepsy episodes will be released online on Monday.

The big picture, according to Intel’s chief marketing officer, Steven Fund — who has worked at Procter & Gamble, Pepsi and Staples — is that Intel wasn’t “getting credit for all the experiences that we enable.” Not enough people realize, he said, that Intel’s various processors and other technologies beyond PC chips play some role in all sorts of creative experiments in realms including fashion and art and science and medicine.

“We were marketing ourselves as an ingredient brand,” said Mr. Fund, who has been with Intel since 2014. He said Intel had become so associated with PCs that the company was “a little bit of a victim of our branding success with ‘Intel Inside.’”

Thus Intel altered its broader marketing. The official “Intel swirl” logo is now punctuated by the slogan “experience what’s inside” — to shift the emphasis to end results from intrinsic functionality. Working with a new outside agency, McGarryBowen, it released a splashy TV spot, “Anthem,” this year, specifically to showcase the sheer diversity of cool-looking stuff that Intel tech had helped make happen.

Intel, Mr. Fund said, “decided to bring a lot of advertising in-house,” and hired Ms. Herd, then working at Staples, to oversee that effort. (Mr. Fund noted that Intel continued to work with outside agencies as well: “It’s a good mash-up, if you will.”)

Ms. Herd says her team operates much like an external agency — by responding to the marketing needs of various departments — but enjoys far greater access to current and future projects at the company that, as she put it, “nobody else knows about.” Efficiency aside, this is also an appealing situation for those she’s recruiting for the creative department.

A series of videos created around the theme “Experience Amazing” went deeper into the stories of some of the projects highlighted in the “Anthem” spot. For example, a clip about participants in a solar-car contest, who used Intel technology in testing and refining their entry, has more than two million views on YouTube. Another,about a dress adorned with “proximity-activated” mechanical butterflies that hover and return to the garment through a design that relies partly on an Intel Edison chip, has about 1.5 million views.

Another series, “Meet The Makers,” tells short, documentary-style stories — such as a scientist’s efforts to understand the decline in the bee population by tracking the insects with tiny Intel-powered “backpacks,” and an eighth-grader’s creation of a low-cost Braille printer, using an Edison chip.

So far, Agency Inside’s focus isn’t broadcast spots; these two- or three-minute videos are distributed and promoted through social media and Intel’s own online publication, iQ, which is available in 17 languages and, the company says, seen by more than one million people a month. The idea is to promote Intel within cultural-interest industries that are not necessarily tech-based, such as fashion, music and sports.



See more @https://jahlike..com.ng/2016/06/techintel-tells-stories-that-go-beyond.html?m=1