AMD rebrands to shed geeky image

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PC chip maker AMD is to give its advertising a major overhaul in an effort to rebrand the struggling company and shake off its geeky image.

Instead of harping on about specifications, AMD’s new advertising campaign focuses on how its computer chips can offer consumers an improved "user experience" in contrast with rival Intel, especially when its comes to handling graphics.

The new ads focus on AMD's expertise in computer chip design and how that prowess has been enhanced and integrated into its products through the 2006 acquisition of graphics chip maker ATI. Sounds pretty geeky so far, but the company insists the image is different. All the new ads feature the word "Fusion" as a tagline that appears in a white, patterned circle of every ad.

"The idea behind fusion is to take technologies and bring them together," Nigel Dessau, AMD's chief marketing officer. The campaign focuses on how the chips are used. They show a teenager using Rain Recording software, a leaf symbolising carbon reduction with help from IBM and a scorpion image from game developer OTOY.

The Fusion campaign replaces a two-year-old "smarter choice" tagline, which was the last time AMD used ads to make a big splash, and come ahead of the big-selling Christmas period.

As part of the campaign, free software will be available from AMD's website that it promises will speed up Microsoft's Vista operating system for people who play computer games.

"It polishes their brand," said Roger Kay, a PC industry analyst with Endpoint Technologies Associates.

AMD’s chief executive Dirk Meyer told Fortune Magazine this month the company will sell its manufacturing plants, known as "fabs," and let others make its chips.

"We're going to go away from a captive fab model to more of a fabless model for the CPU part of the business," Meyer was quoted as saying.

AMD is borrowing a page from Intel's established strategy of advertising its products not just as individual chips, but as "platforms" that become the basis of marketing campaigns. The strategy has included Pentium, Celeron and Centrino.

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