I first came across the marketing campaign for Intel®’s 2nd generation Core™ Processor Family via a fun fact sheet. From the Feb. 25, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,

Last year, Intel unveiled its Core™ processor family that, for the first time, used a full-featured system-on-a-chip 32 nanometer process technology to complement the CPU-specific technology. …

# A nanometer is so small that it takes a billion of them to make a meter. A billion is a huge number. A stack of a billion sheets of paper would be 100 km high. If you could walk a billion steps, you would go around the earth 20 times.

# The original transistor built by Bell Labs in 1947 was large enough that it was pieced together by hand. By contrast, more than 60 million 32nm transistors could fit onto the head of a pin. (A pin head is about 1.5 mm in diameter)

# More than 4 million 32nm transistors could fit in the period at the end of this sentence. (A period is estimated to be 1/10 square millimeter in area)

…

# Compared to Intel’s first microprocessor, the 4004, introduced in 1971, a 32nm CPU runs over 4000 times as fast and each transistor uses about 4000 times less energy. The price per transistor has dropped by a factor of about 100,000.

The marketing piece that has really excited my interest is The Chase Film,

What I find particularly interesting about this marketing campaign is the number of channels, the variety of materials, the time frame, and the range of audiences being addressed. Apparently the film (which is a remarkably slick production that crosses platforms seamlessly from live action to animation to a game format to Google Earth to Facebook and so on in the context of a ‘chase’ story) was presented yesterday at TED 2011 the same day it started, March 1, 2011 while at least one version of the film was posted on Youtube 2 months ago.

There’s more promotional material here at Intel Unveils All New 2010 Intel® Core™ Processor Family including quotes, images and, at least one more, video.

It looks to me like they are simultaneously ‘narrowcasting’ and ‘broadcasting’ to their audiences and this is an approach I heartily agree with. I know it’s fashionable in ‘communications’ circles to say that there is no such thing as a general audience which is why communication should be targeted to specific audiences. Two big issues arise with this kind of thinking (a) a tendency to preach to the converted and (b) a failure to properly identify the audiences.

Taking Intel as my example, that company broke ground when it started advertising its computer chips on television.  While dumbfounding the rest of the industry, Intel took the computer chip into daily conversation. I don’t know how they bought the media but I am assuming there was some strategy regarding the programmes they chose for their early advertising breaks. In essence, the advertising was both general and targeted and identified an audience that no one else in the industry though existed.

You could say this new marketing strategy is general and targeted. Placing the video on Youtube is sending it out to the ‘general’ public. The concept behind the video is very engaging and as I noted, this is a very slick cross-platform piece. It’s the type of work you want to look at several times so you can catch everything.

Bringing the video (I gather one of the speakers is from Intel ETA Mar.4.11, I was wrong; it’s one of 10 winners of their “Ads worth spreading competition“) to TED (Technology Education Design) 2011 could be considered narrowcasting since only registrants (able to pay a high registration fee, interested in cutting edge ideas, and innovative thinkers) will see it at this time (these talks are made available for free months later). The registrants  and the speakers for an event of this nature could be viewed as ‘influencers’. In other words, people who are ‘cool’ and whom others will follow. As you do, for example,  on Twitter which is how I found this video.

I think I’m going to coin a phrase, ‘ripplecasting’ to describe what Intel is doing here. You throw a stone in the water and it causes ripples just like sending a speaker to TED 2011 where a registrant tweets (comments on their Twitter feed) which gets retweeted and so on. Sending a ‘fun’ factsheet to Nanowerk, is targeted communication to the nanotechnology community gets us back to narrowcasting.

ETA Mar.3.11: In rereading the previous passage, I think I wasn’t as clear about my ‘ripplecasting’ concept as I’d thought but then I am in the process of developing it.  Here I go again, ripplecasting is a way of describing narrowcasting, broadcasting, and the use of new media and social media. I think Intel’s new product provides an excellent example of ‘ripplecasting’ with its use of tv advertising, outreach to industry media, presentation at TED 2011 which gets tweeted, and so on it goes.

I mentioned time frames earlier, this the 2nd year of Intel’s campaign, they unveiled their new product family in Jan. 2010.

Bravo Intel!