AMD is a company that makes computer chips. Which means that most of us don’t understand it or care much about it.
Even Nigel Dessau, the company’s chief marketing officer and senior vice-president, admits that the components inside a computer are seldom its top selling point. For this reason, AMD’s marketing department bunches consumers into two categories. “The first audience we call the ‘processor aware,’” says Dessau. “These are people who make decisions about the PC based on the processor – everyone from the enthusiasts locked in their basement playing games to our partners, to retailers, to companies like HP and Acer and Lenovo.”
The other group, predictably, is the “processor unaware.” These, says Dessau, are “the people who buy PCs, and aren’t really aware of the processor inside them.”
The first group numbers around 25 million globally, and are traditionally who computer companies have been selling to; the second group, though, makes up around 6 billion.
Tech firms, therefore, might have been getting their pitch wrong. “We’re an industry that for years has been trying to tell everybody about the processor,” says Dessau. “After billions of dollars spent by marketing, here’s the thing: Most consumers don’t care.”
On the back of this realization, AMD changed its marketing towards the end of 2009, and now tries to sell experience over processors. “For years you’ve seen sticky labels on PCs,” says Dessau. “They don’t mean anything to anybody. So we replaced them about nine months ago with a single brand we call ‘Vision.’”
When Communicate caught up with Dessau, a Brit who now lives in Austin, Texas, he had come to the region for the first time in his two tenures at AMD (he was previously with Sun Microsystems, and worked with IBM for 19 years) to visit his company’s partners in the region and to check out the local retail scene.

VIVID EXPERIENCES. AMD might make components, but the computers those components run provide experiences, says Dessau. “AMD is a company focused on trying to give consumers, particularly PC consumers, the most vivid experience they can have when using their PCs.”
That’s big business. California-based AMD employs more than 10,000 employees worldwide, and generated revenues of $5.4 billion in 2009. At the end of 2007, Abu Dhabi investment company Mubadala acquired an 8.1 percent stake in AMD. In 2009, through its Advanced Technology Investment Corporation (ATIC), Mubadala bought AMD’s manufacturing arm and formed a joint company, Global Foundries, which manufactures chips. The venture took Mubadala’s share in AMD to 19 percent.
AMD is moving to educating retailers, says Dessau, to persuade them to sell computers differently. Typical shop assistants will ask customers what they want to do with their computer, says Dessau. “So you describe your needs in terms of audio, or video, or photos, or Web surfing. You know what you want to do with your PC, but there has been no real way for the shop to connect your needs to the technology.”
The shop assistants listen, continues Dessau. “Then they completely forget everything you’ve said, and ask, ‘Well, how much do you want to spend?’”
That’s where the Vision idea kicks in. If a consumer only sends e-mails and browses the Web, he can get by on the lowest tier of the Vision system. Those who are glued to Facebook, occasionally breaking off to edit some photos or watch DVDs, need the Premium system, and users who spend their days editing videos and playing 3D games need what Dessau calls the Vision Ultimate system. “We really need to try and connect – for the first time in 40 years in the PC industry – the experience the users want to get with the platforms they buy,” he says.
Not that the model is new. “Every retailer in the world works on a good, better, best model,” he adds. “They advertise the good, they want to sell you the better, and if they are lucky they will sell you the best.”

HUNG UP ON SPEED. AMD has only one serious competitor, Intel. AMD has about 20 percent of the global market for central processing units and Intel holds the other 80 percent. But despite being up against a relative giant, Dessau says he is unconcerned by Intel.
His rival is hung up on speed, he says. “Like every dominant monopoly they think they are at the center of the universe, so what you need to do is buy a bigger Intel processor,” he says. “That really doesn’t make any sense. The processor is just one part. The size of the keyboard is important to some people, the graphics are important to some people, the sound quality is important to some people.”
But computers are like cars, in that while a bigger engine might help you go faster, that makes little difference at a traffic light. “Intel are obsessed by the speed of their processors; we are a bit more obsessed by giving users a better experience,” says Dessau.
Of course, AMD still wants you to spend more on a computer running on its chips. That’s where things get tricky. “The hardest thing for retailers and the hardest thing for our partners is how to explain the up-sell,” says Dessau. “How do you explain to someone the difference in buying a PC that’s 20 percent more expensive?
The answer is pretty simple, apparently. Tell them how the costlier computer will make things better. “If editing video is important to you and on a bigger machine you can do it in half the time, you think, ‘Oh, I get that,’” says Dessau.

SHOW, DON’T TELL. Some of the platforms carrying AMD chips give twice the visual experience of those with Intel processors, says Dessau (there are qualitative ways to measure this, he assures Communicate). Since 70 percent of communication is visual, this is an obvious selling point. “That’s the sort of thing that we do best as a company: We have the best graphics in the world,” he says. “When you buy an X-box, or you buy a Wii, and you play a game, you are using AMD technology. We really focus on that visual experience and give users the best experience we can.”
The visual experience is changing media consumption, says Dessau. Owners of high-definition TV sets don’t watch more television, but they do watch different programs, he says. The same applies to computers. “I don’t think people are using them more; I think they are using them for different things,” he says. Most of the top uses for a PC are visual: For example, video calling, watching videos, looking at and editing photographs, surfing the net.”
Processors are now becoming optimized for applications like video chat. “Skype takes a whole different type of processing than opening an e-mail does,” he continues. “We are starting to talk about 3D, and we have some technology in our graphics for multiple monitors. More and more people are wanting a visual experience.”
A desire for richer media is good news for AMD, says Dessau. “If you ask what was the technology that most differentiated us maybe from our competition, it would be the impact of our visual and our graphics capabilities. So as the media gets richer, and more interactive, and more video-based and more contextual, then that plays more and more to our hand.”

DO, DON’T SHOW. Having said that, another major change in media consumption that Dessau notes is less dependent on cutting-edge graphics. There is a trend towards experiential media, typified in Nintendo’s Wii games console. Users can play games by waving controllers around, moving on mats, and generally getting more involved than just pressing buttons. Compared to consoles with better visual effects, the Wii still caused more of a stir when it was released in 2006.
“The graphics on the Wii are ours, and we’re very proud of them,” says Dessau. “But they are not the most sophisticated graphics on any games machine, we do accept that, they are a generation behind.” The reason for the console’s popularity is the experience, he adds.
This could give us some pointers to the future, says Dessau, although if AMD knows what experiential technology will dominate, he’s not telling. “I don’t know whether the next thing is people talking to their PCs – that technology never really caught on,” he says. But interacting with them is what people want to do. They want to break their human-computer interface in a way that makes it more natural to you.” Dessau has heard one story of a child who played with his parents’ iPad and now tries to change channel on TV by swiping the screen.
So we still may not care about what AMD’s pieces of silicone actually are, but what they mean to us and the way we consume media will become something we can all understand. “The world has changed, and the technology that is required needs to change with it,” says Dessau. And that’s going to mean a better looking experience all round.