Nov
19
The second and far more visible aspect of Intel Inside is a massive media campaign consisting of a series of ads and commercials featuring all sorts of jiggly jiving critters. The first generation of Intel media pitchmen were known as the “Bunny People”: dancing “technicians” who leaped around in the “clean suits” worn by the people who work in semiconductor fabrication plants. Just like real rabbits, the Bunny People have been supplanted by numerous descendants, including the Blue Man Group and animated aliens who look like Bunny People whose genes have been subjected to nuclear radiation in a hidden lab. In addition to the Bunny People, Intel also created a jingle (the company calls it a “signature ID audio visual logo”) placement program—that ubiquitous 3-second tad-dah-tad-DAH song snippet millions of Americans have had pounded into their subconscious during a Dell or Gateway TV ad.
The main thrust of Intel’s media campaign was to convince people that computers are more fun, exciting, and colorful if they have Intel inside and, after spending a great deal of money, Intel succeeded in doing just that. Millions of people knew about Intel (though many weren’t precisely sure what they knew), bought computers that had Intel inside, and were confident that in doing so they had assured themselves of the very best computing experience they could have. That’s because their computers had Intel inside and that was a good thing because … Intel had spent a lot of money to hire dancing Bunny People to say so … and because it costs a lot of money to hire dancing Bunny People, lots of people must be buying Intel … so Intel has lots of money to spend on dancing Bunny People and that’s … a good thing!
By 1994, the Intel Inside program had built up a full head of steam and that was a good thing, too, because Intel was about to introduce its Pentium chip, a major product and marketing milestone for the company. Prior to the Pentium, Intel had identified chips via a series of numbers that also corresponded to the chip’s ancestry. The 286 was the second generation of the 8086 line, the 386 the third generation, and so on. However, Intel had been told by a very unsympathetic trademark office that it wouldn’t be granted a trademark on a series of numbers, and that anyone could call their chip a “486″ if they felt like it. Intel promptly renamed its 586 the “Pentium” and the Bunny People were instructed to leap about with enthusiasm to celebrate the event.
People responded favorably to all of this frantic dancing, and new Pentium-based computers flew off the shelves. The computers all seemed to work very well, undoubtedly because of the Intel inside them, and America was a happy, happy place. And then a disturbing serpent appeared in Intel’s sales paradise as a rumor spread through the Internet and the media about a flaw in Intel’s latest microprocessor. It appeared the Pentium inside in your computer couldn’t … well … count.
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