Dennis Carter: Behind the Intel Inside campaign

Carter's solution

The team was already working on ideas for marketing the upcoming 486 in 1991 when a San Jose court dropped a bombshell in Intel’s dispute with AMD: Chip designations like “386” could not be trademarked. “The day we lost that ruling, Grove came by my office and said [the ad] money was pretty much wasted,” Carter recalls, adding that the CEO gave him the weekend “to figure what I would do about it.”

Carter’s solution was to borrow the consumer-goods industry’s cooperative marketing model. Intel ultimately put 3 percent of its revenue from microprocessor sales into a fund that PC makers could tap to pay for up to half of their advertising for promotion of Intel-based PCs bearing Intel’s logo.

To define that logo, Intel commissioned a small ad agency that came up with the tagline, “Intel, the computer inside.” In 1991, in The Wall Street Journal, IBM ran one of the first ads with to use the now-iconic shortened tag: “Intel Inside.” By the end of that year, 300 PC makers had signed on to the program.


Click on image to enlarge.

“Suddenly, every third page was a PC ad with the Intel Inside logo,” says Carter. As the logo “burned retinas,” PC ad revenues “went from tens to literally to hundreds of millions of dollars. Sales teams that had nothing to do with us were put together to figure out how to best use the co-op money; we were creating a backdraft in the industry.”

Microsoft, copied the Intel Inside program “almost immediately with its Windows logo,” Carter notes. “Disk drive companies tried to copy it, with varying levels of success. All the different PC component makers tried it. But we had the advantage of being first.”

With the 486, Intel extended microprocessor advertising to television for the first time. It turned up the volume on the TV dollars with the Pentium ad series, the first to play Intel’s four-note audio signature as the Intel Inside logo flashed on the screen.

A 2002 Harvard Business Review case study noted that in 2001 alone, approximately 150 million Intel Inside stickers were printed and more than $1.5 billion in Intel Inside advertising was generated, making Intel, according to one ranking, “the sixth most valuable brand in the world, alongside consumer powerhouses such as Coke and Disney.”

Carter retired in 2000, leaving his successors to figure out how to extend the concept to burgeoning areas such as cell phones and embedded systems. With periodic tune-ups to accommodate new classes of products and partners, the program is still active today.