V/Speak

Intel Executive ‘Rockstars’ have made the cover of this month’s edition of Fast Company, and the magazine has taken an in-depth look at how the company that pays my wage has transformed itself during one of the worst economic times of our generation.  Of course, I am biased, but this is an article that’s worth the read.  My favorite line harkens back to the days of Andy Grove:

“It was former Intel CEO Andy Grove — decidedly not quiet when angry — who was famous for his “silver-bullet test”: If you had only one bullet left for your competitors, which one would you shoot?”

We’re beyond the ‘silver-bullet test’ in my opinion – focusing on flawless execution and amazing technology rather than chambering that bullet.

David Veneski Intel, Uncategorized Deborah Conrad, Fast Company, Paul Otellini, Sean Maloney

Business Week just released a report on  the ‘Best Places to Launch a Career in 2009‘ – Intel is ranked #20, up from #38 in 2008.  They used the following methodology to determine rankings:

“First, we surveyed career services directors at U.S. colleges to learn which employers were tops on their lists. We asked those employers to complete a survey on their hiring, pay, benefits, and training programs, which we then compared with others in the same industry.  Finally, we obtained from Universum USA, a Philadelphia research company, the results of its 2009 survey of more than 60,000 U.S. undergraduates, who were asked to identify their five most desirable employers.  The employer survey counts for 50% of the final ranking, while the career services and student surveys count for 25% each.“

I’ve been at Intel for 10 years and have had a variety of jobs while here – my current role being by far my most rewarding.  If you’d like to find out more about the company that pays my salary, you can follow our jobs organization on Twitter, or check out our careers site.  Business Week also has some good profile data.  Yes – it’s true – all of us sit in cubes, so if you’re seeking that big corner office overlooking the Silicon Valley, look elsewhere…even Andy Grove had a cube.

David Veneski Intel Career, Intel

I’m usually pretty in tune with the news about the company I work for, but this one must have slipped by me in the last few months.  At the end of April Millward Brown released their report on the top 100 most valuable global brands.  Intel comes in at #23 (up from #27 last year) at a value of nearly $23 billion with a modest gain in value of 4%.  Not bad in these economic times, but we are still behind several other technology companies (Google, Microsoft, and Apple to name a few) in terms of both rank and % gain in value.  What was very surprising to me is that Blackberry made a massive move over the last year – gaining an astounding 100% in value to be the largest mover in the tech sector.  Blackberry is on a roll, having jumped 390% in 2008.  Pretty impressive.  Looking forward to the 2010 results to see how we respond.

David Veneski Branding, Intel Brand Value, Intel

Working at a very recognizable high tech company for the last 10 years (and a smaller, yet equally recognizable one for the 5 years prior) has taught me a lot about what companies think about when they proclaim ‘Leadership’ in their space.  At Intel, on the back of our employee badges, we have our ‘Values’.   Those values revolve around Customer Orientation, Discipline, and Quality – to name a few.  One sub-bullet under the value of Quality stands out to me and it says “Do the right things right”.   I think that’s a great line and is applicable to so many aspects of the business.  I peek at our values from time to time – mostly when I am writing my self assessment around review periods or mapping a project justification document to the core tenants upon which our company was built.  Today I was compelled to review them again after reading a guest post on Fast Company by Paul Worthington.  He made a great observation about the power of the customer and the responsibility of brands to lead in their space.

He negates (well, at least cautions against) a popular and rampant belief that, with the power of Social Media and direct feedback, the customer is absolutely in charge and brands must simply accept that as fact.  I appreciated how he urged brands to take control of their own fate and do more.  Not just with their customers, but also in how they square off with their challengers.  He summarizes his observation of what makes brands leaders in their space in three lines:

1. Innovate by leading your customer
2. Create amazing experiences
3. Get involved with the conversation

Three very simple tenants that every brand leader must heed.  #3, in my opinion, is probably the most important and could be the potential foundation for the other two to build off of.  It all starts with understanding what your customer is expecting from your brand.  By listening to, and incorporating their input into, your traditional product development cycle a brand will be better equipped to ‘create an amazing experience’ for current and future customers.  Some brands ‘get’ this far more intuitively than other brands.  At Intel, we are getting better with #3 and it makes me proud of the team that is helping move that discipline forward.

Hat tip to Paul Worthington for a well thought out post.

David Veneski Branding, Intel, Social Media Brand, Leader

It’s no secret that I am a Pandora fan.  Not only do I like their product, but I genuinely enjoy the people that bring great opportunities to Intel to help extend our campaign messages.  We’ve been trying to get the right thing in place to leverage the power of the Pandora listening network for our Sponsors of Tomorrow brand campaign since launch.  Yesterday we finally unveiled our effort.  Big kudos to the Pandora team and our agency for really working hard to make this happen – I think it will be a great activation around our new brand campaign. 

We did a soft launch yesterday and you’ll see us show up more and more over the next month or so as you enjoy your favorite artist streaming on Pandora.com.  The visual experience you can expect is in the image below.  We’ll also have some interstitial placements of our Rock Star and Oops advertisements as media within the channel stream.  Great job Team Pandora!

David Veneski Intel, Pandora #tomorrow, Intel, Pandora

Clearly, I was channeling David Pogue of the NYTimes yesterday when I wrote my post on travel and techology.  He has an interesting post in yesterday’s digital publication that talks about the battery life claims battle going on between manufacturers.  Everyone has their opinion, and one of our spokespeople – Bill Kircos – weighs in with Intel’s position regarding testing and benchmarking:

A spokesman, Bill Kircos, says that MobileMark is “a well thought, well debated and very sound benchmark.” Besides, if a shopper doesn’t like it, “there are a wealth of independent tests, reviews, magazine articles and company information out there to see what people are getting on battery life, in addition to the three-faced MobileMark benchmark.”

Pogue goes on a sarcastic bent regarding customers having to do ‘extra’ research on their purchase by leveraging the independent tests and reviews that clarify battery life claims.  Interesting commentary.  Personally, when I am making a technology purchase of a significant dollar value – I spend plenty of time researching, and am happy to do it in order to make sure what I am getting is passing muster.  Maybe we should recommend a good search engine to Mr. Pogue to make his research easier so he is happy with the product claims he is getting from the spokespeople he talked with for this article.

David Veneski Intel Battery Life, Technology

I travel for my job – lucky for me, I get to go to interesting places.  Whether I am flying to New York to participate in a social media summit, heading down to North Carolina to meet with a customer or spending time in the Windy City with my agency,  I am constantly taxing the limits of the technology I use for my job.  Smart phone – check, laptop – check, data card – check, iPod – double check (well, this isn’t really job related but a guy can’t work ALL the time now…).  The 3 things that I worry about most, in this order are: battery life, connectivity, and form factor (including weight).  If I don’t have good battery life, my ship has sailed – I’m not getting any work done on those long flights across country. 

Clearly, working for Intel gives me some perspective on this matter as we focus on battery life as one of the key differentiators in our processor line.  We’ve recently announced a new family of processors that will power the next generation of ultra-thin notebooks.  Now, rather than focusing on turning your screen brightness down, disabling your wireless antenna while not connected, and frantically searching for a power outlet during layovers to get enough juice for the next segment, customers can be confident that they are choosing a notebook that will help ensure they enjoy their computing experience for longer periods than ever before. 

Now, which notebook to choose?  The customer that I met with this week was Lenovo.   Last year they released the first instantiation of their ultra-thin lineup in the X300 – a competative PC answer to Apple’s Mac Book Air.  This year’s addition to the lineup is the T400s.  Gizmodo does a comprehensive review of the notebook and from talking with the good people in Cary, NC (US Headquarters for Lenovo) they are pretty confident that this will be a best seller in their family of products. 

Standard on this machine is an Intel Core 2 Duo processor (as an Intel employee and share holder, I think you for that).  In addition, there is the option of embedded WiMAX for connectivity in the cities (currently Baltimore, Portland, and as of June – Atlanta) that are on the Clear WiMAX network.  As a data card user while traveling and a modest user of WiMAX in my home town of Portland, having embedded WiMAX capabilities is a bonus.  Now the trick is expanding that network beyond the handful of cities.  In addition, this is a notebook that has definitely undergone a serious design stress test.  Lenovo did a great job in analyzing how their machines are used by the clientele they cater to and realized that design definitely matters.  Choosing not to stray from their signature matte black shell, they instead focused on things like ‘supersizing’ keys users touch more often (ESC and Delete), better integrated tools for Voice over IP calls, and an optional solid state drive for data security.  All good decisions in my book.

I’d like to get my hands on a T400s to try out for a while – it has to be an upgrade to my nearly 4 year old X60s which, while tiny, definitely forces me to sacrifice some things – like battery life and an optical drive.  Yes – I’m that guy you saw searching for the power outlet in RDU and PHX last night so I could kick out the emails I did on the plane during my flight home.  With an ultra-thin notebook powered by our new processor line, I imagine that my 6 hours of flying time would be productively spent without a care in the world about battery life.

David Veneski Intel, Ultra-thin #ultrathin, #wimax, Intel, Lenovo

As a follow on to our Sponsors of Tomorrow effort, we (Intel) are clearing up the confusion around our processor brands.  This week we announced our new brand structure and refined our strategy around a new, focused, ‘hero’ client brand – Intel® Core™.  There will be three levels of Core ‘modifiers’ that differentiate the various features and benefits native to each level of Core.  Joining the current instantiation, Core i7, will be an entry-level (Core i3) and a mid-level (Core i5) modifier to round out the Intel Core family.  Our VP of and Director of Corporate Marketing, Deborah Conrad, explains this transition to Core as our hero client brand in a video posted to intel.com.

David Veneski Intel #tomorrow, Brand, Core, Intel

The consumer wanting a mobile computing device has several options before them – at multiple price points and feature sets.  Depending on their usage model, the device they choose may vary.  If they are interested in a small form-factor device that they can easily carry with them to simply connect to the internet and surf the web, a netbook may be the best choice.  For more compute intensive activities, a CULV (consumer ultra low voltage) machine could provide a mid-range price point option for consumers that don’t need the full features of a high end notebook or laptop. 

As an employee of Intel and an avid user of mobile computing technology, I think the choices available are outstanding.  As a shareholder, how do I feel about the potential cannibalization of higher ASP SKUs by lower price point devices?  Again – I think choice is good.  People will purchase the proper device for their needs.  Sometimes that will mean that they are the proud owner of a top end notebook for their high octane computing needs, and will also purchase a ‘companion’ device such as an Atom-based netbook to take with them to satisfy their portable web surfing jones.  CULV based machines are set to debut in June and provide an “…opportunity for upsell” as Sean Maloney stated at our investor meeting earlier this month.  He continued on to state “We can reach new price points and we can also get paid for it.”

The way I interpret this: identify the market/customer needs, provide a choice of solutions to satisfy those needs, evolve your product line to improve upon past generation offerings, and finally continue to innovate to ensure you’re exceeding your customer’s and the industry’s expectations.

David Veneski Intel Atom, CULV, Intel, Netbook

It’s launch day in the U.S. for our new advertising campaign.  You all got a sneak peek last week, but today we pull the curtain back and show you all of the great executions we’ve put in place to support our efforts.  Credit to a crack team @ OMD for helping us build a spectacular media plan, including targeting several ‘first mover opportunities’ that will help you get to know our ‘Rockstars‘. 

Never before has the New York Times allowed a complete overlay of their homepage.  We did that today with the image you see to the left of this post.  In addition a contingent of engineering, marketing, and sales folks were on hand at the opening of the NASDAQ this morning to kick off the new week in the market.  Rather than ringing the bell to initiate the opening of the market, our group harmonized the Intel ‘bong‘ to commence trading – a first ever for the NASDAQ.  To complete the New York experience, we’ve given you the opportunity to share your vision of ‘Tomorrow’ to the world by sending (click on ‘You on Tomorrow @ the bottom of the page) your thoughts to the NASDAQ and Reuters boards in Times Square.  If you’re not in the Big Apple today, please check out the dualing Times Square webcams.

The Sponsors of Tomorrow campaign is scheduled to be the cornerstone of our advertising for the foreseeable future.  We’ll be broadcasting our Rockstar and Oops spots on the major networks and across cable starting this week.  We’re hoping you’ll have as much fun with this campaign as we plan to.

David Veneski Advertising, Intel #tomorrow, Intel, Sponsors of Tomorrow