Intel Inside turns 10

LONDON (ZDNet UK)--It has become the best-known brand in the high-tech industry, up there with the Coca-Cola wave and the golden arches, and on Monday the Intel Inside advertising programme turned 10 years old.

Since then the campaign -- which successfully established Intel as the hardware platform behind manufacturers such as Compaq, IBM and Dell -- has involved "bunny men" in spangled clean-suits and members of the performance-art group Blue Men to increase awareness of its essentially arcane semiconductor products.

Besides the logo itself, the one constant has remained Intel's five-note brand jingle, made up of a composite of more than 20 sounds including a tambourine, an anvil, an electric spark and a hammer on a pipe. Intel estimates the jingle is played an average of every five minutes, somewhere in the world.

The Intel Inside program has generated more than $1.5bn (about £1bn) in advertising, beginning with $20m in 1991. It has also helped make Intel by far the largest player in the consumer PC market and established it as the world's No. 4 brand, after Coke, Disney and McDonald's.

For years Intel remained virtually uncontested in the mainstream PC market, but more recently the success of Advanced Micro Devices processors has helped defray Intel's market share and the notion that "nobody was ever fired for buying Intel".

More recently Intel has tried to achieve a similar level of marketing success to its efforts in everything from consumer electronics to e-business.