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Chip manufacturing goliath AMD is set to dramatically step up its presence in the UK with an aggressive marketing push designed to boost sales and reinvigorate the entire market.
Product marketing manager for EMEA Ian McNaughton told PC Retail that the firm has been guilty of ‘passiveness’ towards the UK in the past – but this is all set to change.
When asked if there was going to be a step up in marketing in the UK, he said: "Absolutely. You’re going to see some things from us that are much different from what you’ve seen in the past.
"In the past you’ve probably seen much more passiveness, going forward you’re going to see a much more aggressive stance in really getting out there and driving education and awareness in the channel, which obviously equates down to more educated consumers and more interested consumers.
"To me the UK is easy because it’s distinguished. It’s one of those things that we should be doing a lot better job in."
The predominant thrust of this hammer-blow campaign will be targeted towards the mainstream buyer as opposed to enthusiasts. This comes alongside the emergence of the mass market facing RS780 chipset – the first product to truly meld the strengths of AMD and not-so recently purchased graphics powerhouse ATi Technologies.
"When we look at the acquisition of ATi, the RS780 is really the first fruit off the tree," said McNaughton. "[It] shows a full ecosystem working together at AMD, discreet GPU, integrated chip set and CPU," he added.
Alongside this, AMD will also be looking to ramp up awareness of AMD Game, with plans to work alongside Microsoft for a heavy-duty web push in the near future.
"What AMD Game is about is to de-mystify what you need from a PC to play a game – we hope to take a lot of that fogginess away," continued McNaughton. "It’s initially designed for the channel, it will then be put over to OEMs and SLIs for them to benefit from as well.
"You’re going to see retail programmes, a lot of presence on the web – a big push on the web – and you’ll see that we’ll target the gaming community. We are discussing with Microsoft how to align with their programmes."
