Advertising of Intel Inside

Intel has become one of the world's most recognizable computer brands following its long-running "Intel Inside" campaign. The campaign, which started in 1990, was created by Intel marketing manager Dennis Carter. The five-note jingle was introduced the following year and by its tenth anniversary was being heard in 130 countries around the world.

The Intel Inside program was very lucrative for advertisers. Intel paid half the advertising costs for any ad that used the "Intel Inside" logo. However, in print media, Intel stipulated that the page the ad was on must not contain any references to competitors, such as AMD. If the ads didn't meet these requirements, Intel did not pay half the cost, and the advertiser was prohibited from using the "Intel Inside" logo. Intel employed staff whose primary function was looking for advertisements which violate the agreement. Advertisers found doing so—many of which were "mom and pop" shops ignorant of the reimbursement agreement—were requested to stop violating the use of the logo and were then told how to legally use the logo and get part of their advertising costs reimbursed. PC companies advertising products containing Intel chips are required to include the jingle in their film and television advertisements in order to receive the reimbursement.

The Centrino advertising campaign has been hugely successful, leading to the ability to access wireless internet from a laptop becoming linked in consumers' minds to Intel chips. In the UK this has caused some controversy, as the ASA upheld complaints that this was a misleading advert.

In 2006, Intel has expanded its promotion of open specification platforms beyond Centrino, to include the Viiv media centre PC and the business desktop Intel vPro.

In December 2005, Intel phased out the "Intel Inside" campaign in favor of a new logo and the slogan, "Leap ahead". The new logo is clearly inspired by the "Intel Inside" logo. In fact, sometimes "Intel Inside" is used, only this time with the processor name between the two words. Like so: "Intel Core Duo Inside".

In mid January 2006, Intel announced that they were dropping the long running Pentium name from its processors. They phased out the Pentium names from mobile processors first, when the new Yonah chips, branded Core Solo and Core Duo, were released. The desktop processors changed when the Core 2 line of processors were released. The Pentium name was first used to refer to the P5 core Intel processors (Pent refers to the 5 in P5,) and was done to circumvent court rulings that prevent the trademarking of a string of numbers, so competitors could not just call their processor the same name, as had been done with the prior 386 and 486 processors. (Both of which had copies manufactured by both IBM and AMD.)

Though some in the Macintosh community were concerned that Intel's branding, including the decals and jingle, would be used with the new Intel-based Macintoshes (see Apple Intel transition), this has not occurred.

Intel's "Intel Inside" campaign has generally been considered to be world class marketing. However, over the years there have been several plays on the Intel branding scheme which have appeared on the web. While such jabs at Intel are obviously beyond the company's ability to control, they do tend to show that not everyone believes that Intel's programs and policies are always world class. For example, there is the popular "evil inside", the ubiquitous picture of a tombstone with "R.I.P Intel Inside", and the descriptive "Idiot Outside".