Motorola to Launch TV Campaign for PowerPC Chip By Daniel S. Levin

SAN FRANCISCO - Motorola, the nation's third-largest computer chip maker, is taking aim at rival Intel with its first television campaign designed

The TV ads, set to launch in November right before the critical Comdex computer trade show in Las Vegas, centers on the company’s new PowerPC chip, which was developed jointly with Apple Computer and International Business Machines. It will carry the tagline ‘Changing the course of computing. For the better.’
‘We’re in a marketing war,’ said Michael Matthews, vp/management supervisor for BBDO/S.F., the Motorola ad agency developing the campaign. ‘We need to get end users to ask computer companies when and if they are going to offer a PowerPC machine.’
Motorola’s Microprocessor and Memory Technologies Group, which spent about $3 million on advertising in all of 1992, has nearly tripled its budget for the second half of 1993 and is expected to spend about $8 million in 1994 on the brand-building effort. Even so, the company’s spending will be dwarfed by Intel’s advertising, which continues with its $125-million Intel Inside coop program launched in 1991.
‘They’re hoping to break Intel’s stranglehold, but the operating system and applications are not there in the short run to do it,’ said Jerry Bank, principal analyst at research firm Dataquest, San Jose, Calif.
In 1992 Intel had 69% of the microprocessor market based on revenue, selling $3.8 billion in chips. Motorola claimed 8% or $430 million behind AMD, which had 10.5% of the market and $571 million in sales.
Copyright Adweek L.P. (1993)