Tedium - No Hiding These Logos 💻

Today in Tedium: Whether you think they’re neat or annoying, stickers indicating what’s inside your computer have been a key part of basically every pre-built machine this side of Apple. The last 30 years has seen tremendous shifts in the public image of a typical PC, but there is a high chance that your new ultrabook, just like the desktop your family once bought for Microsoft Excel and Quake, would come covered in vendor badges. Today’s Tedium goes into the origins of the long-running marketing scheme and some of its historical highlights. Stick with us if you want—we promise that’s the last sticker pun you’re going to read here. — Yuri @ Tedium

(Ricardo Bernardo/Flickr)

Intel Inside was initially a ploy to improve hiring in Japan

Computer stickers might advertise many things: sound cards, connection standards, extended warranty or a misguided fear of technological failure. But thanks to Intel, processors stand on their own when it comes to getting a badge. The Intel Inside campaign, introduced in the US in July 1991, is often cited as one of the prime cases of brand building. From the start, the program was conceived to make Intel a household name—but not for reasons you might expect.

The campaign, initially called “Intel In It,” was modeled by Intel’s Japanese arm to make the foreign company more desirable for local graduates to join, wrote [in Japanese] Nobuyuki Denda, a former Intel Japan executive vice president turned business consultant. The idea stemmed from the use of the Dolby logo on audio equipment which incorporated its noise reduction tech. Toshiba, building what’s often referred to as the world’s first modern-style laptop (which at its time meant the size of a binder), was the first company to use the Intel In It swoosh in 1989. 20 years later, Denda said in 2019 he persuaded Tetsuya Mizoguchi, Toshiba’s PC unit’s general manager, to join the program by offering processors at a discounted price and with a custom clock speed.

As Intel was bringing the campaign to the States, their Utah-based marketing shop, Dahlin Smith White, tweaked its slogan and its logo while the management formalized the incentive scheme. Basic rules of the program remained for years to come: a share of contract value paid by a PC manufacturer for Intel chips is transferred to the co-op marketing fund which the manufacturer used to subsidize the advertising—as long as the Intel Inside logo is featured.

Intel’s scheme, backed up by a TV advertising campaign, immediately got the attention of both computer manufacturers—some 350 of them joined the Intel Inside program in 1991, per Intel’s data—and the Federal Trade Commission. (Antitrust law enforcers worldwide were acting on Intel’s rebate programs throughout the 2000s, with some fines from that decade overturned as late as this January.) The Intel Inside branding, not referring to any specific chip initially, was expanded to also carry the Pentium name in 1994, essentially forming the now-familiar concept of a processor badge.

The company’s marketing efforts went further in 2003 after the introduction of Centrino, Intel’s first marketed integration of several hardware components—that line ended up having its own stickers, including one-off “combo” ones which allowed users to peel the processor name off. Intel is still focused on the concept of promoting hardware platforms with Intel Evo, but it also markets their graphics chips—with badges, too—in this way.

Stickers from the AMD Game! program.

AMD tried to make a separate sticker for gaming PCs, while wooing buyers with Wi-Fi chip brands

Unless we are talking about entire spec sheets glued on a PC, computer stickers are limited in their ability to convey useful information.

A consumer might deduce, via a thumbnail-sized badge, which processor a given PC has, but it’s tricky to translate this information to real-life performance on the fly. This was always particularly true for graphics chips. In the early 2000s, for example, a sticker for the graphics card maker ATI could be found on a top-of-the-line gaming PC, but also on a Nintendo console and a video output add-on for a Toshiba PDA—hardly the same devices performance-wise.

In 2008, AMD (which had acquired ATI by this point) created a badge designed to convey that a PC which carries it—built around AMD components, of course—is suitable for gaming. Machines bearing “AMD Game!” labels were billed as being able to run World of Warcraft at 60 frames per second at 1280×1024 resolution, among other things, with an “AMD Game! Ultra” designation promising a comfortable bump in resolution.

AMD’s Better By Design program gave wireless chip companies equal billing.

Visually, AMD Game! stickers followed the style of the company’s earlier initiative of bringing PC component stickers in a literal chevron-like order. Incidentally, the “Better By Design” campaign considered a wireless module brand to be worthy of mention next to CPU and GPU brands. Such exposure for Broadcom or Atheros—both reputable manufacturers, yet hardly household names—might have happened because the AMD affair was touted as an answer to Intel’s Centrino platform, which the Intel-made wireless card was an integral part of.

Destructoid criticized AMD Game! stickers for their static, vendor-specific nature, noting they add to “an already inconsistent industry vernacular for PC hardware.” There wasn’t any similar campaign by NVIDIA, and Microsoft’s “experience index,” designed to make PC gaming simpler, failed to escape the few places in Windows that it was confined to.