Intel's enormous marketing budget
A big obstacle for AMD in achieving this is Intel's enormous marketing
budget. One of the ways in which this has best been put to use is in
making sure that its Centrino platform has become synonymous with
notebooks.
But DiFranco insists this has also helped AMD. "They did us a huge
favour with Centrino - it gave an assurance of stability and opened up
notebook growth.
"I'm happy for them to spend and create demand. Our job is to convince people to make the smarter choice.
"To do this we need people to experience AMD. We can achieve this by
improving our supply chain and communicating better with the points at
which brand choice is made."
So what will change? "Our roots are selling to distributors and
tradionally we never looked past them," said DiFranco. "We need to talk
more to resellers and the rest of the channel."
We asked if this means that AMD thinks distributors are becoming less
important, but DiFranco wasn't about to fall for that one. "In many
ways, distributors are more important than ever," he replied.
"Those that do data mining and reseller clustering are adding a lot of
value. For example Ingram Micro in the US has someone on board doing
just that. It can help us understand who we're talking to, which is
especially valuable in the commercial sector."
To conclude, we asked DiFranco how he'd found himself in the position
of heading up AMD's consumer and channel marketing. It turns out that
he graduated in Theatre and Broadcasting in 1982, but he denied any
thespian tendencies, indicating instead that it was good traning for
public speaking.
He was taken on in his current role four years ago by AMD, having
previously done a similar role for Maxtor. While he was there he
launched Maxtor's external hard drive range.
Prior to that he ran the Jazz Drive part of Iomega and feels his
experience has prepared him well for a big part of his current job,
which is competing for shelf space with Intel.
"Things improved when we stopped trying to compete with Intel on
branding and focused on getting on the shelves - what we call 'The war
in the store'."
The 780G chipset launch was AMD's highlight at CeBIT 2008
