By poking fun at the “megahertz” marketing employed by AMD’s competition, AMD set about building brand awareness and encouraging dialogue among IT professionals, an audience noto­riously skeptical of traditional marketing vehicles. One part Cal­ifornia Dude and two parts Monty Python, the personality of the narrator and the ambiance of the site itself is the pole opposite of the usual AMD style. Deliberately giving the animation a make­shift, hand-rendered look, designers at Antics Visual Marketing made playful jabs at an “imaginary” competitor: Rather than going for the sleek look of AMD competitors, they opted instead for something satirical and irreverent.

The goal for the site was to remind the audience just how invalu­able AMD really is by offering a glimpse at what the world might have looked like had it not existed, or if it had not revolutionized the industry with a technology (the AMD Opteron processor) that forced rival Intel to radically alter its plans for the future.

“We wanted to create a character that would resonate with a technology audience: funny yet credible,” Antics team spokesper­son Steve Sokil says—a character “who could deliver the message without having the audience immediately dismiss it as corporate marketing-speak.” The Dave turned out to be an extremely effective viral marketing tool. “Leaked” to a single, influential blogger in the IT community, this became the most-viewed video in its category on YouTube within 48 hours. “It was the first time we used a large and publicly accessible internet video forum—in this case, YouTube—to market the site,” reports the Antics team. Having raised the question of what the world might have been like had the AMD Opteron processor never been invented, the YouTube video resulted in numerous posts on the many blogs that picked it up and ran with the discussion.

“We believe we struck the right note with The Dave character,” Sokil says. “Every software developer or system administra­tor knows someone like The Dave. He’s probably in the cube next door.” This familiarity created a sense of trust in the message, which gave bloggers the freedom to propagate it without fear of feeling like corporate shills. R. Ashby