14 DAY TRIAL // Video solutions manufacturer Nvidia is planning to extend its brand awareness outside the hardcore gaming community, via a massive ad campaign. Company executives claim that Nvidia is currently in talks with a number of major advertising agencies in search for the best media exposure.
The 3D graphics card manufacturer has hired Select Resources International to take care of finding the proper ad agency that will take care of its first massive consumer campaign. Nvidia would like to raise the consumers' awareness of its brand and make the company as recognizable as, say, Intel. The latter used to spend immense budgets in order to roll out the "Intel Inside" campaign.
Nvidia is currently selling its video-related products in pre-built systems from Dell, HP and even Apple. The graphics cards manufacturer has a strong presence in the graphics cards industry, with almost two-thirds of the market for desktop PC graphics cards.
The company's decision of increasing its market awareness comes as the result of the PC screen shifting from the average, low-performance 2D graphics to the brighter and more expensive 3D graphics that are present in nowadays' gaming titles.
Moreover, although Intel is not a direct competitor for Nvidia, the borderlines between CPUs and GPUs tend to become more and more blurry. For instance, Intel is producing low-end graphics chips as well as high-end chipsets to power the most recent motherboards. Nvidia seems to be extremely disturbed by Intel's successful X48, P45 and P43 professional chipsets, that directly compete with its own chipset products.
AMD is also a market threat that is worth taking into account. At the moment, the graphics division of AMD, ATI, has released world's most powerful graphics card, embodied by the ATI Radeon HD 2870 x2, a dual-GPU solution that has conquered the highest-end of the market. Nvidia currently has no competitor for AMD's HD 3870 X2 card (the GeForce 9800 X2 has not hit the market yet).
Nvidia plans on spending as much as $30 million to $40 million for its media image, but the final decisions will be made in spring. The action will represent the highest media spending for the company ever, given the fact that the highest amount of spent money was only $353,000 in measured media for the first nine months of 2007, and $2.4 million in 2006, according to TNS Media Intelligence.
The company, however, denied the fact that the company was looking for the right ad company to stage their consumer-oriented campaign. "We do not have an agency ... and we're not looking for one," Nvidia spokesman Derek Perez said. "We're just talking with people and companies about new ideas, like we always do."