• Los Angeles Times, Wednesday, May 6, 2009 11:03 AM

Intel is about to launch a massive advertising campaign in more than two dozen countries that seeks to make consumers more familiar with the brand. "Sponsors of Tomorrow," which will appear on TV, billboards, the Web and in print beginning Monday, will be the first advertising from the chip maker to focus on its overall brand rather than specific processors or products, Alana Semuels reports.

"We want people, when they decide they need a new laptop, to make sure they're going to look at Intel inside," says Nancy Bhagat, director of integrated marketing at Intel. And it wants consumers to be as insistent about products having Intel components as they once were about having NutraSweet in their diet drinks, she says.

The ads will tout Intel's role in pioneering the microprocessor, inventing the USB standard and helping build Silicon Valley. In "Rock Stars," two actors play engineers who invented the first microprocessor. When they walk across the company cafeteria, they are admired as if they were Jagger and Richards.

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