Intel, Microsoft team to tout digital home
The two companies will announce on Thursday a joint marketing campaign for television, print, cinema and online advertising aimed at showing consumers what they can do with their digital entertainment technologies.
Those technologies might include Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 or Intel's Pentium 4 processors. Expenses for the campaign are estimated to be in the low tens of millions of dollars and will be split between the two companies. It will run from Nov. 7 until late January.
The campaign is meant to address one of the key complaints about consumer electronics devices that use digitized content, which is simply that they are harder to figure out how to use. Digitized content, such as audio files and video clips, is more portable and transferable between devices and, in most cases, is of higher quality than analog content.
Consumer electronics makers such as Sony Electronics and Samsung have opened showroom stores where new products and digital technologies can be demonstrated to consumers to educate them about what they can do.
Microsoft and Intel will have similar demonstration areas in high-traffic malls in 38 U.S. cities, including Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle.
