AMD's upcoming marketing campaign attached to their Polaris architecture and Radeon RX 480 rollout is designed to target community, not competition. Forbes speaks to Raja Koduri, Chief Architect of the Radeon Technologies Group, and Global PR Director Chris Hook about AMD's plans to reclaim more GPU market share, one pixel at a time. Plus, an exclusive look at the marketing materials propaganda AMD will start distributing at the end of June.

Goal #1: Revamp and Revitalize the Radeon brand

About 9 months ago, Raja Koduri and his Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) embarked down a path to revamp and revitalize the Radeon brand. "We knew it was going to be a real crazy journey," Koduri tells me. "What we were trying to attempt was not easy. Many people in the industry called me and said 'Are you crazy? You have two very formidable competitors in front of you.'"

Koduri laughs in acknowledgment, and continues a theme of transparency that AMD began at Computex and seemingly plans to continue. "Frankly, AMD had fallen behind significantly," Koduri says. "If you look at our market share before RTG was formed, it was falling to single digits in the desktop channel, which is very important from a gaming standpoint. So that was a huge, tall mountain ahead of us."

As we all know, one of AMD's first steps toward changing public perception of the Radeon brand was improving the quality and frequency of their drivers. That directive, so far, has been nothing short of a resounding success, and the company has witnessed a 3.2 point gain in market share during a time period that saw no new Radeon products introduced.

The next step? "We had to change the culture," Koduri explains. It was crucial for AMD and, by extension, RTG, to pinpoint what Radeon really stood for, and what that meant to its users. "When people ask me who I work for, I always tell them 'I work for my user. He's my boss.'"

They finally settled on the essence of what they do: the pixel. The building block of computer graphics. The new Radeon logo was designed with the pixel in mind, and was indeed a custom-created font meant to reposition Radeon as a "Future Tech" brand instead of a "Masculine Tech" brand. It may seem like a minor thing, but AMD conducted focus tests in 7 countries, and users overwhelmingly preferred the new logo to the old one, which is usually the opposite of what happens once we're comfortable with a brand's appearance.

With a bold new logo and the notion of the pixel as their guiding light, AMD got to work creating a campaign that would be quite different than what we've seen in the past.

What Radeon does NOT represent

But before we look ahead, I had a burning question for Koduri: They forged forward based on what they wanted to be, but I was curious to learn what they didn't want to be. "We've discussed this internally, and our goals are not based on how to be a $10 billion company," Koduri answers. "They're based on how do we create these pixels super fast and super smooth?"

Koduri went on to explain that although their explicit goal is not to be a great business brand, that could inevitably happen. Obviously they want to make money so they can in turn create more advanced chips, but Koduri and company believe that if they can capture pixels, the rest will fall into place.

Chris Hook interjects: "What was cool about Raja's vision was that it was very much 'if we focus on community first, and we listen carefully to what we get tweeted at everyday, and we make the customer first, it may take us some time to build the business but we're going to be on the right track."

"We also don't want Radeon to be a closed brand, for it to look like Radeon was building their own fortress," Koduri adds. "We don't want it to be a more advanced, high-tech brand. We want it to be more approachable to consumers."

That's the narrative you've already seen unfold with the upcoming launch of the Radeon RX 480 and their "VR for the rest of us" mentality.

Chris Hook is showing me a mock ad for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided that "represents everything that's wrong with gaming advertising today...or at least everything that's boring about it," he says. "Whether you look at our historical ads or at Nvidia's they all have the same 3 things in them. There's a pedantic slogan. There's a picture of some of the content. There's some bullet points. There's often a picture of a graphics card. Sometimes there's even a picture of a gamer."

Hook argues that ads like these have become stale and meaningless. They don't communicate anything. It's the default because it's always been the default. "And it's the way it's always going to be if we don't go back and reevaluate what this product really is and how we communicate that as authentically as possible in an ad," Hook adds.

While Radeon Technologies Group was conceptualizing Polaris, they kept their ear to the ground and learned what their community wanted right now, but also what their community desired 2 years from now. Hook says this resulted in five key takeaways:

1: Prestige. "They wanted the prestige of a $700 graphics card, but they didn't want to have to pay for it," Hook begins.

2: VR that just works. "They wanted the ability to have a great VR experience today or two years from now without worrying about upgrading power supplies and digging into their PC. They wanted to buy a headset at some point and just have it work."

3: Respect their investment. "They wanted us to pay respect to the dollars they were giving us and do things in the architecture or transistors or APIs or ASync Compute, that provided a measure of 'futureproofness.' They wanted to be reassured that even if they're only spending $200 they'd feel secure in their investment for a couple years."

4: More overclocking control. "We brainstormed what kind of voltage control could be given to them to create a better experience.

5: Better drivers. "We feel we've made a great first step there, and we're only going to be putting a heavier foot on the gas this year and next year to make those drivers better and better."

Then Hook gets to the point and wraps everything in a bow. And I almost laughed outloud. "So it's becoming less of a product launch and in our view more of a movement." The moment this phrase leaves his lips, he actually acknowledges how unbelievable it sounds. "As a marketer, I almost don't believe myself as I'm saying that. But this is where it became real to me..."

The Letter

Fan mail is nothing new. Every celebrity and recognizable brand gets it. But on June 1 at 5:17am, following AMD's Computex press conference, Chris Hook received a special one that, he says, reinforced that what they're doing is genuinely a movement. Here's an excerpt, with permission from the author:

"Dear AMD staff: My name is John Haffley and I'm writing this to offer my sincere thanks to your team for all that you do. The recent announcement of your new product (the Radeon RX 480) is, I assume, an important event for you and yours. Please allow me a moment to let you know how impactful it is for some of us outside of the tech industry, to people like me.

I'm a 49 year old man who was born with a congenital heart defect called Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome. Though this condition is now mostly treatable, that is a relatively new development. For the bulk of my adult life I endured literally hundreds of near-death experiences of cardiac arrest and several open heart surgeries. By my late 20s I'd developed post-traumatic stress disorder because of the cardiac issues. Eventually I became unable to work and was forced to go on disability. As time progressed, so did my illness. By 2012 it had become difficult to even go outside in public.

Since then, my PC has become so much more to me than an entertainment device. My PC is my freedom. It's my gateway to the world. Because of this it's the one hobby I allow myself. Living on disability is very difficult and requires a great deal of financial discipline. Any penny spent on non-essential items has to be reckoned and evaluated greatly. My PC is my prized possession. Over the past year and a half I have pieced together a very nice -- if not modest -- machine by taking advantage of some incredible bargains. Bargains that, sadly, are more difficult to find and require twitch reflexes to take advantage of.

The final piece of my PC puzzle remaining is the graphics card. My current card is OK but it simply doesn’t have the legs to keep pace with innovation and all to often, lately, has been showing it’s [sic] weakness."

The letter continues for awhile (clearly Mr. Haffley is as verbose as I am), but the author explains the difficulty he's had searching for a reasonably powerful graphics card on a budget, and adds that -- like so many people I've personally talked to -- he feels the introduction of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive (especially the financial barrier to entry) has left him in the dust.

The letter ends with the following: "[...] the announcement of the Radeon RX 480 has made me feel like I might possibly be the happiest guy on Earth right now! What an AMAZING BARGAIN! What AMAZING SPECS! Because of the work you do, an entire world opens up to me and I cannot express my gratitude for that."

While this qualifies as the most eloquent and emotional letter AMD has received on the topic, Hook says they've received tons of messages with a similar sentiment. And it stands to reason: 84% of PC gamers around the world spend between $100 and $300 on their GPU upgrades. Nvidia may indeed be the performance king right now, but AMD has decided to compete in an entirely different universe. A universe which statistically favors their strategy.

The Uprising: Inciting A Radeon Rebellion

AMD is tapping into that John Haffley-esque passion, that enthusiasm, and that "everyday gamer" mentality with their "Uprising" campaign for Radeon, which will combine the look and feel of uprising and protest-inspired posters with real-world accounts of "normal" gamers to amplify the narrative.

There are no photos of AMD's graphics cards. No gameplay screenshots. No specs. No models. No catchy slogans. No promises of free games. "Instead, these reflect statements from the community itself; things that they want in their gaming life," Hook says.

So will it just be banner ads and tweets? Nope. AMD wants to pepper the streets with these posters. They'll be doing AMAs and giving consumers direct access to Raja Koduri and other executives, not just PR and marketing people. They'll be personally reaching out to their dissenters on forums and Reddit and saying "I know you think we make hot and loud graphics cards, but that's all changed now."

"We're hoping to make this not just an ad campaign, but a way of doing business going forward," Hook offers near the close of our conversation.

I think Koduri, Hook, and the entire Radeon Technologies Group seem more driven than ever to not only create the perfect pixel, but to capture as many as possible. If this new attitude resonates with the community, there may indeed be an uprising.