Marketing hits differently when it authentically connects.
Great campaigns don’t start with the product, they start with the audience. Audience-first creative and messaging lead to nimble, high-impact activations, not bloated budgets with mediocre outcomes.
Understand Your Audience
Intel’s Edge AI Campaign aimed to engage developers to test, and ideally adopt, specific inference software.
Like many Intel campaigns, the media strategy targeted a broad AI developer persona and funneled them to a landing page. From there, content directed users to a GitHub repository where the models lived.
While this approach saw some success, each step added friction… another click, and another chance for a developer to drop off.
To better understand the experience, I walked through the process myself, using our most accessible and honest proxy for the audience: Intel’s own internal developers and engineers.
Turns out, developers are just like any other audience.
They want a simple, clear and accessible journey.
Instead of running more general ads that funneled users to a broad campaign page, I partnered directly with our tech evangelism team to build an explicit campaign experience created by developers, for developers.
Together, we identified models that were current, trending, and aligned with scalable business opportunities.
I then developed ad creative that highlighted real use cases and showcased model output in a fun, eye-catching way designed to stand out in the digital noise.
Finally, the ads linked directly to the model and code on GitHub… taking developers exactly where they wanted to go.
Win-Win
This approach delivered value to both developers and Intel: it provided easy access to code that solved real AI application challenges and came pre-packaged with Intel software.
With just 1/18th the budget of the full campaign, the pilot drove an 800% increase in daily traffic. In fact, anytime we paused or reset the media, I’d hear from engineering within 12 hours. They noticed the drop immediately.
It worked because I prioritized real relationships with our technical teams and built the trust needed to create an experience that truly resonated with developers.
Speak the Language
Here are a few other examples of connecting campaigns with audiences.
Build Skills
For a campaign designed to draw in Python developers who may not be working in AI yet but looking to transition, I worked with our engineers to create ads using Python code.
Python-coded ads performed 2x better than the existing creative.
Build and Deploy
Moving to more intermediate and expert AI application builders, I wanted to create a gamified experience for developers to demonstrate how they use Intel products. I worked with a community partner to launch “Chip’s Challenge” leveraging 8-bit nostalgia while asking for cutting edge submissions.
