For a final project, I will be
analyzing the branding of a brand I am quite familiar with as I use their products
just about every day; Nvidia. Not only are they the industry leaders in discrete
graphics technology, but they also have the branding/ad campaigns that truly reach
their customers and show the advantages of their products without disparaging their
main competition in the space, AMD. One specific ad campaign I would like to
analyze is their Ampere architecture launch in late 2020 as it was not only a
successful campaign for a top-notch product, but it also showcased their marketing
prowess by incorporating their already familiar branding and even long-running memes
while touching on how this series of products had huge generational improvements
for just about every computing sector.
Firstly,
I’ll briefly go over what Nvidia does as a company. As I mentioned previously,
Nvidia is the undisputed leader in discrete graphics technology. Their current
line of gaming graphics cards (RTX 3000 series) is not only the price to
performance king with the RTX 3080 but is unchallenged at the top of the enthusiast
market segment with the RTX 3090ti. Consumer graphics cards are only one facet
of their business as they have many more computing hardware and software
products. Nvidia is also a leader in the deep learning/AI space as well thanks
to the massive parallel computing power of the DGX A100 which is essentially a self-contained
server featuring dual 64 core AMD CPUs and eight A100 GPUs, the biggest and
most powerful chip in the Ampere architecture. Another field that goes hand in hand with AI,
self-driving cars, is also something that they are developing products for. Of
course, they also have many enterprise level solutions such as cloud and data
centers, networking, and workstation GPUs along with proprietary software to
take full advantage of these products. More can be found on their site here: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/.
Now on to the launch
of the Ampere architecture which took place on September 1, 2020. In the tech
hardware space, it is very hard to keep a complete lid on products so there will
inevitably be leaks of certain product specs and maybe relative performance. The
keen eye may also catch benchmarks that are mistakenly left on leaderboards of software
such as 3D Mark. With a new architecture, it would be a disappointment if the
new flagship didn’t completely decimate a benchmark leaderboard, so it isn’t
too hard to notice when an unspecified product all of the sudden appears near
the top. These leaks of course happened, and hype began to build for this new
Nvidia graphics card architecture which was shaping to be a much larger generational
leap compared to the last generation, Turing (or more commonly known as the RTX
2000 series). There were also rumors of Nvidia’s biggest competition, AMD,
being competitive at the high end of the gaming GPU space for the first time in
going on 10 years. The last time Nvidia had true competition at the top was
when AMD released the R9 290X in 2013. At the time of launch, it so badly beat Nvidia’s
flagship gaming card, GTX 780, in both raw performance and price, it caused
them to reshuffle their entire product stack to answer. Their solution to this
was to essentially rebrand their flagship enthusiast tier card, the GTX Titan
which was a then unprecedented $1,000 card, to the GTX 780 Ti for $700 msrp. This
sudden rebrand was embarrassing to Nvidia as the GTX 780 had only launched a
few months prior. Nvidia would never make this miscalculation again as they trounced
AMD on the high end for the next several generations in raw performance and
price. This time around, there were rumors that AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture (Radeon
RX 6000 series) would be competitive on the high end for the first time in generations.
AMD has historically also let Nvidia release their newest products first in
order to make sure they price their products accordingly and take advantage of
any pricing miscalculations by Nvidia so Nvidia has to get things right the
first time around.
With anticipation building as rumored release
time frames came closer, Nvidia started their marketing campaign for the Ampere
architecture. They made several short posts on all of the usual social media
platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. These then get picked up by the
tech media sites and other social media sites with user generated content like Reddit
and Youtube, all of which make sure that their customer base is aware of the announcement
they have coming. Normally, these broadcasts are made in person at a massive
trade show like Computex or CES but 2020 presented a unique set of
circumstances that marketing had to overcome thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic shutting
down just about all in person events. The solution they came up with was to do
the announcement with their CEO, Co-Founder, and President, Jensen Huang, do
his now familiar new architecture presentation from his own kitchen. Jensen is the face of Nvidia and is just as synonymous
with the brand as the green and black color branding of the company at this
point. On September 1, the announcement video went live on Nvidia’s Youtube
channel and Facebook which currently sits at 1.8 million views, but that
doesn't truly represent the reach that the announcement made, and I’ll get back
to that later. The video can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E98hC9e__Xs.
The 40-minute video starts with some short
clips of familiar games and renderings before you see Jensen Huang appear in
his signature leather jacket that he wears for product release announcements. His leather
jacket has become expected and is somewhat of a meme amongst enthusiasts. He
then goes in to breaking down Nvidia’s different target audience within the PC
gaming world such as gaming, live streaming, content creation, and esports
which the new architecture will have industry leading solutions for. He goes
into a few announcements for some of their architecture highlights such as RTX
(Nvidia’s real time ray tracing technology) being added to more games, Nvidia
Reflex which cuts input latency in games, Nvidia Broadcast which is their AI
technology that can turn any room into a home studio (different backgrounds on
camera without use of a greenscreen, background noise removal, video overlay
for streaming, and head tracking focus), Nvidia Omniverse Machinima which is
used from rendering film quality cinematics using preexisting
or new assets. Jensen then goes into the hardware and its deep learning ability
and real time ray tracing ability which were the major architectural features that
were to become the headline features outside of purely rasterization advances. There
are then some cinematics that truly show to the layperson how much more
powerful this architecture is compared to the previous generation, Turing, in
these specific areas. In this scene, the shadows being cast are rendered in real time by the GPU from multiple
and changing position light sources. In the past, this type of thing would have
to have been pre-rendered or hidden by developers using rasterization effects
to hide the fact that the shadows weren’t truly dynamic. Then, it is time to
finally unveil the newest video cards themselves. A short cinematic showing the new RTX 3080
plays and then Jensen pulls out the card from behind his spatula jar, revealing
that it was hidden in plain sight the entire time. After the specs of the card
are revealed along with the relative performance compared
to last generation, they announce an unexpected price of $700 msrp. This was
huge as it had almost twice the performance of its predecessor, the RTX 2080, for
the same price. With the power and price of this card, there was a new price to
performance king in the market that AMD would not be able to match. They later then
revealed 2 other cards, the 3070 which matched the previous generation $1,200
msrp 2080ti in performance for only $500 and the 3090 which would be the industry
leader in performance but at an eye-watering $1,500 price point. The 3090 wasn’t
hidden in plain sight like the 3080 was but was pulled out of Jensen’s oven
when revealed. As the relative performance of the 3090 only ended up being 15%
better than the 3080, it was undoubtedly limited to being an enthusiast level
card for someone who simply wanted the best possible card for an irrelevant price,
similar to what their Titan series of cards was.
With the successful reveal of the Ampere
architecture and the RTX 3000 series of cards announced, Nvidia had basically
done their job as the rest of tech media and word of mouth took over. The
product would essentially sell itself at this point thanks to all of the technology
packed in that its competitors lacked, a huge generational leap, and a price
point that was near unbeatable. Tech channels on Youtube such as Linus Tech
Tips, JayzTwoCents, and Gamers Nexus had review copies of the GPUs so that their
testing could be shown for the product launch. While Nvidia’s own video only
received 1.8 million views, the reaction video to their announcement on the Linus
Tech Tips channel received 5.1 million views with their 3000 series card reviews
totaling 10s of millions more views. You can see the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucutmH2KvSQ.
Just by releasing an excellent product for a good price and getting the word out
there, they were able to let other media companies take over with sharing the good
product news. The announcement also added to the Jensen leather jacket meme by
also adding his kitchen and the guessing game of where he was going to pull a
card from next. Nvidia’s Facebook page even released his kitchen as a
downloadable Zoom background as a way to embrace the meme and also acknowledge
the leather jacket. Nvidia also ran giveaways of the cards on their various social
media sites to people that liked, shared, and tagged friends in their posts which
is a very common thing to see companies do at this point.
Almost two years
later, this announcement and product launch has been a massive success for Nvidia.
Up until very recently, it was near impossible to get your hands on a 3000 series
card without getting extremely lucky online by beating out bots or waiting hours
in line locally at a retailer in hopes of getting the opportunity to buy one. I
personally waited in line at a local Best Buy in 2021 as I had given up buying
one online. I got there around 3 am on the night of the rumored restock and the
line was already around the building. I ended up getting a RTX 3080ti after
being 178 in line when they had 180 cards total across all product skus. Around
another 200 people at least were told to go home with many offering to pay me
double the $1,200 I just paid for the card when I got out of the store at 8:30
am. Nvidia’s quarterly earnings has skyrocketed from an average of around 3 billion
per quarter to 8.2 billion in their most recent quarter. By every measurable
way, the Ampere architecture and 3000 series product line as a smashing success
and was started by a simple, yet effective marketing presentation by Jensen
Huang from his own kitchen that conveyed the newest features to all of their potential
buyers as well as just how much better this product was than the last
generation.
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