Intel spending hundreds of millions of dollars on new Ultrabook marketing campaign

Though initially seen as a niche product, Apple’s ultra-thin MacBook Air has become a bonafide hit in its own right, and is typically the case, has catalyzed the rest of the computing industry to follow suit with slim and ultra portable notebook designs.

But these efforts have ultimately failed to really to deliver a true competitor to the MacBook Air, and one company uniquely interested in giving the Air a run for its money is Intel who is making a strong marketing push to advertise ultrabooks. And when we say strong marketing push, we mean that they’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars via the San Francisco-based advertising firm Venables Bell & Partners.

Their ultrabook push will be their largest marketing campaign since 2003 when they launched the Intel Centrino processor platform.

Here’s the first of what promises to be a bevy of ultrabook themed commercials from Intel.

Not too shabby visually speaking, which isn’t surprising given that it was directed by Daniel Kleinman who is credited with putting together the title sequences for James Bond films between GoldenEye and Casino Royale. That said, we doubt these adverts will do much of anything to steal away any marketshare from the MacBook Air or the iPad. After all, many manufacturers have had trouble complying with Intel’s ultrabook reference specs while keeping costs low. But that won’t stop Intel from trying. Recently, Intel representative Alison Wesley told PC World that ultrabooks provide a better and more efficient working environment than iPads and give consumers a better value than the MacBook Air.

The MacBook Air is a great product, sure. It has the Intel Core processor, it’s a great choice for someone who wants to invest in the Mac operating system, and it offers some of the things we talked about. But really, with the Ultrabook, it’s about offering all those things in the same device–the great responsiveness, the great battery life–and with an operating system that people have come to love over the years, as well as all the legacy applications that they would like to run. And they want to do all this at mainstream price points, which is where we think one of the biggest key differentiators is, and the biggest value that Intel can bring to this space. We can actually get the ecosystem to move to an extent [that it will] bring all of these great features in a laptop down to mainstream price points.

But consumers, at those mainstream price points, are picking up the iPad in droves. It’s a slow but significant shift, but people are starting to realize that sometimes you get what you pay for, and that the misery that often accompanies cheap PCs isn’t worth it, making the Mac all the more appealing.

via BusinessWire