Meaningless Marketing

Solutions provider AMD made a trip to our institute, supposedly on a training pretext. I was told that I am supposed to attend an "expert lecture" from the 64-bit microprocessor developers. I went into the magnificent auditorium of the Diploma section, specially used for national and cultural meets.

Seeing the aura surrounding the stage, I mean literally(there were huge AMD placards put up around the stage, one each on AMD’s partnerships with the Ferrari Formula 1 team, former Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong and on the 64-bit microprocessors that they develop), I knew in one shot that this was no expert lecture. It was probably one of those regular we’ll-teach-you-but-you-gotta-buy-us trips, which even a company like Microsoft had made in the recent past.

The worst part about the whole thing was how they kept mentioning that it was not a marketing effort and then going all the way out to compare AMD dual core’s performance and architecture with Intel’s. They ripped apart all of Intel’s technologies (Dual-Core, Centrino etc) and insultingly promoted their own.

The interesting part of the afternoon was yet to come. Questions were asked and freebies were handed over, which obviously had AMD encrusted on them. Marketing is an exciting adventure, but what makes it weird is that we forego our own ethics in advertising our products. I prayed for it to end and when it did, we were again shockingly told that it wasn’t a marketing stunt! I left the hall frustrated about what a waste of time I’d been through, and prayed and hoped that if I ever was hired by a company, I won’t be sent on such ridiculous marketing trips.

Maybe, they didn’t know what the difference between teaching and marketing was. On a healthy note, at least the crowd’s boos provided the music…

Here's a picture from Wikipedia :-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sandstorm.jpg