Tuesday, April 9th 2019
Intel Soaks Up Heather Lennon, AMD RTG Digital Marketing Head
Intel has hired another of AMD's top executives as Raja Koduri hopes to basically rebuild RTG under Intel's banner and its resources. This time it's Heather Lennon, who led AMD Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) marketing and had been with AMD for over 10 years. She directed the Team Red community and won PR Week award for Campaign of the Year 2014. Lennon bagged 40 awards for digital marketing for AMD, and is widely believed to be the brains behind the PR upper-hand AMD enjoys among tech forums and the DIY community.
Lennon now joins Intel as Senior Manager, Digital Marketing for Graphics, and will work closely with Mark Taylor, an ex-NVIDIA exec who now leads technical marketing at Intel Graphics. Other ex-AMD and ex-NVIDIA honchos include Chris Hook and Tom Peterson, respectively. Raja Koduri is overseeing Intel's ambitious project to make inroads to the discrete GPU market under the new Xe brand, not just to serve gamers and PC enthusiasts, but more importantly GPU compute, cloud compute, and AI markets. Koduri is also reportedly lending insights to Intel's new Gen11 integrated graphics architecture, which debuts with its 10 nm "Ice Lake" processors.
Source:
Heather Lennon (Twitter)
Lennon now joins Intel as Senior Manager, Digital Marketing for Graphics, and will work closely with Mark Taylor, an ex-NVIDIA exec who now leads technical marketing at Intel Graphics. Other ex-AMD and ex-NVIDIA honchos include Chris Hook and Tom Peterson, respectively. Raja Koduri is overseeing Intel's ambitious project to make inroads to the discrete GPU market under the new Xe brand, not just to serve gamers and PC enthusiasts, but more importantly GPU compute, cloud compute, and AI markets. Koduri is also reportedly lending insights to Intel's new Gen11 integrated graphics architecture, which debuts with its 10 nm "Ice Lake" processors.
38 Comments on Intel Soaks Up Heather Lennon, AMD RTG Digital Marketing Head
I guess "soaking" would be the wrong term used. Maybe just
"Intel hires Heather Lennon, AMD RTG Digital Marketing Head"
would be ok.
If she was behind the Team Red community and it's viral marketing campaign, no wonder she won so many awards. The team red initiative along with viral marketing machine that fans the flames of team red is the good guy, nvidia is the bad guy is a very effective, particularly in terms of cost that has lead to many people being pro AMD and Anti Nvidia.
It has allowed AMD to get away with behavior like Nvidia with generally none of the backlash in terms of pricing and late product delivery. While we might criticize AMD marketing department, their team red and viral marketing campaign is nothing short of genius.
Remember AMD marketing budget for graphics is limited. The free marketing/cheap marketing due to team red has been very effective at raising AMD profile among forums.
What happens all the time is a positition becomes available (whatever X amount of years later) and then someone from AMD reaches out to Heather or she simply sees the positition and applies. As long as she performed well, she has a good chance of being reacquired.
Leaving a company isn't a personal matter for most companies (especially large corporations). It is just business.
That's what Intel and Raja need, is newer better marketing heads :laugh: