Intel China's Modding Expo

Introduction

Celebrity endorsements are a powerful marketing tool: women spend billions on cosmetics because a movie star tells them “they’re worth it”. Thousands of weekend golfers lap up Nike equipment to “be like Tiger”. But would the same thing work for a product like a processor?

Faced with the challenge of sexing-up CPUs as part of a domestic marketing push, Intel China devised an impressively progressive plan: tap into the talent of the worldwide modding community to combine beauty on the outside with speed and power efficiency on the inside.

The Premise

Rather than a LAN, convention or advertising campaign, Intel designed something a bit more, well, creative: a full press conference with 65 media, media interviews live online with some of China’s most popular websites, and two-week exhibition open to the public to raise the profile of modding and naturally the benefits of having Intel Inside.

The brainchild of Lulu Tsao, Marketing Director of Intel China, the idea was to fly half a dozen of the best international modders and their creations to Beijing to meet the local media and inspire the Chinese modders. Who you gonna call....?

Intel surveyed the local modding community to see who they would most like to meet. The answer was perhaps an obvious one: our own Pete "G-gnome" Dickison, creator of Orac³ and WMD. Unfortunately, Pete wasn't able to accept the kind invitation for personal reasons but luckily there was an entire stable of other bit-tech modders ready to answer the call.




And so with tickets, baggage and mods in hand (or at least in shipping crates, or so we thought), it was time to fly to Beijing for a week courtesy of Intel. What was it like? In a word, “epic.”

(Oh, and for the record, shots of Customs like up above are apparently illegal. Yeah, who knew? You heard it here first.)