AMD's transformation has generated tremendous results
The transformation of AMD from a PC microprocessor challenger to a semiconductor industry leader has been nothing short of remarkable. Under CEO Lisa Su’s leadership, the company has increased its market value to $150 billion from $10 billion in the last five years. At her side has been John Taylor, the company’s CMO since 2017. Taylor recently shared the highlights of this transformation success story. Here are the highlights.
John Taylor, AMD's CMO
John Ellett: How has AMD changed since you took over as CMO?
John Taylor: I was appointed CMO of AMD in 2017, and at that time more than 90% of the company’s revenues were from the PC and gaming markets (consoles and graphics). Our products were in the mid-range and value segments of the PC market, and we were perceived as a bang-for-the-buck brand. Our market capitalization as a publicly traded company was about $10 billion. In 2017, we introduced a new CPU architecture called “Zen” and began a multi-year, multi-product generation journey to high-performance computing leadership. This included creating and launching the server processor AMD EPYC and the premium PC processor AMD Ryzen – the product brands and value propositions. Also, more than 90% of the marketing program budget was attached to partners like OEMs and retailers – very little investment was being made at the corporate brand level.
Fast forward to 2022 and through a combination of many important factors, but notably sustained product leadership and investments in the AMD brand, today AMD’s market cap is north of $150 billion. We just completed the largest acquisition in the history of semiconductors with Xilinx, our server processors power cloud services for billions of people, our share in the PC market is concentrated in the most premium commercial, consumer, and gaming devices, and the AMD brand is ranked as one of the most valuable and fastest growing in the world.
Ellett: How are you transforming Marketing to respond to those changes?
Taylor: We’ve maintained three primary pillars of focus for marketers since I became CMO, with the priorities within those pillars always evolving to match the rhythms of the business and market. First pillar is to invest in and build affinity for the AMD brand, especially with CIOs, IT decision makers, CTOs, as we executed our server and commercial PC computing roadmap. Second pillar is generating measurable pull for our new product families by winning each product launch, cultivating communities of brand enthusiasts and influencers, and building a digital demand gen pipeline for our commercial businesses. Third pillar is scaling and enhancing our marketing capabilities through digital transformation. A few examples of this include launching digital training and certification academies for partners and AMD salespeople, building marketing automation and enterprise account-based marketing connected to our CRM strategy, upgrading our direct commerce capabilities to support millions of concurrent users, and creating a single digital framework for how we plan and measure partner marketing.
Ellett: What makes your partnership with your CEO so effective?
Taylor: The most important aspect of my partnership with Lisa is how she pushes and develops me as a leader. From the moment I first had the great fortune to work with her on a project shortly after she joined AMD in 2012 to today, she’s helped me grow in my thinking and expectations just as she’s helped AMD to grow as a business. Today, we partner on everything from brand and marketing strategy, to new product introductions, to driving the voice of our customers and communities into AMD to create a better experience or product decisions.
Ellett: What accomplishment are you most proud of over the past few years?
Taylor: I’d say I’m most proud of the business results and the team we’ve built. When you start the journey from the base of the mountain with intention to launch new premium products under all-new brands, and conventional wisdom doubts you, it makes the tangible business successes all the sweeter. AMD has doubled its enterprise server CPU revenue year over year. Consumers, creators, and gamers around the world pay a bit extra for AMD Ryzen-powered PCs because they know the value proposition, and we see it in our revenue, share growth and higher ASPs. And the AMD marketing team is a group of creative and determined people who love the AMD culture and being part of the impact our brand has in the world, even when faced with all the challenges our demanding industry or AMD’s hypergrowth can represent.
AMD's new brand campaign, Together We Advance_
Ellett: What was the catalyst for the new brand campaign?
Taylor: Multiple catalysts converged to create the inspiration for the brand platform and campaign, and the moment to launch it. The first catalyst was the repositioning of AMD as the leader in high performance computing, which we pursued and delivered against for the last five years. That led to hypergrowth for AMD, which in turn put more importance on a unifying theme that expressed our calling and our culture as thousands of new people joined the company. The next catalysts were the acquisitions of Xilinx and Pensando this year, adding new technology, customers, and markets like AI, 5G networks, automotive, aerospace, healthcare and more. Then we chose our Financial Analyst Day June 9 for the launch to add more context around it, as we told the story of the next 3-5 years of AMD, our roadmaps, our strategy, under the “together we advance” banner.
Creatively, “Together” aligns with our culture of inclusion and of establishing deep partnerships with our customers – the way we share a vision with partners to design and build some of the most important applications of technology, as well as how the many millions-strong community of enthusiasts for our brand motivate and inspire us. We understand that we must work together. And AMD employees collaborate every day to maximize the potential of modern computing, utilizing semiconductor innovation to transform how people live, work, learn and play.
“Advance” aligns with our vision of pushing the envelope in computing, “Advanced” is in our company name, and it’s the core idea of our new brand platform: where performance meets possibilities. The arrow mark (also represents a transistor) has always been part of the AMD logo for over 50 years, pointing up and to the right symbolizing advancement. The time is right to make it a more prominent part of our branding.
The flashing underscore symbolizes that we always have something to come and lets us build familiarity with our expanded market footprint, as in “AMD Together We Advance AI”.
Ellett: What’s next in your transformation journey?
Taylor: We are just getting started in driving the “Together We Advance” campaign to engage new and existing customers to build their familiarity with AMD’s expanded leadership computing capabilities. Building our brand is a powerful accelerator of the AMD business.
