INSIDE INTEL
Ruby Zefo is Intel’s chief trademark counsel and is responsible for around 7,000 registrations and marks across the world. She leads a team of 18 trademark professionals who handle all of Intel’s trademark work, including clearance, prosecution, licensing, enforcement, counselling and litigation.
Te Intel Inside programme significantly adds to the strength of Intel’s brand. Te trademark licensing and marketing programme is aimed at large computer manufacturers and system integrators to market their products and those of Intel to end users. In the 1980s, Intel used numerical schemes to brand its processors. It believed that its 386 and 486 processors were protected trademarks, but a US court ruled otherwise, allowing Intel’s competitors to use them at will.
Zefo says: “We had to decide what we were going to do aſter that. We wanted more end user demand, but when you’re an ingredient, that’s hard to do. How do you get people to care about what’s inside what they’re buying, because they can’t see it. Te creation of the Intel Inside programme was about getting people to care about what’s inside their computers.”
Indeed, an early incarnation of the ‘Intel Inside’ tagline read ‘Intel. Te computer inside’. In 1991, the licensing and marketing programme launched. “Te programme requires computer manufacturers and system integrators who use our processors to put Intel logos on the outside of their devices,” Zefo says. “When the consumer goes to buy a computer, the Intel name can be seen on there, and it also allows licensees to use our logos in their adverts.”
She adds: “In return for that, a certain portion of the money from their purchase of our processors gets put into a marketing fund for them. Ten when they advertise, they can draw from the marketing fund to help reimburse them for some of the money they spent on the advert with our logos in it.”
Te Intel Inside programme allows the company’s brands to be immediately recognisable to ordinary consumers.
Zefo says: “We end up getting our logos in a tonne of advertisements, which we otherwise wouldn’t be able to do. We also do direct advertising, so consumers can do their research and decide what they want. Tat’s how we’ve been able to turn our brand into one of the biggest and most famous in the world.”
She adds: “We’ve also expanded to allow licensees to use our marks in advertising to a much broader
base of companies. Tere is a huge number of IT product distributors who can use our logos in their advertisements well beyond the Intel Inside programme. We have channel licence programmes and other types of programmes that have well over 100,000 licensees in them.”
Attitude adjustment
Intel’s trademark portfolio is mostly made up of traditional word marks, according to Zefo, yet one of its most famous marks is considered non- traditional by many regimes.
28 World Intellectual Property Review March/April 2011
She says: “We have the sound mark for the famous Intel bong. Tat’s our other big brand that people are pretty aware of and it’s a non- traditional mark. We also have a motion mark that we’ve licensed to DreamWorks. It’s called InTru 3D and it’s for 3D movies.”
Non-traditional marks have been around for a long time, says Zefo, but there are still jurisdictions that do not accept applications for them. “When they do accept an application for a non-traditional mark, you have to figure out what kind of specimen they will accept and that
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