Company: AMD, Austin, TX
Company Description: AMD (NYSE: AMD) designs and integrates technology that powers millions of intelligent devices, including personal computers, tablets, game consoles and cloud servers that define the new era of surround computing. AMD solutions enable people everywhere to realize the full potential of their favorite devices and applications to push the boundaries of what is possible. For more information, visit www
Nomination Category: Corporate Communications, Investor Relations, & Public Relations Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Communications Team of the Year

Nomination Title: AMD Public Relations Team

Tell the story about what this nominated team achieved since January 1 2013 (up to 525 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:  TEXT REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION

At the beginning of 2013, the pressure was on from the sales team to deliver massive awareness and preference for AMD components. In just five months, AMD built a world class team to fight a modern PR war. After tripling the PR budget, AMD recruited a team of nine employees and FT contractors that included top former semiconductor journalists, professional engineers, PR agency professionals, social media experts, content and community strategists, and a rising star who came over from the marketing department.

AMD’s North America-based team speaks eight languages, was born on five continents, and has a combined 45 years of semiconductor experience.

This is what the AMD team accomplished in 2013:

Surround Computing: Launched with a CTO keynote at Hot Chips, Surround Computing established AMD’s position in the ‘Internet of Things’ discussion two weeks ahead of Intel, and generated over 80% SOV at the Intel-sponsored engineering conference.

Never Settle Reloaded (game bundling campaign): AMD’s first sustained community engagement and PR campaign generated 750 million potential impressions worldwide, and was credited with driving four percentage points of market share gains for AMD Radeon.

AMD Technograffiti: Building compelling PC form factors out of everyday devices (a retro gas pump turned jukebox, a desktop PC with internal missile bays that fired real model rockets, a tabletop hockey game PC that ‘played’ itself) captured the imagination of the press and the industry at SXSWi and delivered 25X more potential impressions per dollar than similar campaigns.

Radeon HD 7990 Publicity Stunt: Just before launching the world’s fastest graphics card, AMD quietly put the Radeon HD 7990 up on Ebay, instigating a community bidding frenzy that sent the price skyrocketing to $96,400 (non-paying bidder), and drove tens of millions of press and digital impressions. The $250 mini-campaign (Ebay fees) generated dozens of stories and $600K in earned media value.

The International Solid State Circuits Conference – How to Build A Holodeck: The concept was to deliver a serious engineering narrative around Heterogeneous Systems Architecture to this intimidating and distinguished academic crowd but draw connections between HSA and Holodeck enabling technologies such as tactile feedback. The icing was an appearance by actor LeVar Burton, who played LaForge in the Star Trek series. The unorthodox approach of marrying a CES-style presentation with a deep engineering narrative was called ‘the best ISSCC presentation in years’ by conference organizers.

#GPU14: The team conceptualized and led AMD’s most impactful PR campaign to date, which included a community building campaign an global community webcast preview for AMD’s 2014 family of graphics processors.

Launched before a crowd of 120 global technology press aboard the US Missouri in Oahu Hawaii, the event drew an audience of 118,000, trended nationally o Twitter, delivered 1300 articles and over a billion potential impressions by Oct 9th, and tripled enthusiast GPU sales.

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Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the nominated team:

Chris Hook is Director of Global Public Relations, AMD. Before joining AMD, Hook oversaw corporate communications ATI Technologies GmbH, based in Munich, Germany. Hook has over 20 years of experience directing innovative global marketing, PR, and social media campaigns for a variety of technology companies, consumer brands, government leaders and non-profit organizations. Hook possesses a BA from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and a post-graduate certificate in corporate communications from Humber College in Toronto, Ontario.