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A Qualcomm Star Makes Movie Debut

Qualcomm Inc. wants to be top of mind among the people buying smartphones this summer.

It’s making another advertising push for its Snapdragon chip, though for San Diegans, it won’t be as eye-catching as the one in late 2011, when the corporation rebranded Qualcomm Stadium as Snapdragon Stadium.

Snapdragon is Qualcomm’s chip for smartphones, tablet computers and other devices. It really isn’t a consumer product. Qualcomm sells its chips to mobile phone makers.

Still, Qualcomm wants consumers’ attention.

Part of its strategy is to hook moviegoers.

Qualcomm created a one-minute short that looks and sounds like a movie trailer. After testing in five markets, Qualcomm has rolled its “spoof movie trailer” out nationally, said Tim McDonough, vice president of marketing for Qualcomm.

“A Dragon is Coming — to Your Phone” starts as a castle scene in the Middle Ages. The ad, mixing live action and a computer-generated dragon, pokes some fun at moviemaking conventions. And it explains what Snapdragon does in layman’s terms: It operates fast, conserves power and multitasks easily.

“It’s not an ad about gigahertz” or triangles per second, McDonough said. The ad “cuts the clutter and builds an emotional connection,” the executive said.

The in-theater ad includes a reference to the HTC One smartphone, the flagship phone from Taiwan-based HTC Corp.

The Los Angeles office of Ogilvy & Mather did the creative work on the spoof movie trailer, McDonough said.

Qualcomm is also running television advertising on TNT, ESPN and ABC during the National Basketball Association finals. The ads are also tagged for HTC One carried by Sprint. (Sprint’s price for the phone starts at $99 with a two-year plan.)

South Korea-based LG Electronics is making use of the Snapdragon brand in its marketing for its Optimus G line of phones. LG sees Snapdragon as an “asset differentiator,” McDonough said.

Winning Over Consumers

What’s more, Qualcomm is advertising on the Internet. On ESPN’s NBA site, Qualcomm has created advertising that doubles as an interactive game where a player shoots baskets by pressing a computer key.

Other advertising has targeted videogame enthusiasts.

McDonough declined to say how much Qualcomm was spending on its ad campaign.

The company is also promoting Snapdragon in the United Kingdom, Brazil and China.

“China is an enormous market for us,” said McDonough, noting that is where a lot of smartphone growth is. In that part of the world, “people’s first computer is a phone,” he said.

Qualcomm offers four versions of its Snapdragon chip, which performs cellphone functions and acts as a computer processor. The high-end model, the Snapdragon 800, has four cores which can each operate at 2.3 billion gigahertz, or cycles per second. The wireless Internet component of the chip lets the device connect to fast 4G LTE networks.

Strategy Analytics reported earlier this spring that the global smartphone applications processor market grew 60 percent in 2012 to reach $12.9 billion. Qualcomm was No. 1, getting 43 percent of the revenue share “on the strength of its strong relationships with global handset manufacturers and broad product portfolio,” read a statement from Strategy Analytics. Rounding out the top five chipmakers were Apple Inc., Samsung, MediaTek Inc. and Broadcom Corp.

Part of Qualcomm’s strategy has been to offer its chips at multiple price points.

Getting Ahead of the Competition

“The new Snapdragon 600 and 800 chips will help Qualcomm move further ahead of the competition,” wrote analyst Sravan Kundojjala.

Qualcomm made its Snapdragon Stadium advertising push in late 2011, in time for the Poinsettia Bowl, Holiday Bowl, and Chargers versus Ravens game.

In other news, anti-virus software maker Kaspersky Lab recently announced that it signed a deal with Qualcomm.

Under the agreement, Kaspersky will offer special terms on preloading its software — either Kaspersky Mobile Security or Kaspersky Tablet Security — to companies that build their Android devices around Snapdragon processors.

Kaspersky is based in the Boston suburb of Woburn, Mass.

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