Trifire working for AD - pass Crossfire working for newest PC releases - fail

It was amusing... I imagine you get told all the time how critical advertising is. Must be hard not to roll your eyes.

It does depend on the product, market conditions and of course, whether the company has a competitive product. I roll my eyes only to curry favour with the person paying my fees, typically when they mention the amount of OPEX and CAPEX their S/M or S&M guys and gals have blown through with zero effect on their market penetration. Dude, I've been in meetings where I've made what I see as a day one marketing question like "Have you tried contacting your lapsed customers and asking them a series of questions regarding why they are no longer customers?" and, these 'professionals' look at me as if I've discovered fire. To any sane person, this is a baby step to understanding why you do not have as many customers as you do and why you are losing position in your market space. Additionally, your impact cost to the business is normally small, as you already have the contact data and these people are a thousand times more likely to engage with the sales department of a company they know than a company they don't. Another meeting I recall is when someone thought it would be a great idea to spend nearly all of her annual marketing budget on an 'event' that was off calendar (not part of the normal conferences and exhibitions for this industry) and geographically was more than two hours away from the average target audience. She also did not factor in things like drop out, for which I had to explain to her that when you get people to say 'yes' they will go to something, you typically have about 50-70% drop out, and again, she looked at me with a dumb founded expression of disbelief and outright refusal that this magical, wonderous event that she had planned would have people eating out of her hand and take the company into a new dawn of amazing financial results. At an extreme distance, and admitably without knowing what the ins and outs of this particular event were that the forum have broken me in on, AMD appeared to be spending money frivolously. I would love to know what the actual S&M expenditure is and what this brings back for AMD though.