AMD is a technology company that makes cutting-edge computer processors. In recent years, AMD’s sought to reignite customer passion as sales lagged and the company struggled. In 2013, AMD developed a new line of graphics cards, but needed to unveil them in a new way to gain back supporters. The plan? Execute a global launch to make industry history. With that, GPU14 was born.

AMD planned a webcast product preview event in Hawaii, a nod to the public engineering codename for the cards: ‘Volcanic Islands’. Broadcast from a location that could reach every important time-zone live on the same day, AMD assembled 120 of the world’s most elite technology journalists for a star-studded presentation of graphics and gaming technology and game previews. A partnership with the makers of Battlefield 4 was announced in Pearl Harbour aboard the historic USS Missouri, and improved temperature control features of the card were announced atop an extinct volcano. In dozens of languages, press kept readers glued and community members tuned in live.

The campaign’s secret weapon was a global group of AMD fans dubbed ‘The Red Team’ that would be re-invigorated and used as a social accelerant to propel coverage volume and drive social sentiment.

A three-month product roll-out followed, along with a massive 1000-piece global sampling campaign.

The campaign was a huge success, nearly tripling enthusiast graphics card sales, generating 22,000 social mentions on preview day and delivering a whopping 1.5 billion potential social media and press impressions globally.

The press event was hosted on September 24-26, 2013 in Oahu, Hawaii and the live product preview event took place on the morning of the 25th, local time.

The location ensured that AMD stakeholders in key time zones could participate in the preview via a live webcast, with some press embedding and rebroadcasting the video stream on their websites. Real-time press analysis through live blogs and social commentary increased awareness and traffic while widening the international impact of the event, with many press instantaneously translating the preview content.

AMD staged a show packed with gaming industry superstars and technologies. Press, fans, partners and customers were engaged to amplify the AMD story through social channels.

Over several months, ten more waves of coverage followed as the full product family rolled out to market through an ambitious and coordinated global product reviews program.

AMD’s media relations efforts helped increase the sales of enthusiast graphics cards, with a 224% increase Q/Q and 260% increase Y/Y (by revenue) and 210% Q/Q and 237% Y/Y (by unit volume); sales more than tripled.

Global coverage of the preview totalled 1,343 unique articles, and generated 926 million potential press impressions initially. By end of Q4, article volume rose to 2,000 with 1.5 billion total potential impressions, exceeding the target by 300% and claiming an AMD record.

Positive message pull through included headlines like “The fastest graphics chip ever” (Tech Radar), “AMD disrupts GPU Market” (Forbes), and “AMD’s graphics card comeback” (Engadget).

Almost 120,000 press, community members, customers and stakeholders tuned into the webcast, which generated over 22,000 social mentions in just hours. AMD trended nationally on Twitter, and Anandtech’s live blog traffic exceeded the iPhone 5 launch and temporarily overloaded a massive server infrastructure.