How Intel Used a Turntable to Put Edison Technology on the Decks
Intel's "Reinventing the Turntable" is a digital campaign launched in the United States in August 2015 that embedded the Intel Edison computing platform inside a DJ turntable, created in collaboration with Thud Rumble, a collective of DJs, makers, and technologists, to demonstrate compact computing power through a cultural and musical lens.
The campaign's central proposition is straightforward: laptop-scale computing power, condensed into the Intel Edison module, can live inside instruments and tools that people already use and love. Rather than present the microprocessor through a conventional product demonstration, Intel chose the turntable — an instrument with its own innovation history and devoted technical community — as the proof-of-concept object. The result is a content piece that frames Intel not as a component manufacturer but as an enabler of creative reinvention.
In the United States, August 2015 placed this campaign inside a competitive electronics landscape where Intel was simultaneously defending hardware market share and broadening its brand story beyond the PC era. The campaign sits within a lineage of Intel communications, including the "Sponsors of Tomorrow" platform introduced in May 2009, according to reporting by The New York Times, which aimed to reposition Intel as a company enabling future technology rather than simply supplying processors inside existing devices.
Thud Rumble's involvement is the campaign's cultural anchor. The collective brought credibility from the DJ and maker communities, and their willingness to engineer alongside Intel signals that the Intel Edison platform was genuinely deployed rather than cosmetically featured. Richard "DJ QBert" Quitevis of Thud Rumble is the named participant at the centre of the film, according to records documented at Ads of the World. The campaign comprises a single media asset in digital format, published on August 17, 2015, according to thinkliveinc.com. Clapboard has assigned this campaign a score of 66 out of 100.
Intel entered 2015 as the world's largest semiconductor vendor. According to CRN and design-reuse.com, Intel held approximately 15.5% global semiconductor market share that year, retaining the top position for the 24th consecutive year, while generating semiconductor revenue of approximately $51.709 billion, down 1.2% year over year. That revenue decline arrived in a year when, according to design-reuse.com, worldwide semiconductor revenue fell approximately 1.9% and the global semiconductor market was valued at approximately $335 billion.
Samsung Electronics was Intel's most proximate competitive pressure in the semiconductor rankings. According to sammobile.com and eetimes.com, Samsung generated approximately $38.855 billion in semiconductor revenue in 2015, up approximately 11.8% year over year, capturing approximately 11.6% global market share. In Q2 2015, one estimate from IHS, as reported by eetimes.com, placed Intel at 13.6% and Samsung at 12% market share, illustrating how narrow the gap was becoming on a quarterly basis. Against this backdrop, Intel's strategic imperative was not only volume — it was relevance.
The Intel Edison platform was Intel's answer to the maker and IoT movement, a compact computing module designed to be embedded in objects, wearables, and prototypes. Targeting the DJ and music hardware community through Thud Rumble positioned Intel Edison inside a credible innovation subculture at a moment when makers and hardware hackers carried genuine cultural authority in the United States. Intel's broader agency model during this period was notably pluralistic: according to Business Insider, Intel operated an open-source roster approach in 2012 rather than relying on a single agency of record, a posture that continued into the mid-2010s and made collaborations with specialist production partners like Houseblend Media structurally consistent with the brand's communications architecture.
The film produced for "Reinventing the Turntable" is a documentary-style digital piece directed by Josh Soskin. Soskin's direction places the creative weight on the build process and performance rather than on product specification, a choice that foregrounds Intel Edison's physical integration into the turntable rather than abstracting it into a feature list. The production company is Houseblend Media, according to archive records at Ads of the World.
Executive creative direction was led by Teresa Herd, with creative direction shared between Caspian Michalowski and David Williams, according to documentation at Ads of the World. The lead creative agency for the campaign is not identified in available archive records. This production structure — a named director, named creative leadership, and a specialist production house — is consistent with Intel's 2010s approach of assembling campaign-specific creative teams rather than routing all work through a single retained agency.
Richard "DJ QBert" Quitevis of Thud Rumble is the human centre of the film. DJ QBert is a recognised figure in the scratching and turntablism community in the United States, which means his participation functions as endorsement not from a celebrity outside the subject matter but from a practitioner whose technical judgment the target audience would trust. The casting decision is therefore both a creative and a strategic one: it grounds the Intel Edison technology claim inside a community where the standard for what counts as genuine innovation is unusually high.
The single-asset digital format reflects a content marketing logic common to technology brands in 2015, where a well-produced film distributed through owned and earned channels could reach technically curious audiences without requiring broadcast media investment. The turntable itself, modified to carry Intel Edison computing capability, functions as both the product demonstration and the visual centrepiece of the piece.
No verified performance data for "Reinventing the Turntable" is publicly available. No view counts, engagement metrics, earned media reach figures, or conversion data have been attributed to this campaign in publicly accessible records.
Structural analysis, however, supports a reading of the campaign as well-constructed for its stated objective. The decision to demonstrate Intel Edison through a physical, culturally meaningful object — the DJ turntable — rather than through a technical specification sheet addresses one of the core challenges facing microprocessor brands: the invisibility of their core product. Intel's component is, by definition, hidden inside other things. "Reinventing the Turntable" made the act of embedding the component the entire subject of the film, turning an engineering constraint into narrative content.
The collaboration with Thud Rumble and the specific presence of DJ QBert gave the campaign earned credibility within the maker and DJ communities in the United States, audiences that are both technically literate and socially influential within hardware and music culture. This kind of peer-endorsed demonstration is structurally more persuasive for a developer and maker audience than broadcast advertising would be.
Clapboard rates this campaign 66 out of 100. The score reflects a campaign that executes its cultural positioning competently and deploys its named talent purposefully, while remaining limited in demonstrable scale and measurable impact by its single-asset digital format and the absence of any documented distribution or amplification strategy in the public record.
Intel's Reinventing the Turntable is a digital campaign published in the United States in August 2015. It embedded the Intel Edison computing platform inside a DJ turntable in collaboration with Thud Rumble, demonstrating compact microprocessor technology through a cultural and musical context rather than a conventional product demonstration.
Richard "DJ QBert" Quitevis is a recognised turntablist and member of Thud Rumble, a collective of DJs, makers, and technologists. Intel partnered with Thud Rumble to ground the Intel Edison platform inside a technically credible community in the United States where genuine hardware innovation carries cultural authority.
Intel Edison is a compact computing module designed to be embedded in objects, wearables, and maker prototypes. In Reinventing the Turntable, Edison was physically integrated into a DJ turntable, giving the instrument laptop-scale computing capability and making the embedding process the central subject of the campaign film.
Josh Soskin directed the Reinventing the Turntable film for Intel. The production company was Houseblend Media. Executive creative direction was handled by Teresa Herd, with creative direction by Caspian Michalowski and David Williams, according to archive records at Ads of the World. The lead creative agency is not publicly identified.
Intel's Reinventing the Turntable campaign received a Clapboard Score of 66 out of 100. The score reflects competent cultural positioning and purposeful use of named talent, set against limitations including a single-asset digital format and no documented amplification strategy in publicly available records.
Reinventing the Turntable extends Intel's effort to reposition itself beyond processor manufacturing. Intel's Sponsors of Tomorrow platform, introduced in May 2009 according to The New York Times, established the strategic ambition. By 2015, campaigns like this one used maker culture and the Intel Edison platform to sustain that positioning in the United States.
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