Qualcomm / Awareness Campaign

It was Qualcomm who developed CDMA technology into the breakthrough innovation that ignited the wireless revolution. According to the company, people around the world touch something made better by Qualcomm technology “billions, maybe trillions of times a day.” This includes everything from smartphones to navigation and health monitoring systems. Yet the company is often misidentified as a cell phone manufacturer instead of the thought leader behind the technology that makes the cell phone work. Qualcomm wanted to change that.

An awareness campaign was planned to position the company as both a technology leader and community of innovators at work on the future. Concepts were developed with messages that could speak to the pervasiveness of their achievements and ongoing potential for impact. The creative presented different ideas for illustrating the company’s discovery process from using the ‘Q’ in Qualcomm’s logo as a hero graphic to creating an abstract train of thought with a series of connecting shapes. Individuals—engineers, scientists and strategists—from within the Qualcomm community of innovators were to be spotlighted. The resulting campaign became a hybrid of these concepts. It launched as a series of station dominations in East Coast commuter stations, advertisements in leading national newspapers and online.