Qualcomm, the maker of chipsets and wireless technology, has launched a new campaign and creative platform that looks to demonstrate the ability for its consumer brand Snapdragon to power PCs for modern consumers, per details shared with Marketing Dive. “Snapdragon. That’s How” was created with agency 72andSunny and comes at an inflection point for the tech company and the industry at large as artificial intelligence becomes a larger part of consumers’ lives.

“Whatever you want to do, whenever and wherever you want to do it, it’s you plus Snapdragon,” Qualcomm CMO Don McGuire said of the marketing platform. “If you have us powering your PC… you’re going to do amazing things.”

The campaign launches with spots that demonstrate the power of Snapdragon through familiar scenarios and personas: a freshman during orientation week, a scout leader on a camping trip, entrepreneurs launching a new business and a maid-of-honor planning an emergency bachelorette party. 

“We definitely wanted them to be relatable moments where we all know performance matters, centered on the people who put their heart into everything they do. Those are definitely our consumers,” said Ali Cornford, chief executive officer at 72andSunny NY. “In a category that does a lot of telling… we wanted to be very intentional. How do we show that in a way that people can relate to, versus just talking at them?”

An anthem film unites all four vignettes, and the campaign will run across broadcast, connected TV, online and social, including TikTok and Instagram. All the spots were shot on a Snapdragon-powered Samsung S25 Ultra and edited on Snapdragon-powered computers.

“You gotta drink your own Kool-Aid,” McGuire said.

Evolving a tech brand

Snapdragon, Qualcomm’s most consumer-facing brand, launched in 2007 and was initially focused on the smartphone space in Asia. When McGuire joined as CMO after Cristiano Amon became Qualcomm’s CEO in 2021, the pair discussed how to drive brand affinity for Snapdragon and turn it into an iconic consumer brand in the way that Intel did with its “Intel Inside” campaign in the 1990s.

As Snapdragon’s product categories began to expand outside of smartphones and into automobile and other personal devices, the brand focused on connecting its values and value proposition across categories. After first marketing around specifications and benchmarking and then features and benefits, Snapdragon landed on experiences and emotional connections, launching its “Power to Move” campaign in 2023.

Snapdragon entered the PC space in 2024, bringing its processing power to a category that had been more focused on iteration than innovation in recent years as the center of consumers’ digital lives moved from desktop to mobile devices. The brand started advertising its PC products across linear TV and connected TV and digital and social channels in markets where it previously hadn’t done much brand building, such as the U.S. and Western Europe. The work paid off: Snapdragon in 2025 landed at No. 38 on Kantar’s BrandZ list, ahead of Nike, Disney and Uber. 

“The PC business is cutthroat, highly competitive and it is a little bit of a mafia situation when it comes to the value chain. You got to stand out. You've got to do things differently if you're going to win,” McGuire said. “I put it out to all my agency partners and said, ‘I want ideation. I want an end-to-end PC marketing platform that we can go to market with.’”

The result is “Snapdragon. That’s How,” which includes a new tagline that bills the brand as “the processor your PC wishes it had.” In addition to the campaign and platform, 72andSunny worked on a design system that revolves around a transparent laptop with a Snapdragon processor as the heart inside the machine. 

“We really wanted to end each spot with a punctuation mark, knowing that we have an ingredient brand and we’re trying to draw awareness to the processor and the chip inside the laptop,” Cornford said.

AI inflection point

Snapdragon’s entrance and rise in the PC market parallels the growth of AI, and the brand sees its new campaign as a way to prepare for the moment where agentic AI enters consumers’ lives in a major way. As AI agents roll out to laptops, smartphones, cars and wearable devices, Snapdragon is well-suited for a moment where consumers are increasingly concerned with computing power.

“We are in a period of profound industry transformation — the rise of AI agents is reshaping our roadmap across every platform we develop,” Amon said in Qualcomm’s latest earnings report. 

Qualcomm last week announced Q2 fiscal 2026 revenue of $10.6 billion, in line with Wall Street expectations, while its Q3 revenue forecast came in lower than expected. However, plans for an unnamed data center chip client and rumors of a deal with OpenAI have buoyed the stock. The company will announce further plans at its investor day on June 24.

While the agentic AI inflection point might be this year, next year or sometime later, Snapdragon doesn’t expect computing power to be a mass consumer concern immediately. First, it will be the domain of developers, gamers and creators who need to compute to follow their passions. Then, Snapdragon will be ready with its products as more consumers enter the space.

With that in mind, Snapdragon and 72andSunny focused on use cases that are familiar and down-to-earth in the campaign. One spot features a woman who, after flights are cancelled, uses AI on a Snapdragon-powered laptop to pivot from having a vacation in Fiji to a Fiji-themed party in Philadelphia.

“We’ve got this campaign that doesn’t go that nerdy,” McGuire said. “No one’s going to say, ‘Oh my God, I’d never do that’ or ‘that’ll never happen’ in these spots. We’re not jumping the shark with this stuff.”