Extra Helping of Squid 1.6.2014

Circular Logic…Squid spent the past week prepping for end times. Enough water to last a few months? Check. Enough dried shrimp to make it through the raids undoubtedly about to occur at local grocers? Check. And then Squid started watching the skies.

Because with the news of that crop circle suddenly appearing just before New Year's Day in a barley field in Chualar, it should only be a matter of time before the alien overlords started landing all over the Central Coast and enslaving every man, woman, child and cephalopod in the land.

Unless, of course, the crop circle had been executed as a marketing stunt by a Silicon Valley chipmaker that, despite having a $9 billion market cap, had only a shoestring budget to pull off the announcement of a new chip so advanced that surely aliens had a hand in its creation.

Meet Nvidia (and pronounce it En-vid-ee-uh), the Santa Clara-based company behind all things Chualar crop circle, including the planning, the execution, the shakey-cam video of two dorks finding it and even the security company brought out to guard the sucker when tinfoil hat wearers from across the region began flocking to it.

Brett Murray, one of those video dorks and a member of Nvidia's global marketing campaign team, tells Squid the idea was first conceived as a challenge thrown down in early December by company CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. Find a way, Huang told them, to build excitement around the announcement this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas of Nvidia's new chip, the Tegra K1, so named because it contains 192 core processors. (For non-geeks reading this, the chip will make a handheld device like a smartphone or tablet more powerful than an Xbox 360—and it means that Nvidia might just dominate its competitor, Qualcomm.)

"It was a tsunami of expectation," Murray says. "We knew we had to do something big. We talked about the chip being impossibly advanced, so impossibly advanced that Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster must have had a hand in it. And aliens too."

Someone jokingly mentioned a crop circle. And boom! An actual team of crop circle designers from Great Britain—"a couple of these guys were the original circle designers in the '70s, although they call themselves 'land artists,'" were hired, Murray says.

(Murray declines to identify the "land artists," but says three of the six-member team have PhDs in subjects like math and philosophy, and one wrote a dissertation on why people believe in things like crop circles.)

Next Hollywood location scout Matthew Mehl was brought in to find a field, and he spent days driving remote roads between Livermore and the Salinas Valley to find the perfect place. 

Only two fields that would work were found, and the one in Chualar emerged the winner. A deal was struck with landowner and the Brits got to work. 

"We asked the landowner to play along, and he did," Murray says.

Over the course of two days, the circle artists and a few members of Nvidia's marketing team (also known as the guys who were spotted on ladders and holding GPS devices outside the field) carved the design of the Tegra K1 into the barley field. And yes, Murray admits, that was braille they used to spell out 192 (a reference to the number of processors). Murray and a colleague named Jaime Salinas then shot the Blair Witch Project-style, shaky cam video they posted to YouTube that purported to show two dudes just happening on the crop circle.

"We know we're not going to win any Oscars for it," Murray says. "But we had a goal and it was that it needed to be a way of getting attention."

Murray says the goal was for just one Bay Area television station to show up. But the next thing you know, television vans and hundreds of people began appearing. Nvidia hired San Jose-based Echelon Security, which brought in a team of guards that normally works the Presidio of Monterey, to make sure nobody got injured and the crowds didn't get out of control.

One of the most important things Murray wants people to know: "We didn't want Chualar to feel we were playing a joke on it. We absolutely developed a relationship with Chualar and we can't thank them enough." The team ate at local restaurants, including First Awakenings in Salinas and the Windmill in Soledad. At the Windmill, the team enjoyed a few beers and tried to keep chatter about the mission on the down low—still, the waitress who served them said, "Good luck on your crop circle" as they left. A man who pulled up next to the field to watch the team in action was told they were just there to survey the land.

"Oh too bad," he told them. "I was hoping you were doing a crop circle."

Doh!

Even if the design of the circles wasn't much to recommend the design of the chips, the marketing campaign was. It went viral. CNN and Good Morning America did segments, there were 300,000 views on the YouTube video and 60 reports done by Chinese media alone. 

"We estimate there were 280 million potential views throughout all media by the time we did the reveal," he says.

That reveal, made by Huang, happened Sunday night in a live webcast at CES.

Now Squid isn't sure what to do with all the provisions Squid has jammed into the lair, but Squid knows this: Nvidia is never going to be able to top this marketing stunt. And Squid hopes no other Silicon Valley company will even try.