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Focus on BlackBerry's alert icon 'Splat': Will RIM's new ad cam

  • In the glory days of BlackBerry all the advertising it seemed to need was the 'sent from my BlackBerry' signature. It signalled that the sender was important, maybe even fabulously wealthy. Or at least an alpha geek. Well those times are long past and BlackBerry has gone from being the only phone for on-the-go email to one of the many phones that do email among other things. The last few years have seen both mindspace and market share being lost to some of the sexier competition. And so after Black-Berry Boys seasons 1 and 2, in association with Vodafone, Research In Motion (RIM) has put together the first branded campaign for its flagship.

    The campaign focuses on the asterisk, called the splat (or the spark if you are talking to its fans from the website Crackberry.com), a design element that has been part of BlackBerry for years. Josy Paul, chairman and chief creative officer at BBDO who also owns an iPhone, claims to reach for his Black-Berry first thing in the morning and cottoned on to the fact that the splat worked as a call to action, giving notifications of messages, email etc.

    He explains, "When we came up with this observation and the concept of making it the symbol for action, we were responding to an Indian situation. But Sunil Dutt (managing director, RIM) believed it was not just about this country but a more universal thought." Dutt shared the idea and got a buy in, resulting in the first commercial being developed simultaneously for India and some other markets in the Asia Pacific region. Says Paul, "It was obvious but no one had given it (the splat) meaning. The moment that happened, it was very epiphanic. Sometimes you know you've cracked something that is a life statement."

    However, if all you've seen so far is the TV commercial, you may come away just a little underwhelmed. It's a montage ad; films which usually feature happy grandparents, simpering children, suave executives, teens in love and sometimes even the family pooch, all rendered ecstatic by the brand. Considering the sheer number of montages that roll out every year, they obviously get greenlit quite easily by marketers even as they evoke groans from the more ad saturated parts of the audience.

    We just knewAction Starts Here was going to feature at least one lisping moppet and one 'youthhangout' moment — we stopped counting after two of the latter. We were pleasantly surprised that the sagacious elder didn't put in an appearance. But to give credit where it's due, BlackBerry and BBDO do throw in at least a few curveballs.

    It’s a montage ad; films which usually feature happy grandparents, simpering children, suave executives, teens in love and sometimes even the family pooch

    One of them was the man who breaks off from the jingle to throw himself out of a plane for a spot of skydiving (at least we hope it was skydiving!) Occasional whiffs of deja vu notwithstanding, the Action Starts Here film is bang on strategy, according to RIM. As it moved from being a pure enterprise device to the wider consumer market, BlackBerry has started to cover a large demographic swathe.

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