Monday, February 18, 2013

Blackberry Super Bowl Ad: Missed the mark

Blackberry Super Bowl Ad:  Missed the mark.

Like most Americans, watching the Super Bowl has become a ritual and so has watching the commercials.  With such popular commercials such as the E*Trade baby and the Darth Vader kid, Super Bowl commercials have high expectations (Especially with the price tag they put on them).  So I was very excited when rumors stated that Blackberry was creating a commercial for the Super Bowl.  

My feelings of the commercial when it aired can be summed up in three words:  they botched it.  I understand the whole premise and what they were going for as I have been keeping up with Blackberry 10 for almost a year.  The average consumer, on the other hand has probably not been keeping up with the Blackberry 10 launch  except for the past couple of weeks.  This commercial was Blackberry’s chance to show America that Blackberry is back and it isn’t your dad’s smartphone.  This was their chance to show the roughly 110 million people watching that Blackberry is back in the fight to be cool again.

Blackberry needed to show off what it does best which is amazing keyboards, superb security, and BBM.   All I got from the commercial was that it cannot turn tanker trucks into rubber ducks and it cannot make you explode into a glorified smoke bomb.  They should have showed the both Z10 and Q10 devices in full for starters.  They are great looking phones and the Q10 contains what Blackberry does best, physical keyboard.  They also should have showed the Blackberry HUB, their messaging app.  Combining these features with a blurb about their 70,000 plus apps would have been an eye opener to the demographic that they need to win back, which is the Apple and Android crowd.  The people that knew of the name Blackberry but never have owned one, because of the lackluster support Blackberry put into its App store.  

This was their one big shot at getting a core demographic and they went backwards instead of moving forwards.

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