Yesterday was the one year anniversary of the official launch of BlackBerry 10. We're also coming up on the one year anniversary of BlackBerry's first-ever Super Bowl commercial.
This Sunday the Broncos will be battling it out against the Seahawks in Super Bowl XLVIII, and this year there will be no new Super Bowl commercial from BlackBerry. In lieu of a new one, I figured we could take a look back at last year's commercial.
Reactions to BlackBerry's Super Bowl commercial were extremely mixed. In our follow-up poll, 15% of you loved it, 25% of you thought it was "good enough", 31% of you thought it needed to be more aggressive, and 27% said WTF was that?!. Oh yeah, and 2% thought it needed more Hollywood. Speaking to many BlackBerry employees around and after that time, apparently even internally the reactions to the commercial were mixed (there was some debate about whether or not to follow through and air it).
The day before the Super Bowl BlackBerry spot ran, we interviewed BlackBerry's Chief Marketing Officer, Frank Boulben, who gave us the skinny on the commercial. One of the questions I asked Frank was about choosing to market the Z10 in the commercial (which wouldn't be available in the US right away), vs. marketing the re-launch of BlackBerry and the BlackBerry 10 platform. Frank's response:
30 seconds is not a lot of time to get a message across. People buy products, not platforms, so focusing on the new Z10 was key. Marketing BlackBerry 10 would not have the same ROI attached to it.
In contrast to BlackBerry's Super Bowl commercial, around CrackBerry, it felt like more of our readers were fans of the pre-Super Bowl BlackBerry commercial that was put together by Toronto-based web design agency, Pixel Carve. This commercial was much too long to actually be a Super Bowl commercial, but definitely delivered a POWERFUL statement about the return of BlackBerry to the land, and what the company's core values are. Funny enough, it's the same core values that new BlackBerry CEO, John Chen has been referring to - Security, Productivity and Communications. That IS BlackBerry's DNA. You can hit up the video below:
Even though the CrackBerry fan favorite may have been the unofficial BlackBerry Super Bowl commercial, after the real commercial aired it actually went on to become the #2 top-rated Super Bowl commercial on NFL's website (Coca Cola's commercial beat it out for #1; Samsung in comparison ranked #29). Of course, the CrackBerry community rallied together to help with the voting and we drove the commercial up to achieving #2 status! :)
While there won't be a BlackBerry Super Bowl commercial this weekend, the question now is, do you think we'll ever see BlackBerry do another Super Bowl commercial?? Let us know in the comments. And enjoy the BIG GAME this weekend!
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