CrackBerry Asks: What do you think of BlackBerry Australia's Wake Up marketing campaign?

Yesterday evening I was speaking to a colleague of mine who said, "Kevin... you need to do something to get BlackBerry to stop this Wake Up campaign. It's horrendous." In case you missed it, you can check out the Wake Up website here.

I told him that it was a regional marketing campaign -- targeting the Australian market -- so even though I also wasn't a fan of the Wake Up slogan, that it probably wasn't that big of a deal to get bent out of shape over. BlackBerry has their global brand building campaigns, and they also have their regional advertising campaigns that they target to local customs and culture.  

From there we debated back and forth over it. The conclusion we reached was that we now live in a such a connected world that even regional marketing campaigns aimed at reaching a small and distinct audience have the ability to reach and impact eyeballs around the globe. And this is exactly what we saw happen with the Wake Up campaign. I'm not sure if the campaign has been successful in Australia so far, but I do know that in other markets and around the interwebz (where even regional is viewed as global) it's definitely coming across as a miss with a lot of people. And that's not good.

So what to do about it? RIM has a newly appointed CMO this week... addressing this can be one of the first items on the to do list.