Blackberry: The Fruit of Waking Up
If you happened to be hanging around in Sydney or Melbourne on April 22nd, going past the Apple Store somewhere in the morning, you must have seen weird black-clad people pouring out of a black bus with black posters in their hands reading 'Wake Up.' After stationing in front of the Apple Store, the young and predominantly female group of people started enthusiastically shouting 'Wake up!', modelling for Nate Blurr aka Blunty (an Ozzy blogger who 'purely incidentally' happened to be at the Apple Store with a professional camera), and, all in all, apparently having a good time.
Predictably enough, the flash mob has proved to be another publicity move by one of Apple's direct competitors. However, figuring out whose job it was caused megaloads of drama on the Internet as well as among local and global tech media.
After the event gained the initial media momentum (ah, these magic tag words 'Apple', 'protest', 'mysterious'...), somebody discovered a website that featured the very 'Wake Up' slogan of the flash mob and a countdown to some even more mysterious upcoming event. Something big was approaching. Something very big... and mysterious... and having to do with protests against Apple.
What followed up was nicely summed up by Blunty: 'And then someone reported that, "ooh, because if you look at the website, it was registered... [by] the company who also did some work for Samsung... OH IT MUST BE SAMSUNG!!!"'
And instantly, the hell unleashed upon Samsung. The company's representatives officially stated that though it was nice to be thought of as the closest Apple competitors, it was not them who stood behind the whole affair; but still, it was not enough for the sensation-hungry bloggers and journalists. They just kept thinking it was Samsung's job, mostly because the countdown was to end somewhere about the supposed presentation of the new Samsung Galaxy. The only thing not clear was: why should Samsung launch a countdown site if they already have one... or kinda one?
Then somebody analyzed some piece of the 'Wake Up' page code and found it was the same as on some RIM pages. It gave birth to another theory, according to which the true mastermind behind the campaign could be the Blackberry company.
The Canadian erstwhile market leader was definitely happy to see so much publicity attracted by them (not exactly what the company has been enjoying lately). Even more so since RIM really was behind the 'Wake Up.' campaign and, to all appearances, was going to reveal it in a couple of days anyway. Now we should all wait till May 7th, when the company will present the Something that has cost RIM so much effort.
The moral of this story is that if you want to attract publicity, you still need the three major ingredients: mystery, protest, and Apple.
