March 28, 2024

Media Decoder Blog: BlackBerry Wants to ‘Keep Moving’ With Big New Campaign

The much-discussed arrival on Wednesday of the all-new BlackBerry smartphone and operating system,  which have been deemed crucial to the future of its parent company, will be accompanied by a huge marketing campaign that is being described as the largest in the company’s history.

The campaign, with a budget estimated at more than $200 million, will include work from six agencies and the first-ever Super Bowl commercial for the BlackBerry brand, which is to appear during Super Bowl XLVII on Sunday.

In addition to the Super Bowl spot, there will be other television commercials, print and online ads, promotions, public relations efforts, events, a partnership with arts and cultural figures like Alicia Keys, a presence in social media and elaborate digital demonstrations in real time of the new offerings.

The spending will be the most ever for the company “by a long shot,” said Frank Boulben, chief marketing officer at the parent company, which on Wednesday changed its name from Research In Motion to BlackBerry, part of a corporate-wide re-branding.

Although “marketing success is not measured by how much you put into it,” Mr. Boulben said during an interview in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday, referring to the size of a budget, the goal in this instance is for “a hugely impactful campaign.”

The campaign for the new BlackBerry Z10, formerly known as the BlackBerry 10, will carry the theme “Keep moving,” in a hat-tip to the psychographics of the target audience. Some ads will use the phrase “Built to keep you moving.”

People who use BlackBerry devices are “doers, achievers, people of action,” Mr. Boulben said. “They are about getting things done, success-oriented, multitasking and hyperconnected.”

(Three decades ago, such consumers were described as “the coffee achievers” in a campaign for the National Coffee Association.)

Mr. Boulben shared a quotation from Conrad Hilton, the lodging mogul who, coincidentally, figured in the plotline of episodes of “Mad Men,” the television series about the ad business.  In the quotation, Mr. Hilton linked success and action and described how those who are successful “keep moving” and “don’t quit” despite any mistakes they may make.

Throughout the campaign, “the hero will be the product,” Mr. Boulben said, and “each piece of marketing will showcase a feature of the user experience.”

For instance, one commercial depicts how a user can “jump backward and forward in time to capture the perfect shot” of a child who is hard to photograph. The user takes advantage of a feature called Time Shift to replace an unsmiling face of the boy with a smiling one.

Ads for the Time Shift feature describe it with headlines like “Turn missed moments into magic ones.”

Another commercial tells how a user can “peek in and out of messages in the BlackBerry Hub from any app.” In a vignette, a young man prone on a float in a pool notices on his BlackBerry Z10 that “free gig tickets” are being offered online by his favorite band. He is seen next prone again, this time as he gleefully bodysurfs amid a crowd of concertgoers.

In a banner ad online, a computer user can take a typing challenge that is meant to show off the new BlackBerry keyboard. “Go thumb-to-thumb against the BlackBerry Z10 in a real-time text-off,” the ad declares.

A message at the end of a demonstration that was successful for BlackBerry would read something like this: “The Z10 was 2.5 seconds faster and needed 12 fewer keystrokes.”

The decision to advertise BlackBerry on the Super Bowl for the first time was inspired by the fact the introductory campaign would start four days before the game, Mr. Boulben said.

“The Super Bowl for us is an opportunity to mark our comeback,” he said, “and intrigue them to find out for themselves what BlackBerry Z10 is all about.”

“There is no better platform,” he added.

Another smartphone brand, Samsung Mobile, will also advertise during Super Bowl XVLII. Samsung Mobile, which also advertised during the Super Bowl last year, plans to run a commercial during the fourth quarter with the comedians Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen.

The Samsung Mobile spot is to last two minutes; the BlackBerry Z10 spot is to run 30 seconds.

The agencies working on the BlackBerry campaign are: Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO, part of the BBDO Worldwide division of the Omnicom Group, for creative and brand efforts; a digital team within the Publicis Groupe, for the digital efforts; Proximity, also part of BBDO, for customer relationship marketing; Phonevalley, part of Publicis, for mobile initiatives; Brodeur Partners, for public relations; and Edelman, part of Daniel J. Edelman Inc., for social media.

According to the Kantar Media unit of WPP, Research in Motion spent $148.2 million to advertise BlackBerry in major media in 2011, $169.5 million in 2010 and $109.7 million in 2009.

Ad spending in the first nine months of last year totaled $58.7 million, Kantar Media reported, a slowdown that reflected the plans to promote the new products in 2013.12:19 p.m. | Updated


This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 30, 2013

An earlier version of this post misstated the title of Frank Boulben. He is chief marketing officer for Blackberry, formerly Research In Motion, not chief executive.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/blackberry-wants-to-keep-moving-with-massive-new-campaign/?partner=rss&emc=rss

App City: The Pegleg App Sends You on a New York Scavenger Hunt

PLATFORM: iPhone

PRICE: Free

In one interpretation of New York’s history, the prosthetic leg of the director general of New Netherland, Peter Stuyvesant, was responsible for the city’s transformation from a shabby outpost populated by drunken ne’er-do-wells into a city of boundless ambition and innovation. But according to this admittedly ridiculous story, which forms the basis of the Pegleg, a new smartphone scavenger hunt, the leg has gone missing. If the app’s users can find it, then the world will be rid of war.

The app is an entertaining addition to the Manhattan walking tour and an example of an increasingly popular concept in the technology world called gamification. The basic idea: turn history, civic action or a marketing campaign into a game, and it’ll go down that much easier. The New York Public Library created its own smartphone game to celebrate its 100th anniversary.

The scavenger app corresponds with a guidebook to the city, “New York: The Pegleg,” by Timothy Speed Levitch, which was published on Tuesday. It is the latest book from LOG607, an Italian publisher that has been producing a series of playful guides to Italian cities that combine books with games users play through text messaging. The information on the pages is scrambled, and a reader must solve riddles, sending the answers via text messages to find out which of the seemingly random passages to read next.

Users of the Pegleg choose the level and duration of their challenge. Then they are sent off to a series of locations in Manhattan. There are 40 sites in all, each with a quirky significance to New York City’s history. The app’s developer says it would take nine hours to do the entire thing.

My first clue told the story of how the family ownership of the Gramercy Park Hotel fell apart, a tale that reached its low point when David Weissberg, the brother of the hotel’s chief executive, jumped off its roof to his death. When the app’s GPS sensed that I was out front on Lexington Avenue, it gave me an “enigma” to solve. The riddle was not particularly interesting — it involved counting the number of balconies on the facade. Once I had solved it, I was given the next clue, which sent me several blocks south to the former Tammany Hall building on East 17th Street.

I visited seven sites in two hours, including the intersection of Waverly Place and Waverly Place and the site of a former apple orchard on Broadway.

“This is a great way to learn about a city,” Mr. Levitch said.

The app, released this month, is free. It serves as a replacement for the $21.95 book, rather than a supplement, a seemingly risky strategy for a publisher that presumably hopes people will want both.

The app also allows competition. Users can challenge friends to see who gets through the clues quickest. This feature is social in the pre-Internet sense of the word: you have to find friends yourself and get them organized. The publisher is planning to host a contest in late October to promote the project. JOSHUA BRUSTEIN

Have a favorite New York City app? Send tips via e-mail to appcity@nytimes.com or via Twitter to @joshuabrustein.

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Microsoft Takes to Cloud to Defend Its Office Business

People like Tom Conophy are stirring anxiety — and action — in Microsoft’s executive offices these days.

Mr. Conophy, the chief information officer of the InterContinental Hotels Group, decided earlier this year to begin moving nearly all the company’s 25,000 office workers off Microsoft’s e-mail and Office productivity applications and onto Google’s Web-based alternatives.

About 6,000 employees in the hotel management company have converted so far, Mr. Conophy says, and things are going well. The savings, he estimates, will add up to millions of dollars a year. And Google’s online offerings, he said, have improved steadily since it entered the business market four years ago.

“We could do this now because the Google cloud apps are ready for prime time,” Mr. Conophy said.

Halting such defections is a top priority at Microsoft. Its response arrives Tuesday, when the company begins selling Office 365, a cloud-based version of Microsoft’s e-mail, whiteboard collaboration software and word processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs. The marketing campaign will begin with a presentation in New York by Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer.

Like Google Apps, the new service is run in the cloud — remotely in data centers — and users tap in from an Internet-connected browser on a personal computer, tablet or smartphone.

Microsoft’s long-awaited move, analysts say, is a studiously crafted bet, including various offerings at different prices. They are not sure whether it represents wishful thinking or a workable strategy. Microsoft’s plan is to embrace the demand for cloud-based tools for office workers, which promise to be less costly for companies than conventional software, and yet avoid cannibalizing a business that is its biggest single money-maker.

“If Microsoft stumbles, it really opens the door to Google,” said Matt Cain, an analyst for Gartner. “It’s a tremendous long-term threat to Microsoft and its Office franchise.”

The Microsoft unit that includes the Office family of products is a $20 billion-a-year business with pretax profit margins of 60 percent. The business is even larger than the company’s other big profit engine, the Windows PC operating system.

Google portrays the arrival of Office 365 as an endorsement, if not a capitulation. “This is a recognition that our business is for real,” said David Girouard, president of Google’s enterprise division. “We’ve really helped move the needle in the marketplace.”

The company now claims more than 30 million active users of Google Apps, its collection of online office productivity and communications programs. But about 12 million of those users are university staff and students, who typically get free access to the apps. The standard charge for business and government customers is $50 per user a year. Google will not disclose how many customers pay that fee.

It does say it is gaining momentum. Just this month, Google announced a series of large converts. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that conducts climate and ocean studies, with 25,000 employees, is adopting Google Apps. Others include the State of Wyoming, with 10,000 workers, and the McClatchy Group, a publishing chain, with 8,500 workers.

The subscription renewal rates to Google Apps, Mr. Girouard said, are higher than 90 percent and for larger companies the rate is nearly 100 percent.

There are other cloud-based business e-mail, productivity and collaboration tools including entries from Zoho, Zimbra from VMware, Lotus Live from I.B.M. and Chatter from Salesforce.com.

Yet Google, analysts say, is the main rival that Microsoft has in mind with Office 365. “There’s no doubt that the increasing popularity of Google Apps has forced Microsoft’s hand,” said Melissa Webster, an analyst at IDC. “But Microsoft is really embracing the cloud now. This is the other shoe dropping.”

At $50 a year, Google’s pricing seems far more appealing than the standard price for the Office PC software, from $200 to about $400, depending on features. Office 365 prices are from $2 per user a month to $27 per user a month. The $2-a-month service is just e-mail and is intended for companies that want to extend communications to employees currently not served, like factory workers. The $27-a-month offering is for all the online features, including Web conferencing and digital whiteboards for team projects, and a license to the most powerful version of the Office personal computer software.

A $6-a-month offering is aimed at extending Microsoft’s e-mail server services and collaboration tools, like SharePoint, to small businesses. These small businesses typically have the Office PC software, but not the related software, analysts say.

With cloud-based versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, plus several new communications and collaboration tools, that offering could be quite appealing, analysts say. The price, at $72 a year, is somewhat above Google’s, but it carries the Microsoft name and familiarity. “It could be a lot of net new business, and stable recurring revenue, if Microsoft can pull it off,” Ms. Webster said.

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