As some erudite commentators have pointed out, the ad bears a remarkable resemblance to an Apple ad featuring Coldplay. And even to an Apple ad featuring, um, U2.
What is really quite beautiful about the BlackBerry brand is that it was created without the obvious help of advertising.
It's not that BlackBerry has never been advertised. It's simply that people bought into the brand because they loved the feeling of that business-like machine so close to their fingers and pelvis, rather than because they espied an ad that made them laugh, cry, sing or perhaps even lose their victuals.
When U2 signed a deal with RIM, Bono was positively vertiginous in delineating the difference between RIM and Apple. The Toronto Globe and Mail quoted him as saying: "Research In Motion is going to give us what Apple wouldn't--access to their labs and their people so we can do something really spectacular."
"BlackBerry loves U2," it says. Might the implication be that Apple didn't? Could it be that it was Bono rather than BlackBerry who influenced the ad to be so similar to Apple's, in some slightly odd nose-thumbing gesture in the direction of Cupertino?
It's already a rather peculiar menage-a-trois, given that Bono was a founder of Elevation Partners, which holds a substantial stake in Palm.
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