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Brands & Merch
Alicia Keys named BlackBerry’s Global Creative Director
By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 31 January 2013
MySpace has Justin Timberlake, Polaroid has Lady Gaga – you’re not a real company until you have a musician pretending to be your creative director these days. And now BlackBerry has Alicia Keys. Woopee for BlackBerry.
The company announced its new range of smartphones yesterday, and slipped in the news of Keys’ appointment to the made up role of Global Creative Director. Which, as The Verge pointed out, is a pretty good deal for someone who described themselves as a recently converted “iPhone junky” less than a month ago.
Presumably after family members staged some sort of intervention regarding the iPhone addiction, Keys ran to BlackBerry and begged for their help, ie a professional reason to only use a phone so devoid of excitement, that it would never lead to any sort of dangerous dependency.
Bigging up the all new BlackBerry 10 platform yesterday, Keys said: “Staying connected has become a vital part of my creative process. I have been using the BlackBerry 10 for a few weeks now, and I’m truly inspired by its innovation. It has entirely revolutionised the experience. I know the potential this platform has to help creative people be more productive, and help productive people be more creative. This is such an incredible age to be living in, with such profound advances in communications and technology. As Global Creative Director, my goal is to inspire creativity with this platform, and I’m so excited to jump right in”.
Glad to hear you’re all better now, Alicia. Also thrilled by her rehabilitation, BlackBerry President and CEO Thorsten Heins said: “Alicia Keys has come to BlackBerry because she believes in the product and technology, and subscribes to our overriding philosophy to ‘Keep Moving’: to empower people through mobile computing and communications. We are excited she will be bringing to us her enormous capabilities, as well as a vast network of relationships in the entertainment, social media and business communities, to help shape our brand and grow our business”.
Quite what being Global Creative Director for Blackberry actually involves isn’t clear, though it’s a shame for the flagging phone maker it didn’t include defending the brand to the BBC yesterday, given that anyone would have been better at that job that the firm’s European MD Stephen Bates. But it seems the singer will be far too busy contributing to a new initiative called the Keep Moving Project, which will see “some of the world’s most inspirational people” keep on moving. Which is an opportunity for the recently reunited Five surely? Though Keys has gone and recruited film director Robert Rodriguez and author Neil Gaiman instead. Here’s a video of them spouting on about the project:
