RIM Admits To Involvement In The Australian Anti-Apple Wake Up Campaign

It’s official; RIM was the company behind the Wake Up campaign that took the Internet, and more particularly Australia, by storm last week. The campaign, aimed to take the BlackBerry 10 mobile OS campaign viral, not only achieved its goal of getting people talking about the publicity stunt, but also confused the hell out of people. Go RIM, go!

In a release sent to The Age, RIM admited to the stunt:

BlackBerry maker RIM has owned up to being responsible for an extended protest outside Apple’s Sydney CBD store last week after online sleuths traced the source of the publicity stunt … The company was forced to deny that it paid bloggers to report on the stunt after it emerged that the man who managed to capture the protest on video, Nate ‘Blunty’ Burr, had previously posted a glowing three-part review of the BlackBerry Playbook.

The campaign, which included people who were dressed up in black yelling the phrase “wake up” outside of the Sydney Apple Store did little more than confuse the heck out of customers. Hell, it confused us, and we’re in the business of trying to figure this stuff out. RIM went on to say that a “reveal” will take place on May 7th that will help to explain the campaign as well as provoke a conversation on what “being in business” means to Australians. Given the results of the latest Good Technology survey, and the fact that iOS devices ruled the top 6 of 10 spots for device activations in the enterprise (the remaining four were Android devices), something tells us RIM has absolutely no clue what it means to “be in business” these days. In fact, at this point, we’d probably argue that companies would be more successful listening to what RIM has to say and then doing the complete opposite.

Image Credit: severinearend

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld and TechHive.