BlackBerry Bold Commercial Badly Misses The Mark
CNBC Sports Business Reporter
When Hollywood does sports movies, they are always careful to bring in consultants to make sure the action looks authentic.
Well, it's only 30 seconds, but it appears like the folks at Research in Motion , parent company of the BlackBerry, should have brought in a sports consultant for its spot that has been running incessantly during NFL games.
So here's the problem. This guy who is texting is running the 200-meter dash, we know that from the way he lines up. But he crosses the line in 13.05 seconds.
OK, we realize that you're trying to tell people that the BlackBerry Bold is for fast people. But is it for supersonic people? Because the world record in the 200 meters belongs to Usain Bolt, who ran a 19.30 in August during the Beijing Olympics.
Your random guy beat Usain Bolt by more than five seconds. And for what it's worth, all the people racing against this guy also beat Usain Bolt. Look how close they are to him at the end—looks like they'll easily finish under 18 seconds.
That's not only idiotic, it's careless. Here's what I think happened.
The ad people knew that had about 30 seconds of copy to write. Someone who has no idea what they were doing figured they'd give the guy 13 seconds of copy and that's what he'd naturally win the race in. Then I think they tried to be authentic by putting the clock there and they couldn't have realized, or they didn't care, that their random running model was breaking the world record by five seconds. If you're going to do that, I think you have to hire Usain Bolt to do the commercials.
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