Alicia Keys and BlackBerry? Why celebrities answer the call of tech companies

 

Thorsten Heins, CEO of RIM, introduces Alicia Keys as the global creative director of BlackBerry. Yes. Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP

Most companies would struggle when faced with a rapidly declining market share, but not BlackBerry. It may be losing customers to Apple and Samsung all over the place, but it knows exactly how to reel them all back in – by unveiling Alicia Keys as its new creative director.

It's a genius move. Nobody understands BlackBerries like Alicia Keys does. In retrospect, it's clear that most of her songs were really about smartphones all along, If I Ain't Got You was about the time she lost her BlackBerry and had to temporarily make do with a substandard Nokia, for example, and Girl On Fire was about the time she made the regrettable decision to buy a Kindle tablet instead of a BlackBerry Playbook. Surely Alicia Keys will lead BlackBerry into a brave new future; a future where all the ringtones sound like generic R&B and Alicia Keyshas to be careful not to let anyone photograph her using an iPhone.

 

Will.i.am in his role as Intel's director of creative innovation. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

But BlackBerry isn't the first tech company to draft in a celebrity to beef up its credibility. Three years ago, Lady Gaga was named as the creative director of Polaroid. She even designed a printer for the company. Admittedly it couldn't have looked any more generic if it tried, and people only buy Polaroids ironically now, but it's the thought that counts. Two years ago, Will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas was named as the director of creative innovation at Intel; a move that suggested a horrible future where one day he'd mumble disinterestedly over a loop of the company's jingle for three minutes and release it as another godawful single.

 

Jessica Alba introduces another important Windows 8 announcement to a room of spellbound tech journos. Photograph: Stephen Lam/Getty Images

Similarly, Microsoft drafted Jessica Alba in to launch Windows 8 last year. This was a step down from what the norm – she wasn't made a creative director of anything, not even of the box that Windows 8 phones came in – but on the plus side she gave the photographers something other than banks of worried-looking tech journalists to take pictures of.

Now we just have to wait and see whether Alicia Keys can live up to her creative-directing peers. If she can, who knows, that double concept R&B album about the annoying flashing red light in the corner of her BlackBerry might finally become a reality.

It's obvious that this sort of arrangement has a mutual benefit - the companies know that kids will react more strongly to, say, Lady Gaga than a balding divisional conglomerate head, and the celebrities can flatter themselves to think that they're anything other than a last-ditch attempt to save a firm from bankruptcy. It's a win-win for everybody, especially people who enjoy watching Alicia Keys hold a telephone that she doesn't really seem to care about very much.