Was RIM/Blackberry Behind The Australian “Wake Up” Protest?

Was RIM/Blackberry Behind The Australian “Wake Up” Protest?:
Last week we reported on a mysterious flash mob protest at an Apple store in Australia. With the flash mob participants all wearing black, and black buses and signs that said “wake up” people immediately looked to Samsung. We even ran this story over the weekend stating that Samsung denied any involvement in the mock protest.
Now we are hearing suggestions that RIM/Blackberry may be the culprit and not Samsung. It’s not hard to imagine that RIM/Blackberry would know that Samsung would be the scapegoat anyway. Samsung spent the entire fourth quarter of 2011 poking fun at Apple via their “Next Big Thing” campaign which even earned them a national advertising award.
In their latest marketing efforts they poked fun at Apple fans again by equating them to sheep in a teaser for the Galaxy S III. Although they haven’t had a hit smartphone in a while, we’re pretty confident that RIM/Blackberry is well aware of Samsung’s marketing tactics.
More after the break







So MacWorld did some digging into the protest campaign. The first thing they found was some source code embedded in a double-click source identifier src= 2215527, type= black 822. They reported that when you Google those numbers they point back to the official Blackberry Australia website. Hmmmm.
The second clue is that the blogger/journalist “Blunty” who posted the video that’s been circulating around the internet about the protest itself has ties to Blackberry. In fact, it’s been reported that Blunty actually worked for Blackberry.
Now here’s another rub on Blunty, in the video he states that Apple had asked him to leave the store while he was shooting video, but before he left the store he got some great shots, including a second floor shot that lasted more than 30 seconds of the protestors outside. It seems kind of suspect that he was there at the right time. He very well could have been but with being a former Blackberry employee it looks more like he was part of the event itself. The language in the video sounds a bit staged as well, but most of us brushed it off as him being Australian.
So why would RIM/Blackberry even do this? Well the Blackberry World Conference actually starts on Tuesday so it’s definitely great timing. While Blackberry doesn’t have any hot new products out right now we are expecting a re-up of the Blackberry Playbook, a 4G/LTE Blackberry Playbook and Blackberry 10 devices to be at least announced at the conference.
As phonearena suggests if it is a marketing campaign for Blackberry, they owe Samsung an apology.
Source: MacWorld via PhoneArena