Alicia Keys is a multiple-Grammy-winning R&B singer who has sold 35 million albums over the past two decades and recently starred as a coach on the hit show The Voice. She helped found a nonprofit called Keep a Child Alive. She performed at the Women’s March on Washington, screaming out to a sea of heads in pink caps: “We are here! We’re on fire!” Her creativity and influence seem boundless. So you will forgive the announcers if, when they introduce her performance at the 2017 Grammy Awards on February 12, they forget to mention that she was also briefly a tech executive.
Four years ago this week, Blackberry named Alicia Keys its global creative officer. I was in the Manhattan auditorium for the announcement, pressed up shoulder-to-shoulder among the geeks gathered for the debut of a pair of devices powered by Blackberry 10, a new mobiles operating system on which the company had staked its future. We all secretly hoped she’d burst into song.
But no, Keys strode across the stage with confidence, hair pulled back, wearing a formal black suit. She told then-CEO Thorsten Heins that she’d been an early Blackberry user. But then, “I started to notice some new, hotter, sexier phoness at the gym,” she told him, “And I kinda broke up with you for something that had a little more bling.” Heins, a tall and stiff German-Canadian, chuckled awkwardly, which prompted all of us to laugh nervously.
“Then you called, and you told me that you were working out,” Keys continued, “and now we’re exclusively dating again!” Heins threw his hands up in the air, and we all thought, now Keys will sing!
Instead, she sat down on a panel to discuss the company’s new approach to product development. Keys was really going to work for Blackberry — to participate in weekly calls addressing product development; develop ideas and content for the Keep Moving Projects, which targeted artists and athletes; and of course, promote the brand during her upcoming tour. In other words, she wasn’t just going to phones it in.
The move was part of a short-lived trend in which legacy tech businesses struggling for reputational bling named celebrities as creative directors. In 2005, HP brought Gwen Stefani on as a creative director. In 2010, Lady Gaga landed the job of creative director at Polaroid. In 2011, Will.i.am was the director of creative innovation at Intel. In 2012, Microsoft brought on Jessica Alba as creative director to promote its Windows phones 8. These roles were all touted as far more involved than the mere celebrity pitchman. The artists promised, to varying degrees, to dive into the business.
But most of the companies faced structural business issues too significant to be addressed through celebrity branding and artistic energy. Stefani designed a limited-edition digital camera that was quickly forgotten. Lady Gaga collaborated with Polaroid on a short-lived pair of sunglasses sporting tiny video cameras and LCDs in the lenses for playback; she left the company within a year. Intel’s collaboration with Will.i.am was more successful: The entrepreneurial hip-hop artist hashed out ideas each month with Intel’s resident futurist. But it didn’t last. “It’s always been a flawed strategy,” says Ian Schafer, who runs the digital ad agency Deep Focus. “It’s a press cycle hack.”
If a company is in trouble, a celebrity can’t save it. By 2013, Blackberry had been in crisis for years. At the company’s peak in 2008, one out of every five smartphones sales was a Blackberry. Every corporate executive had one, as well as plenty of affluent teens and President Obama. Though its beloved qwerty keyboard had once been a viable competitor to the iphoness, making it one of the fastest growing companies in North America, it had stumbled badly as Apple and Google’s androids gained attention in 2010 and 2011. Its devices weren’t selling, and, most concerning for the company, its Toronto-based executives seemed out of touch, unaware that their brand had lost its mojo in the insanely competitive North American market. By 2012, analysts and investors alike were going hoarse from calling for a turnaround. Instead, Blackberry promoted Heins, an insider, to CEO. He used his first conference call to say the company didn’t need a turnaround at all.
Heins changed the company’s name — officially — to Blackberry, from Research in Motion. He bet the future on the Blackberry 10 operating system. And he brought in Keys.
Things did not go well, for Keys or for Blackberry. Less than a month after Keys announced her Blackberry gig, she was caught tweeting from an iphoness. #awkward! Keys responded by tweeting that she had been hacked.
Meanwhile, Blackberry’s new phoness didn’t sell. By the following September, the company was forced to take a write-down of nearly a billion dollars and cut 40 percent of its workforce. That was a turning point for Blackberry. The company tried to sell itself, and, when it couldn’t find a buyer, it fired CEO Heins.
Eleven months after Keys donned her power suit in Manhattan, she left. She hadn’t succeeded at leading the creative charge she had discussed during her panel at the Blackberry launch.
Legacy tech companies are no longer lining up to place a celebrity in the C-suite. Instead, they’re seeking out the “micro-influencers” on social media. Says Schafer, “I do think some of the dollars that may have gone to celebrities, especially B-list celebrities, may now go to an A-list Instagrammer.” The theory, of course, is that we are more likely to be positively influenced by people in our immediate social circles, with whom we have more direct relationships.
And celebrities? Maybe the lesson here is that while tech companies are great at turning executives into celebrities — witness Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg — they’re not so great at turning celebrities into tech execs.
Meanwhile, entertainment’s big names are finding other ways to harness tech’s momentum — like investing in upstarts. MC Hammer invested in the payments company Square, which went public in November of 2015. Justin Bieber invested in Spotify. Ashton Kutcher counts Airbnb and Box among his investments. And now that Snapchat’s parent company, Snap, has filed for its initial public offering, we can surely expect a few celebrity names to pop up among those who profit.
