Richard Gillis

OPINION: BlackBerry's makers have been handed the most valuable endorsement ever without paying a cent for it.

PRESIDENT BARACK Obama has two well-known addictions. The first, smoking, he has pledged to kick during his first term in office. The second may take more time. Obama is a self-confessed crackberry addict, or put another way, he can't walk 10 paces without checking his BlackBerry personal organiser.

Much has been made of the potential security risk this creates and the secret service wanted him to give it up. What would happen if he left it somewhere, they ask, and - more worryingly - a president shouldn't be committing so much stuff in writing, lest it be used against him in court, or by historians. To these mundane reasons we can add a few more from the techie end of the spectrum. Some security advisers have suggested the BlackBerry could be used as a homing device or a virus host, which sounds like they generate policy by watching box sets of 24. But then again, where did the idea of a black president first take hold?

In the end, Obama won and kept his BlackBerry. The news agenda thus moved to the new, super secure version, the 'BarackBerry', complete with encryption devised by the National Security Agency.

Throughout all this, BlackBerry's manufacturers, Research in Motion, have remained quiet, safe in the knowledge they have been handed the most valuable personal endorsement ever and they haven't paid a cent for it. At a time when they are launching the Storm, their new toy aimed squarely at the iPhone market, how much would it cost to pay Obama, the leader of the free world and currently the most famous and popular person on the planet, to promote their product? By way of comparison, Microsoft paid Jerry Seinfeld $10 million to appear in their ads, "talking about nothing" with company founder Bill Gates, a campaign aimed at fighting the software giant's perennial "PC or Mac" cool war with Apple.

Because Obama's BlackBerry habit is obviously genuine, the relationship between the "talent" and the brand is authentic. This is the one element most paid-for endorsements lack: the internet and a more intrusive, celebrity-led media has made it easier to spot a fake marriage. But that hasn't stopped them trying.

Does George Clooney really drink Nescafé? Or Martini, for that matter? Is David Beckham a good match for Captain Birds Eye fish fingers? And are we expected to believe Tiger Woods (net income in 2008, $100 million, according to Golf Digest) drives a Buick, the car of middle-management America?

(Note: Woods was recently dropped from an $8 million-a-year tie-up with the Detroit car maker because it was deemed inappropriate ahead of the auto industry's $50 billion government bailout.)

These types of endorsement deals now feel old school, part of a tradition going back to the middle of the last century. In the days before the internet, doing commercial work in far-away places was a lucrative perk of Hollywood's A-list. Huge endorsement fees were earned, safe in the knowledge that the campaigns would never see the light of day back in the US, and so didn't taint the star's carefully cultivated image with anything as vulgar as advertising.

The Japanese, often the target market for this stuff, became so cynical toward the practice that they created a term for it. Japander (n): a western star who uses his or her fame to make large sums of money in a short time by advertising products in Japan that they would probably never use; 2: Japander (v): to make an ass of oneself in the Japanese media.

This stereotype was captured perfectly in Sofia Coppola's film Lost In Translation, with Bill Murray as a jaded American film star visiting Tokyo to make an ad for whiskey. The idea grew in the director's mind when following her father, Francis Ford Coppola, on similarly lucrative and mercenary trips in the 1980s.

By comparison, the Obama-BlackBerry relationship is a 21st-century endorsement, a two-way thing more akin to product placement than advertising.

The president's image has benefited; he's the first internet-savvy leader of the free world, able to use the medium effortlessly to communicate with young America. It's easy to underestimate how cut off our leaders are - the first time former British prime minister Tony Blair used a mobile phone was when he left office in 2007. Obama told CNN that his BlackBerry will help him "break out of the bubble of the White House". He said: "I want to be able to have voices other than the people who are immediately working for me be able to reach out and send me a message about what's happening in America."

How might the last eight years have panned out had George W Bush developed his own crackberry habit?