Flash...saviour of the touchpad universe

Media Moment: BlackBerry Playbook ad

Queen-related: uses Flash’s Theme

BlackBerry® has been running an ad here in Canada for their long-awaited answer to the iPad . . . the PlayBook™. To promote the tablet, RIM seems to be relying quite heavily on its ability to run the latest iteration of Adobe’s Flash software, which is more or less a requirement these days for playing back video and/or animation on a computer. 

The editors of the TV spot were very careful in how they looped the “Flash . . . aaahhh” clip from the song because it never reveals any of the other lyrics in the song. There’s no alluding to the fact that this song is at all related to the movie or any of its characters — the only lyrics heard are “Flash” and “aaahhh!” That’s it. 

I had heard on the QMS newsgroup — and confirmed on Wikipedia’s article on Flash’s Theme — that Motorola had also used the theme for the launch of their Xoom tablet back in February 2011, predating the PlayBook by two months or so. I haven’t seen the Xoom spot myself, but I suspect that the use of Flash’s Theme would have been treated in a similar manner to how RIM worked it into their marketing.

It’s rather convenient that Queen has a song in their catalogue that uses “flash” in its lyrics and that the song itself has a lot of drama due to the piano build-up to the big “Flash . . . aaahhh!” The rationale that Brian probably took in structuring the song like he did works just as well for building excitement around a product, in this case a product that is actually called Flash.

I wonder if it was Adobe’s decision to incorporate Flash’s Theme into the third-party marketing of whatever hardware is using their Flash Media Player? I would think that RIM wouldn’t want to sound like Motorola and vice versa as it could result in marketplace confusion between the products.

Whatever the case, when Adobe gets around to developing software called “Drowse” or “Liar,” I’m sure Queen Productions will be getting another visit from Adobe and friends.