How BlackBerry Used Improv Comedy To Make Cybersecurity A More âHumanâ Topic>
Forbes – Marty Swant
BlackBerry wants to make data breaches a laughing matter. To illustrate how even the smartest and most capable employees can make accidental mistakes that put sensitive information at risk, the Canadian company is taking a more âhumanâ approach to the serious subject of cybersecurity. Itâs not that Mark Wilsonâwhoâs been CMO of the brand since 2017âdoesnât take threats lightly. Rather, he said an overwhelming majority of customers surveyed viewed their own staff as more of an accidental threat than an outside hacker. According to research conducted by BlackBerry, 94% of chief security officers and other executives donât trust their own employees with critical information. In fact, 72% suspected their employees were working around existing security measures. (For example, BlackBerry found that a nurse at a hospital sent X-ray images to a doctor via Snapchat because she was locked out of the companyâs software.) To promote its own security software, BlackBerryâwhich has pivoted from its earlier smartphone-making days to enterprise tech made for the era of self-driving cars and the Internet of Thingsâdecided to humanize accidental errors. But instead of just passing a brief over to an creative agency to come up with a TV spot and some billboards or print ads, Blackerry worked with Oakland-based Funworks to hire improv comedians to create a campaign alongside BlackBerry teams ranging from marketing and tech to sales. The goal: to translate the technical side of security to something more relatable. âThe key to this is how do you evoke emotion into something that can be at times a very dry topic,â Wilson says. âThatâs kind of the fun of what we do. How do you break through a sea of sameness with something thatâs an evolutionary or provocative point of view and thatâs a very human point of view?â
Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/martyswant/2019/10/18/how-blackberry-used-improv-comedy-to-make-cybersecurity-a-more-human-topic/#4ec87b51cf5a