Forget about a new operating system and a new corporate name—the big news out of BlackBerry’s announcement today was that the Canadian tech firm has appointed Alicia Keys as its global creative director.
Keys joins a long and distinguished list of entertainers who have taken on creative-director duties at various companies. Intel, wanting to get in on that My Humps action, hired Black Eyed Peas member will.i.am as its “director of creative innovation.” Polaroid, when it wasn’t being passed around from creditor to creditor in bankruptcy proceedings, announced in 2010 that it had appointed Lady Gaga as its creative director, based on her extensive work in industrial design and precision optics.