By: Hillel Fuld (@hilzfuld)

RIM is dead. Not because its next mobile offering is not impressive. it is. And not because RIM doesn’t know where its priorities are, last week the company showed us that it does. The reason RIM is dead is because they just don’t get it.

You might recall a few weeks back when hundreds of mysterious and creepy people showed up outside of an Australian Apple store waving signs that read “Wake up”. You can read about that here.

At the time, everyone, without exception thought it was a pathetic attempt by RIM to attack Apple. It was silly for so many reasons, but first and foremost, RIM is not exactly in a place that they can afford to ridicule Apple. Far from it.

Well, RIM did not only not cancel the campaign, it decided to continue with it in full steam. The mobile company that was once a dominant player best known for its email solutions and security, just launched a new site called “Wake up, Be Bold”. You can take a look at wakeupbebold.com, but let me warn you, it is painful on so many levels.

The campaign, which you have to see to believe is bad marketing for so many reasons. It insults the company’s potential customers, it attacks a company that is in a position to simply laugh at this effort, and most importantly, RIM has absolutely nothing to back up the claim that “BlackBerry does business”.

I am not even going to talk about the fact that there are actually some grammatical errors in the text of this site. “It’s time to mean business?” “Do different”. Something about those sentences just don’t sound right to me, but again, forget the English.

RIM clearly does not understand that advertising and marketing are both important but there needs to be at least a basic level of innovation to back it up. RIM has nothing. If RIM would have polished this campaign up a bit and released it with BlackBerry 10, I would have said “Fire the person responsible, but at least RIM is backing it up with tech.” To launch such a campaign now is just laughable.

This pathetic attempt to grab onto something in order to survive is RIM’s final nail in its coffin, as far as I’m concerned. And this is coming from a person who used a BlackBerry device for years after the iPhone was released.

In RIM’s only defense, I can say, this campaign did accomplish something. I am writing about it, right? Except I think this is the final proof that not all PR is good PR. Sorry RIM, it was a fun ride but all good things come to an end.

RIP RIM 1985-2012