Not too long ago we reported an an AT&T ad campaign that was taking a direct shot at T-Mobile’s network. These full page ads ran in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today and claim to tell the “Truth” about T-Mobile’s network by noting that T-Mobile has 2x more dropped calls, 2x more failed calls and is 50% slower than AT&T.
This wasn’t an unprovoked attack however, it was in response to T-Mo’s new CEO John Legere and his slights of not only AT&T but Sprint and Verizon Wireless while on stage last January at CES in Las Vegas, Nevada. Legere said among other things that AT&T’s network was “crap” and how nobody in New York City was happy with their service. One of his funniest quotes was about the shared data plans that other carriers offer when he said “A 5-gigabyte, 10-device shared data plan, when Joe Schmoe Jr. starts to watch porn on his phone, isn’t gonna work.”
Well it appears that T-Mobile isn’t taking very long to respond to AT&T’s rebuttal. In what looks like an upcoming print campaign featuring three ads, T-Mobile will be sending a pretty solid counter punch. All three ads not only mention the AT&T response but actually show it in the form of a crumpled up piece of paper in the bottom left hand corner.
The first ad says “If AT&T thought our network wasn’t great, why did they try to buy it?” which is in reference to the failed bid to purchase T-Mobile in 2011. The second states “What keeps AT&T up at night? Apparently us” and goes on to mock the network for being worried about T-Mobile’s 4G coverage. Finally the third spot has the words “Can you see the beads of sweat in this ad?” This one takes the same mocking tone and is also my personal favorite.
We know that these are proof prints that were sent in for approval and can even expect to see them running as early as today. Also they come from the same group of people behind the helicopter commercials that are on TV all the time.
It’s almost always good when companies go at each other like this because it increases competition. AT&T must really see T-Mobile as a threat because if they didn’t they would not have responded in the first place. Howard Stern used to always say that he never mentioned the competition because it only gave the people who were chasing him in the ratings free pub. We never see the country’s top network, Verizon, getting into these kind of battles, so internally AT&T must really be feeling the heat in the number two slot. We should look for T-Mobile to continue bringing the fight to them because clearly it’s working.
Source: TmoNews