Ever since John Legere took over T-Mobile and the Uncarrier movement kicked in to high gear, he’s made a point of aiming jibes towards the country’s #2 carrier. In fact, at one point on Twitter, it seemed like barely a day went by when he didn’t dig at his company’s most bitter rival. Getting thrown out of an AT&T party at CES confirmed without doubt that there’s clearly no love lost between the two. Following on from a targeted ad campaign last year in which T-Mobile openly mocked AT&T’s efforts, a fresh bunch of print ads are set to run, starting from tomorrow. Advertisements will feature in print newspapers, and are aimed at AT&T’s $450 incentive for Tmo subscribers to switch. As reported by Bloomberg:
“T-Mobile announced they would pay early termination fees for customers if they broke up with AT&T and traded in their device for a new one at T-Mobile,” the new T-Mobile ads say. “Now AT&T has made that offer essentially risk free.”
If you’ve seen any of Legere’s interviews since CES, there are common themes that always seem to crop up. One of which is AT&T’s own offer to pay up to $450 for only T-Mobile customers to switch networks. Legere jokes that it’s given AT&T’s customers an even easier opportunity to switch and try Tmo for themselves. If they switch to Magenta, taking up Tmo’s own ETF payment scheme, and happen to not like it for whatever reason (coverage/service/cost), their old carrier will pay to take them back, and they’ve not lost anything.
It’s taken – by pretty much everyone – as fact that AT&T’s promotion was only put in place once we broke the news of what Uncarrier 4.0 would entail. It’s hard to see otherwise when it was clearly only targeting Tmo customers, and no one else. Prints ads should appear in major newspapers from tomorrow. So, if you spot them, be sure to email me pictures to cam@tmonews.com or on Twitter, and I can share them with the rest of the Magenta-faithful.
Via: Bloomberg
UPDATE:
A digital copy of the ad running from tomorrow is below. In an email from T-Mobile, there was a link to a very “tongue-in-cheek” press release, along with the following nugget of information.
All jokes aside, AT&T is showing it an apparent change of heart towards former consumers. With AT&T’s incredibly generous $450 T-Mobile customer buy-back campaign, if a customer makes the switch to T-Mobile from AT&T and is not completely satisfied with T-Mobile and its state-of-the-art nationwide 4G LTE network (now fastest in the U.S.), AT&T will cover the costs for those customers to switch back!
T-Mobile has seen an insane number of people switch to T-Mobile since announcing Contract Freedom. People just enjoy the risk-free, zero-cost opportunity to switch to the Un-carrier. And out of those people switching, nearly 39% came from AT&T.
