The New York Times’ Bits blog reports that AT&T’s lawyers are miffed enough about Verizon’s cheeky maps in their new ad campaigns to sue under the Lanham Act for false advertising.
Specifically, AT&T charges that the “There’s a map for that” commercials from Verizon Wireless are misleading. These plucky ads, which poke fun at the “There’s an app for that” campaign for AT&T’s hottest handset, the iPhone from Apple, display a map with most of the country in red, representing the area covered by Verizon’s fastest 3G data service. This is compared with another map, which has much less geography marked in blue, with the caption “AT&T 3G coverage.”
AT&T’s suit, filed in the Northern District of Georgia (site of its wireless headquarters) says the script and captions of Verizon’s commercial are correct and the map accurately describes where AT&T’s 3G network is available. The problem, it says, is what is on the rest of the map: white. (That’s what the lawsuit says. When I look at the commercial on Youtube (here) the rest of the map looks gray.)
What do I think? Anybody with half a brain is going to take Verizon’s ads to mean the AT&T phone they already have doesn’t work in Nowheresville, Idaho. Then again, this is America and you can’t count on some people even having half a brain.
Even so, smartphone owners especially ought to know what 3G is and what the difference is. Nobody has ever sued a shampoo company for promising “extra body” when they didn’t come out of the shower with a six-pack.
The maps used in the commercial create a fair comparison. Verizon’s map has some dead space too, after all, just not nearly as much. And fact of the matter is, a lot of iPhone owners who live outside of big cities are having a rough time with finding 3G coverage, something AT&T is trying to address. And in places that are covered with 3G, the network is prone to slowdowns. AT&T has had to respond to these cries and seriously try to say it’s not the iPhone, the network’s fine, nothing to see here.
AT&T has serious problems and Verizon is well within their rights to point them out.
(FWIW, Baltimore’s coverage is just fine.)
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