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Sprint Quickly Pulls Video Ad Calling T-Mobile 'Ghetto' (fiercewireless.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Sprint has pulled an ad in which it was calling its competitor, T-Mobile, "ghetto." The ad featured company's CEO Marcelo Claure. "I'm going to tell you a carrier name and I want you to basically tell me what comes to your mind," Claure said in the ad. "T-Mobile. When I say T-Mobile to you, just a couple of words?" Which is when a white woman chimes in, "Oh my god the first word that came to my head was ... ghetto." "That sounds, like, terrible," she says. "I don't know't know. There's always, like, three carriers; there's AT&T, Sprint and Verizon. And people who have T-Mobile are just, like... Why do you have T-Mobile?""We're sharing real comments from real customers," Claure wrote in the aftermath of criticism. "Maybe not the best choice of words by the customer. Not meant to offend anyone."
As the only major carrier that told the Feds to get a warrant before they would provide access to all of your private data, Hero comes to mind before ghetto.
Isn't that bad. I've been with them for a while (7 years), and prices/wifi calling and so on are pretty good.
The only issues I've had is coverage in remote areas (places that A&T/Sprint/Verizon didn't work well either) and inside buildings. Their new LTE
network is supposed to fix the inside building thing, and I've just used wifi inside.
I think some of the pay as you go (burner) phones are way more ghetto.
“I don't know't know. There's always, like, three carriers; there's AT&T, Sprint and Verizon. And people who have T-Mobile are just, like... well, you know, they’re like black and minorities and poor and stuff, and those people, like, live in, like, you know, the ghetto...”
So Sprint must be for self-absorbed inarticulate people, if you use their marketing example as benchmark.
Why do you have T-Mobile?
The question is best asked, "why do you subscribe to cellular phone service?" among the providers listed most are indiscernable from one another outside their limited branding. each network has a coverage determined by the wavelength and spectrum allotted the towers by the FCC. each network has a set of plans, terms, conditions, contractual obligtations, fees and fines associated with their services. And finally, each network of cellular systems is susceptible to outages or failures due to interference, underprovisioning, and "act of god." The cellular service must therefore be defined in terms of the lifestyle it offers, not the service.
the question is why or how do these services differentiate themselves in the consumer mind at all from one another? What the CEO was doing was a simple market identity and brand association test performed every single day by hundreds of corporate focus groups from proctor and gamble to general electric. AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint collectively spend multiple billions of dollars each year to promote their product in different ways. AT&T's advertisements may focus on connectivity and family, while Verizon may focus on selling their customers on the perception of advanced or modern living through a superior network and handsets. It doesnt matter the theme, however assuming the target of the question is being genuine and not a paid actress, its a telling statement. Perhaps T-Mobile has spent too much advertising focus on low-cost plans. another common problem, one that marketing and advertisers are keenly aware of, is demographic. Too much diversity in your advertisements and many middle income white suburban consumers will subconsciously associate your product with the negative minority stereotypes utilised by other marketing teams to sell things like music, movies, and clothing. The question the CEO asked to the participant elicited a tacit admission that the participant felt either alienated or confused by the networks product as she hadn't been properly exposed to the correct advertisement for her demographic which, depending on your marketing alignment, can be a sign of trouble.
full disclosure: I work in marketing.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I disagree. I live in a small town, and T-mo was basically unusable, whereas Sprint is almost OK, but still very problematic.
But it's a lot better than Verizon because I don't have to trade my car in for a beater and move into a shack to pay the phone bill.
...but there were no negroes in the Hot Club in Paris playing with Stepane Grapelli and Django Reinhardt and their crazy gypsy buddies.
Nor would there have been, considering the club opened in '34 and jazz originated decades earlier in New Orleans... but thanks for playing. ;)
This should've been linked in TFA/TFS somewhere:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The Hot Club in Paris was founded in 1931. Django didn't even start playing guitar until 1928. King Oliver was playing jazz in New Orleans in the mid-1910s. But Buddy Bolden had already been playing jazz in New Orleans as early as 1905. That was before the term "jazz" was even invented, and before Stephane Grapelli or Django Reinhardt had even been born.
Buddy Bolden is considered by jazz musicians, historians and musicologists as having started the first band that played improvised music of the type later known as "jazz".
Now, don't you feel a little bit stupid?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Geez, I for the days of NOT that long ago, when the only words you couldn't use on TV were the George Carlin Famous 7.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I have used t-mobile for about 5 or 6 years. I have never had a problem with the service. Contrary to what that airhead customer thinks, I don't live in a ghetto.
:)
I love to see the look on the faces of my ATT friends when I tell them I only pay $50/month for unlimited text/calls/data (up to 2GB at 4g then throttled back after that). I also have rollover data, so what I don't use gets put on the next month's "allowance". They just sent me a text the other day showing I have about 6GB of 4g-speed data to use.
And recently they mentioned something about certain kinds of streaming traffic not counting towards your monthly allotment. I haven't really looked into it yet.
On a personal note, the attitude of that customer makes me sick. I have friends and family of different races. I know people who live "in the ghetto". They are not subhumans you can look down your nose at...what a bitch.
I believe that a good number of George Carlin's 7 you can now say on TV.
Time to offend someone
Power chord is 3 notes a 5th and an octave from the chord tone such as C,G,C this is common in rock guitar because the fingering pattern is simple and is the first three notes of a bar chord finger pattern but it is not the only fingering pattern to omit the 3rd interval of a chord that's common in rock guitar a 4th is also very common because it is even simpler than the power chord and only uses one finger {check out some Randy Rhoads}. When the guitar plays a 4th such as G, C another guitar, bass, or possibly other instrument will likely play the associated 3rd and chord tone giving you C,E,G,C across multiple octaves so that the result can have a major or minor sound. A good two part guitar piece would include passing tones, suspensions, escape tones, etc... all common to classical music.
And, oddly enough, the first thing that comes to mind when I hear "Sprint" is "white trash".
What's odd about that? Sprint is NASCAR's biggest sponsor.
I don't presume to know any good accounting for any national origin of aspects of music today. I do know that the diatonic scale and its modes appeared independently in different places and so did the pentatonic scales. Jazz is a broad thing. It's easy to identify tributaries from multiples genres in multiple places. The harmonic minor was common in European classical music, is rampant in Middle Eastern music and pops up all over the place.
Trying to claim some musical style or scale or chord progression is the property of a skin color is silly.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Not to mention that the video shows HIM nodding and saying "yes" when she says that.
HE chose to go ahead with that video.
HE chose to include that scene in the commercial.
HIS company's logo is on that commercial.
No. It was not that woman. HE chose all of that. He could have left it out.
Now he's trying to blame her. Fuck him.
I am one of T-Mobile's earlier customers. I signed up with them shortly after they formed in 1999 because they were the only carrier in Metro Detroit that offered GSM, and I thought it would be useful to be able to use my phone in Europe where I worked for a week or two once a year. Indeed, I used my phone in Europe sparingly. Thanks to number portability, I've had the same phone number for the entire 17 year period.
We've had our ups and downs, but for most of those 17 years T-Mobile was the cheapest option, sometimes by a large margin. Their data service is fast, but only if you get a 4G or 4G LTE signal. You don't want to be stuck on their Edge network for longer than brief periods. Edge is not much better than 1999-era GSM.
I haven't gotten a 3G signal in many years, except where T-Mobile has a roaming agreement with another carrier. In these roaming areas, they give you a tiny monthly allocation of data which I normally exhaust in a few hours. You can still make calls and send text messages as normal. This leads me to conclude that while other carriers have wider deployments, T-Mobile has done a great job at providing coverage where their customers actually live and work. Unfortunately, when you go camping and you have roaming coverage instead of Edge coverage, you will quickly not be able to use the Internet at all, rather than have to settle for slower speeds.
I live, work, and mostly travel where T-Mobile 4G LTE coverage is good. Programs like Waze are much better now at dealing with networks like T-Mobile where speeds can go from 4G LTE to no coverage within ten miles by behaving like you would expect. I used to have problems with apps thinking that everywhere the app is being used the bandwidth will be the same, or the developer naively assuming that their offices in Silicon Valley have similar coverage to places like rural Illinois.
To summarize, if you are a rural user, do not use T-Mobile. If you are a(n) (sub)urban and cost sensitive user like me, go with T-Mobile. You won't always get good coverage in rural areas, but you can at least store your pictures and videos and immediately crush the first 4G LTE tower you encounter once you get within range on your way home.
> People, just get over it...pretty soon, NOTHING will be able to be said.
Oh, please. There is no never-expanding-list of things you can't say. It's merely an matter of respect. This article is a perfect illustration of that. The word itself isn't the issue, it's the interpretation of what the person meant. To most it is doubtful that that person pored over a dictionary trying to find the best most accurate word to use. Instead they probably thought the person had a particular picture in their head, one they found unflattering. They could have said "trailer park", not even a remotely racial term, and the same would have happened.
People don't like being judged for something they didn't do. That's it, that's the whole story. There are lots of terms that do just that, and you already know what they are, it's not some new thing that just came along. What is changing is that the scope of people you meet in your life is broadening. In my own case I gave up using the R-word very fast after doing some volunteer work for the Special Olympics. I'm in a position where I could really darken the day of someone who doesn't deserve it. Nobody has ever actually gotten on my case before for using that term, I didn't have to find out it was on a "bad list" by using the term in front of one of the athletes. All I needed to know was what the word meant. It isn't too much to ask to know what words mean.
You don't actually have to live in fear of accidentally using the wrong term, especially if you're not already an asshole.
But the person on the ad was not calling anyone "Ghetto"...she said the word to describe T-Mobile, a competitor, was Ghetto.
I'm trying to figure out how they thought it would be beneficial to them to say this in the first place.
Cellular companies are just service providers. If a cheaper service provider meets the customer's needs then why would the customer spend more money than necessary?
Insulting another company through pejoratives that don't have a technical meaning probably does more to galvanize that company's subscribers against the person making the statement than it does to solicit those subscribers, as it is basically an insult to the customers too.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Finally someone with some sense on Slashdot. How insecure are people posting here that they have to cry every time a story comes up that references changing social etiquette norms, especially in public circumstances? The exercise was word association. The woman associated T-mobile with "ghetto", and the implication was clearly that it was meant to be derogatory, in the sense that it's bad to be associated with a ghetto. Many people are forced to live in what have traditionally been called ghettos, this does not reflect who they are as people but the association with "ghetto" impacts their life in negative ways, from financial and social hardship to just feeling shitty. Commercials like this normalize this association in our culture and imply that the effect is neglible. This further hurts the people already affected by the association because it basically says that their negative experience with the association doesn't matter. Now, you can be an asshole all you want in private, that's fine if that's what it takes to make you feel better about yourself. But in the public domain, when your thoughts may be heard by anyone, have a little consideration about the actual effects of what your dumb ass wants to say. I swear reading all these comments on Slashdot complaining about PC culture, I feel like you all are a second away from killing yourselves because you can't handle the notion that social norms can be hurtful to others. tl;dr thank you, poster above me, for having some damn sense
Only people in the ghetto can use the word ghetto. Just say "the G word" instead.
But no...everyone has to attach a racist tag to it.
Well, that is sort of the origin of the word: a segregated neighborhood of the city. Usually jews, but more recently for black neighborhoods in the US. They don't even have to be all impoverished but generally are as groups that have economic power usually aren't force to live someplace. To somebody that's never been told where they have to live, it might have a more generally meaning, but as that red-lining is still going on, it might have different meaning to those who actually have to live there.
I honestly love the history of music lesson and telling a bigoted cretin to shove it, but I came here to learn more about what's wrong with T-Mobile.
But once I realized what was going on, I have to say the only way they could have done worst is record the commercial in Yiddish and air it in central Europe.
Abraham Lincoln: [interrupting] What a charming negress. Oh, forgive me, my dear. I know that in my time some use that term as a description of property.
Uhura: But why should I object to that term, sir? You see, in our century, we've learned not to fear words.
. .
The broad definition of the word isn't "the poorest part of a city" - it actually means the area of a city that is set aside for a minority, and carries some connotations of that place being poor. People aren't just attaching a racist tag to it; the very definition of the word is inseparable from race. The fact that you think "ghetto" simply means a "poor area" suggests that you've been exposed to a lot of casual racism in your life, and you haven't noticed.
For example, during the Nazi era, the Jews were gathered into ghettoes. They weren't called ghettoes because they were poor, they were called that because they were areas that were set aside for Jews.
When I was in high school, a lot of kids would say "that's gay" to refer to anything they didn't like in general - imagine if the woman in the ad had called T-Mobile "gay"! It's similarly offensive to people who actually live in ghettoes, or are part of races that have historically been forced into ghettoes.
No, there are other, qualitative differences between ragtime and what Bolden was playing. They have the syncopation in common, but that's about where the similarity ends. Bolden added the harmonic substitutions, the iconic progressions and most important, the improvised solo voices that make jazz jazz.
I realize that your post was just an excuse to post a racist image, but I don't want erroneous information to go unchallenged.
Also, did you know that most ragtime music was written by white women? Yes, the originators were black, but it was quickly taken up as parlor music by white women, who penned most of the published ragtime.
You are welcome on my lawn.