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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.