Three Versions of the Same Commercial

Another Super Bowl came and went, once again hosting a plethora of good advertisements in between stoppages of play in the game. Normally, I enjoy watching the game while waiting for the next wave of advertisements to come, but I found this year’s game to be rather boring which led to me enjoying each advertisement even more. However, one advertisement stuck out to me more than others, and that’s mainly because it was the third version of an advertisement I had already seen twice before. Of course, I am talking about the T-Mobile ball advertisement with celebrity endorser Steve Harvey.

This all started in December, 2015 when Verizon started a new ad campaign, that consisted of different color balls that represented Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile, going down a ramp. To no surprise, Verizon had the most balls in this commercial, which meant that they had the best wireless performance, among other things, compared to their competitors.

Sprint did not appreciate this, and decided to make a commercial for themselves.

In the commercial, Sprint claims to have faster download speeds than all of their competitors, including Verizon, and that Verizon forgot to mention that in the first commercial. This response by Sprint to call out Verizon apparently inspired T-Mobile to do the same thing, except they waited to pay $5 million so that they could air it during the Super Bowl. Utilizing the fact that Steve Harvey was being turned into memes and trending on the Internet about a month prior was helpful for T-Mobile in the fact that he was still relevant. In the commercial, he says that Verizon used the prior years numbers rather than keeping up to date with the current ones, and in fact that T-Mobile doubled their wireless performance which basically is now the same amount that Verizon offers. However, there was no way that Mr. Harvey was going to take the blame for getting the numbers wrong the way he took the blame at Miss Universe 2015 when he announced the wrong winner, but instead completely holds Verizon accountable for the wrong information.

Out of the three commercials, T-Mobile was the only one who used a celebrity. Although, with three versions of the same commercial being utilized by these companies, at some point one has to call into question as to where the originality of advertisements has gone that used to always be present. Overall, Steve Harvey making fun of himself and the “colorful balls war” going on between the cellphone companies was in good fun and, in my opinion, better than both Verizon’s and Sprint’s commercials’. Now we’ll just have to wait and see if AT&T comes out with their own ball commercial over the next few weeks (I hope not).