Come and get your smug

You can just smell the desperation in every Alltel ad:



Oh man, those other wireless companies are such dorks. How could I ever use one of them, when Alltel is represented by a cool guy with spiky blond hair?

Idiotic things about this ad include the following:

* Using the unbelievably cliché tactic of personifying your competitor(s) as less hip and/or attractive than your pitchman
* Suggesting that Verizon, Sprint, Cingular and T-Mobile would ever act in unison, when in fact they fight rather fiercely for market share
* Further suggesting that these four companies could give even half a shit about Alltel when they combine for 88% of the US wireless market and Alltel, despite recent growth, is still a pretty distant fifth

Obviously Alltel is going to want to talk up its advantages, but couldn't it just have run a commercial doing so? The ads in which it takes on the "Big Four" are just kind of pathetic when it isn't a close race at the moment, and Alltel doesn't exactly have the "hip" factor of something like Apple that could allow it to get away with this kind of campaign. Alltel's aiming at so many different targets that it can't even do more than mention a single benefit that it has, while no doubt intentionally glossing over things like network reliability and range of service (which I'm going to go ahead and say matter more to most wireless users than a list of ten people you can call for free). So much time is spent on the "ha ha, what dorks" angle that Campbell-Ewald needed to make, what, six of these things, one for each feature? What an absolute waste of everyone's time.