Verizon iPhone prompts Sprint to drop derogatory iPhone quote from ad

First Verizon makes its big iPhone 4 play, now Sprint is telegraphing something regarding its iPhone plans as well. For those who thought the carrier moving-and-shaking for the iPhone had already come and gone, think again. Sprint is on the move, one way or the other, in relation to the iPhone. Even as the Verizon begins running its nationwide television ads bragging about the fact that it’s now landed the iPhone 4, Sprint has made a subtle yet significant change to its own ads. Until now, Sprint had been promoting its own EVO on TV by showing the text of, but not speaking, one favorable media quote about the phone after another. And the punchline quote was one in which one publication stated that the EVO was a superior option to the iPhone 4. The ad has been running consistently, for months, without change. Until now. The moment the Verizon iPhone 4 ad started running, Sprint altered its own commercial to remove the iPhone 4 quote entirely. The ad hasn’t been edited for length. It runs the same length as before. Sprint simply decided that it needed to get the derogatory iPhone 4 quote out of its commercial. And the timing is ostensibly not a coincidence.
Sprint isn’t the first U.S. carrier to take public potshots at the iPhone. In fact it was Verizon, barely a year ago, which threw the iPhone under a bus in almost vulgar fashion when it was launching the rival Droid. Shortly thereafter, Verizon curiously ceased airing the iPhone nastygram and its subsequent Droid ads made no mention of the iPhone one way or the other. At the time, it wasn’t clear whether Verizon merely decided it was a bad strategy to mention a competing product in its own ad at all, or whether a Verizon-Apple partnership was secretly afoot and Verizon had decided to stop publicly bashing its new secret partner. Although it took Verizon another year-plus to get to the point where it was able to begin selling the iPhone itself, it’s now been revealed that the Verizon iPhone was actually in development for close to a year.
Do the calendar math, and it could still go either way as to whether Verizon yanked the anti-iPhone ad because it had a change of heart of a change of allegiance. Now, more than a year later, history is repeating itself with Sprint. At a time when the Verizon iPhone is done from an inside standpoint (all that’s left is to market and sell it), now would be the time for Apple to turn its attention to expanding the iPhone to the Sprint and T-Mobile carriers, if indeed it plans to do so. Either way, at this point don’t expect to see either carrier pick up the iPhone until the next generation iPhone rolls out later this year. But Sprint’s decision to remove the iPhone quote from its ad at this time adds up to something, whether it’s a change in strategy due to the Verizon iPhone 4 arrival, or a sign of a newly underway Sprint-Apple partnership. It’s also worth pointing out that Verizon’s openly nasty anti-iPhone ad didn’t keep Verizon from eventually being able to buddy up to Apple, so Sprint’s comparatively tame use of a calm quote from a third party shouldn’t be a hurdle if and when Sprint and Apple sit down at the table – if they haven’t already.