Sprint has a lot of reasons to be happy these days. After posting its preliminary financial results for last quarter earlier this week, the fourth largest US carrier demonstrated that it's slowly steadying the rocky ship that its business results have been in recent years. A little over a year ago, T-Mobile managed to take the title of the third largest US wireless carrier away from Sprint but a new major fight for market share is now in the making once again.

Interestingly enough, Sprint isn't targeting T-Mobile customers. In fact, it's taking on the largest wireless carrier in the country – Verizon Wireless. Over in New Jersey, everyone at Verizon's HQ is a little on edge after its third-quarter earnings report revealed that the company missed analysts' expectations when it comes to additions of postpaid users. Sprint is now trying to rub some salt on that wound with a couple of new ads it launched yesterday. The ads note how Sprint's network reliability is now within 1% of Verizon and pokes fun of Verizon's executives as it depicts them panicking and hiding around the office. Sprint's network reliability was questioned in the past on more than one occasion so it's not surprising that the carrier is now proudly advertising the fact that it's only 1% worse than Verizon. Of course, that's because Sprint is still aggressively marketing its half-off promotion which promises to cut your phone bill in half if you switch from another carrier. As both of the company's latest ads put it, "don't let a 1% difference cost you twice as much."

Whether this is good marketing or not is up for discussion, but it's definitely interesting to see Sprint employ such cheeky advertising practices which one would usually associate with T-Mobile. Well, T-Mobile under John Legere, that is. Speaking of which, this also isn't the first time Verizon was mocked by another competitor. Earlier this year, T-Mobile made fun of the company's earnings call by coming up with an elaborate drinking game which required you to take a shot every time Verizon's executives mentioned "millennials" or were unable to form a sentence which didn't include some jargon. Whether that's an effective advertising strategy or just a way to entertain existing customers is debatable, but Sprint has obviously decided to join in on the fun.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGLOeyalDLc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–sFJAEIo_E