The war of the maps and end-user preferences

The next time you go out to bid for anything, I hope you can stir up a fight between AT&T and Verizon that's as good as the one they're having on television and in federal court right now.

Verizon is sticking it to AT&T in U.S. TV ads for lacking 3G wireless coverage. Here's Verizon's ad technique: Show big, white spaces around the USA on what Verizon says is an AT&T network map. A putatively outraged AT&T has gone to court to stop the ads, claiming that of course it has good wireless coverage throughout most of the country, and the average viewer doesn't realize Verizon means a more-advanced network exclusively relying on 3G technology.

Verizon says that AT&T just can't handle the truth, and the ads do clearly use the label 3G. But some analysts say that Verizon is pushing the edge of how it presents its claims because it still can't match the momentum of the iPhone. So far the court has declined to stop the ads, but the judge is continuing to hear the case, and meanwhile AT&T and Apple are putting up their own ads touting both coverage and unique capabilities as much as they can.

Finding telecom carriers in court is hardly a new phenomenon, but I think this contretemps has a much different feel than the old days when the "RBOCs" and the "long distance carriers" would slug it out before the judge. In my view, the war of the maps has the potential to benefit both Verizon and AT&T at the expense of everyone else, no matter how it turns out. That's because the highly publicized incident furthers the Coke-and-Pepsi-fication of the telecom industry, something that the budding duopolists have to realize beneath it all.

In marketing, choosing to attack another vendor by name without being prompted to do so is, in part, a subtle way of paying respect to them. Besides, both carriers are continuing to build their networks, and the long-term potential for leapfrogging each other in capabilities is in place.

On a customer-by-customer basis, obviously AT&T and Verizon are playing for keeps, and they mean it when they battle for each customer contract. But as considerations of end-user preference on both carriers and devices seep further into the realm of corporate telecom procurement, image and status threaten to create a two-tier system where corporate executives may be forced to consider only a diminishing slate of brand-name vendors for large group purchases.

If those brand names cite only each other -- everywhere from the point of sale to Super Bowl ads -- it could create a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby they split the lion's share of the business. And the fact that in large parts of the country, either AT&T or Verizon can bundle end-user telecom and media needs in a way that Sprint and T-Mobile (or anyone else) can't helps keep these brand names on end-users' lips.

Thankfully, we're not at the point yet where wireless competition has been reduced to an either-or. But in the broad strokes of the telecom industry's future, I'm willing to bet that Verizon has finely calculated what attacking AT&T in this way means, and AT&T understands the publicity it's gaining from a legal war with Verizon, no matter how plainly it seems to many people that Verizon's ads are technically clean. Keep an ear out for how your user base talks about telecom vendors, for surely they're talking about them more than ever before. Ultimately, that's part of what all this is all about.