Khaled rambles technology, tea/coffee, consumer rights and other interest from Saudi Arabia

The ad war between the Saudi Telecom Company (STC) and Mobily continues. After STC’s response to Mobily. Mobily has aired the following ad on 9/9/2009. The Mobily employee warns against using inferior products shown by “their brothers”, meaning STC. In the end he said “beware of fake products”.

CITC is being quiet about it. But a few days later STC has edited their ad to remove the “fake device” and Mobily has stopped airing their ad mentioned in this post.

I found this interesting comic on Alriyadh newspaper:

The title is “ad wars” and the two women in this ad are dressed in the traditional logo colors of STC and Mobily. Guess the ad war is good for the consumer, no?

This is not the first ad war between the 2 companies. It happened before in 2006 and you can read about it on Arab News.

The eternal feud between the Saudi Telecom Company (STC) and Mobily will never end apparently.

Starting this Ramadan Mobily has aired some ads showing their Mobily Broadband @ Home service. This ad shows a person installing a DSL land line, happily saying “they are finally installing the Internet”, he did not say “finally” but his expressions show that he is happy that he finally got his DSL Internet connection (from STC).

This second ad is about the wireless features of the modem, it reminds me of the good old days of dial up modems (oh wait, STC DSL still feels like a dial up modem sometimes). The third ad shows people screaming in frustration with their disconnected Internet connections (something I am sure everyone in Saudi Arabia has experienced).

So on September 6th, STC has aired a counter advertisement which ironically airs at the same time as Mobily ads:

The ad clearly copied how Mobily customer care desks looked like, the blue square logo on the modem and how the modem looked. The customers were trying to get a good signal by extending the modem out of the window. The guy using STC’s service said “they got screwed”.

I am no fan of Mobily; their billing system is inaccurate and they are ruining the iPhone 3G/3GS experience in Saudi Arabia (I got into the details at SaudiMac). STC isn’t any better; Mobily is truly the lesser evil of the two.