It's not quite clear what exactly Sprint was trying to accomplish with its ill-fated, rather tasteless ad, but a few hours of Twitter outrage took care of the controversial video: It was pulled Tuesday night, the Washington Post reports.
The carrier has, of course, been duking it out with other telecommunications companies, namely AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. In its latest bid to outdo its competition, Sprint thought it was a great idea to air footage of a customer calling T-Mobile "ghetto."
In the ad, Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure asks a customer what she thinks of T-Mobile.
"I'm going to tell you a carrier name, and I want you to basically tell me what comes to your mind," Claure says in the video. "T-Mobile. When I say T-Mobile to you, just a couple of words?"
"Oh, my God, the first word that came to my mind was … 'ghetto'!" the customer, a white woman, replies with a bit of a dramatic pause, to laughter and nods in the room. “That sounds, like, terrible. I don't know.
"People who have T-Mobile are just, like, why do you have T-Mobile?" she continues.
On Tuesday at about 1 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, Claure tweeted the video, tagging T-Mobile and adding in the caption, "Sometimes the truth hurts."
https://twitter.com/marceloclaure/status/719933582119215104
"We're sharing real comments from real customers. Maybe not the best choice of words by the customer. Not meant to offend anyone," he added in a follow-up tweet.
Twitter users, however, were not having it. Claure was almost immediately hit with the backlash, with users calling the ad "stupid," "racist" and "classist."
https://twitter.com/Jerzyiroc/status/719947735613468674https://twitter.com/adamtyree/status/720035852580048896https://twitter.com/dcseifert/status/720066544794013696
After eight hours, Claure announced that he would be pulling the video and apologized.
https://twitter.com/marceloclaure/status/720062170067697664
Read more at the Washington Post.