Advertising campaigns by telecom companies are all the rage these days. It seems they are the only ones left with enough money to even buy media space anymore. Lately, they seem to be going after each other aggressively, especially after zong opened up operations in the country.

Recently, Zong set up an MNP campaign which aired all over the place. The campaign was centered around the following group of TVCs.

Now this ad may have been very informative to the customer on what MNP is all about (namely, you get to keep the complete number, including the network code when you switch) it wasn’t very pleasing to other operators seeing that their customers were being targeted.So Ufone came up with a campaign of it’s own. Only they didn’t release it to any of the traditional media streams, they kept it viral. It’s been making rounds on facebook, youtube and other sites and has been viewed more than 10,000 times on youtube only, facebook is another story.

The main theme of this ad was that the number with 0333 was attached to ufone because the customer wasn’t “pagal”. The ufone segment was the following:

Not be outdone, Zong created and released a viral video of it’s own with the line, “har pagal ye hee bolta hai kay mein pagal nahi hoon” (a crazy person always claims he’s not crazy). The ad was the following:

Now as a consumer, you may be shocked, delighted or whatever, but that’s besides the point. The point is, these two giants have broken into a whole new segment of advertising which was pretty much dormant in Pakistan, namely viral marketing. I don’t think many other advertising houses would steer clear of online or viral marketing now, given how successful these strategies have been to these two.