Usual Suspect Touts Sprint's Wireless Web - Brief Article

Brandweek, Sept 20, 1999 by Todd Wasserman

Sprint PCS will deploy its now-familiar, deadpan spokesman for two tongue-in-cheek TV spots breaking this week to support the telecom company's new Wireless Web service.

One of the two 30-second spots, via Publicis Hal Riney & Partners, S.F., features the square-jawed spokesman, actor Brian Baker, crossing paths in a metropolitan park with a mysterious figure modeled on Q, the inventor from the James Bond series. The Q character opens a metal briefcase to reveal a wireless handset equipped with Wireless Web, a service that lets users receive updates from the Web via wireless phones.

"Will they be ready for it?" the spokesman asks. "Some will. Others will follow," answers Q.

In the second spot, the spokesman is standing outside an apartment building and "letting the geeks of the world know there is life outside; they no longer have to be chained to their computers to use the Web," said Charles Levine, chief sales and marketing director for the Westwood, Kan., company.

The spots are an extension of the "Cellular Town" campaign launched in May. Tagline: "The clear alternative to cellular." The budget for the Wireless Web campaign was not disclosed, but Sprint PCS, a subsidiary of Sprint, spent $11.1 million on measured media last year, according to Competitive Media Reporting.

Print ads take a bolder, more direct stance. One shows a Sprint PCS-branded phone handset with the headline, "Good-bye office. Hello, world." Another employs a similar image with the headline, "The power of Internet. Now in your hand."

Print ads will run in general-interest books and newspapers such as The New York Times, L.A. Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal.