Hasta La Gadget!

When you find out that AT&T put out an attack ad about a competing carrier, you’re first guess is that they’re probably going after Verizon, which is AT&T’s biggest competition right now. However, it turns out that Ma Bell is going after the little guys in a new full-page newspaper ad that appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.

The advertisement goes after T-Mobile, and it explains “the truth about T-Mobile’s network.” AT&T claims that T-Mobile customers experience double the dropped calls, double the number of failed calls, and 50% slower download speeds compared to AT&T’s own network. As a response to the ad, T-Mobile Chief Marketing Officer Mike Sievert said, “Wow. Looks like we struck a chord.”

Of course, T-Mobile has gone after AT&T before, so this could be regarded as a fair fight, since AT&T seems to just merely be dishing it right back. T-Mobile CEO John Legere shared some fighting words at CES back in January about AT&T, and it just seems that AT&T is glad to return the favor to the Deutsche Telekom-owned company.

However, it seems that T-Mobile is taking the attack ad very lightly, as it should. Sievert said that “AT&T doth protest too much. Glad they’re spending their money to print our name.” Of course, whether or not AT&T’s claims about T-Mobile’s network are true, I’m sure T-Mobile users are pretty excited about the cheaper bill they get every month, but everyone has their preferences, of course.

[via Bloomberg]

AT&T attacks T-Mobile in full-page newspaper ad is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Facebook has discovered that its “pages” feature, which allows businesses and websites to share their information with millions of Facebook users, has a slight issue. There were some bugs that were discovered after Facebook launched a “comprehensive engineering audit” on their pages product. The bugs caused the impressions and audience reach reports to return incorrect information to businesses and websites.

Facebook says that while the actual delivery and reach were unaffected, the reports of how many people being reached were under-reported. Fixes for the Facebook system began rolling out on Friday,and will continue rolling out this weekend. Facebook pages should be reporting the correct information starting on Monday.

After the fixes are rolled out, your reported reach should increase compared to previous reports, however there is also a chance that your page’s reach was unaffected by the bug in the first place. Your organic reach should either increase or decrease depending on the number of subscribers to your Facebook page, as well as how often you make a post. For those who purchased a paid-ad campaign through Facebook, there should definitely be an increase in your reports. There has been a change in the metrics extracted from your Facebook page’s reach and impressions. Finally, Facebook has implemented new measures in order to prevent bugs from misreporting your page reach in the future.

Starting Monday, Facebook suggests analyzing your page’s data, including looking at your organic, paid, and viral reach in order to view how affected you were by these bugs. Since the bugs affected Facebook’s logging system, there’s no way Facebook can restore the real data in past posts. Despite this bug affecting your statistics, it might actually be a good thing, because your Facebook page, and your business, could be doing a whole lot better than you had expected.

[via Facebook]

Bugs affect Facebook insights for pages is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The Super Bowl is a good two weeks behind us now, but the commercials are continuing to live on. We ended up rounding all of them up and showing all the ones that we liked the best, and it looks like the public shared some of our same thoughts. The 2013 YouTube Ad Blitz contest saw Dodge’s Ram Trucks “Farmer” ad take the top spot.

YouTube users voted on their favorite Super Bowl advertisement for the past two weeks, and it’s not too surprising that Dodge won the crown. Their ad was a bold step towards originality, using strictly photos and a voice-over from the late Paul Harvey, who was a famous radio broadcaster for over a half-century. While the ad may not have been comical or fast-paced, it tugged at the heart strings for many viewers.

Rounding out the top five Super Bowl ads on YouTube include Budweiser’s “Clydesdales” ad, Samsung’s “The Next Best Thing” featuring Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen, Jeep’s “Whole Again” ad, and Hyundai’s “Team” ad. All five of these adds have a combined 62.7 million views as of this writing, with the most being Samsung’s ad with 21.3 million views.

In total, these five ads made up more than 30% of all total views of Super Bowl ads and teasers on YouTube. Plus, the Ad Blitz channel itself had over 46 million interactions. To celebrate the end of Ad Blitz, YouTube is hosting a Google+ Hangout later today at 3 pm ET where they will chat with the “creative heavyweights behind these winning ads, along with ADWEEK editors James Cooper and Tim Nudd.”

Dodge Ram “Farmer” ad wins best Super Bowl ad on YouTube is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Microsoft‘s series of Surface advertisements have been interesting to say the least, and their latest one is no exception. It’s the company’s first Surface Pro advertisement to air on television, and while we get to see the tablet being thrown around in a room full of break dancers, we’re not quite sure if Microsoft hit the mark on this one.

Essentially the advertisement is a lot similar to past Surface ads we’ve seen, where the users perform cool trucks with the tablets, and in this case, breakdance with the tablet in hand. In the ad, we see what the Surface Pro can do for only a few split seconds, like take notes with the stylus in business reports, and even create music by plugging in a microphone.

However, the ad doesn’t really get the point across of what the main differences between the original Surface tablet and this new Surface Pro. Sure, tech enthusiasts like you and me (aka geeks) know the differences between the two, but everyday users really only know that the “Pro” tacked on at the end must mean it’s better, without knowing the details.

Of course, the tablet is definitely an improvement over the original model, and it seems Microsoft is just going to leave it at that. The Surface Pro is available now in stores and online with prices starting at $899 for the 64GB version and going up to $999 for the 128GB variant.

Microsoft Surface Pro ad will make you want to breakdance is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Late last week, Google decided to pay $82 million to French publishers that would help their websites make money off of online advertisements. However, it seems there’s a little bit of jealously going around with other European countries. The European Publishers Council isn’t too happy about the exclusivity with France, so the EPC’s director, Francisco Pinto Balsemao, is asking Google to compensate publishers in all European countries, not just France.

Balsemao claims that search engines, like Google, get over 90% of revenues from online advertising, and a lot of that comes either directly or indirectly from news or entertainment content that’s available for free. He says that “this use is carried out without the authorization from copyright holders or without any payment in return,” which basically means that Google, and other search engines, should pay up.

The EPC represents 26 of the main media outlets that are operating in Europe, so that organization definitely has a some authority when it comes to this kind of stuff, and since ad revenue is falling throughout Europe, the group is wanting search engines to pay up a chunk, since the’re believed to essentially be taking ad revenue away from these European outlets.

Advertising revenues in Portugal fell by 90 million euros in 2012, down to 526 million euros, which is the country’s lowest since 1997. Google has declined to speak about on the situation, but according to TechCrunch, a source close to Google said that the EPC’s claim that the company gets over 90% of its revenue from web advertising is untrue.

[via Reuters]

Google asked to pay all European countries for content use is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.