TORONTO – Rogers Communications today filed a lawsuit with the Federal Court of Canada over Bell Mobility’s recent run of TV and print advertising Rogers says “crosses the line” and is damaging to its brand.
“Bell has run a series of ads over the past year, the most recent of which, we felt, were too much,” John Boynton, Rogers Communications senior vice-president and chief marketing officer told www.cartt.ca this afternoon. The most recent ad that he – and the lawsuit – points to is the TV spot about Bell Mobility’s wireless speed capabilities where the Bell cheetah eats the Rogers rabbit, and then spits it back out.
Calling the ads “disparaging” and saying they “denigrate the Rogers brand,” Rogers has filed suit under the Trademarks Act, has asked for as-yet unspecified damages and for the ads to stop.
“We are in a highly competitive industry in wireless and we support and believe in competitive advertising and have done it ourselves in the past but this has nothing to do with being competitive.”
Comparisons of service is fine, said Boynton, but, “we believe the line was crossed and the objective of the advertising no longer becomes competitive but becomes about denigrating another company’s brand – a good example is the most recent ad with the cheetah and the rabbit… if you were doing competitive advertising you would show the cheetah beating the rabbit in a race showing that it’s much faster but clearly the objective of the ad is different and the cheetah instead must swallow the rabbit and then barf it out.
“That is quite frankly, a very, very shameless, unnecessary thing that they didn’t have to do.”
In Rogers’ statement of claim, it says the cheetah ad “disparages, denigrates, discredits, tarnishes, diminishes and otherwise deprecates the value of the goodwill associated with the Rogers trademarks an Rogers brand. Rogers is symbolically devoured, choked on, and then spat out by Bell.”
On January 20th, Rogers’ lawyers wrote Bell, demanding the ads be pulled. Bell refused, says the statement of claim.
Another print ad ran out west shows Rogers phones in a urinal with a Bell offer above the urinal “and the line says ‘making the other guys plans seem worthless,’” says Boynton.
“So they are saying the value of our brand is worthless.
“There’s a point where you want to do some logical, factual comparisons, and sometimes there’s a clever, emotional element to it but there’s a line that gets crossed that people need to be taken to task on,” he continued. “We’re a multi-billion-dollar company and wireless has revenues in the millions and millions – the value of our brand, therefore, is massive and when somebody clearly is out to denigrate the brand and reduce the value and therefore the value of the company, we will hold them for monetary reasons.”
Since its own lawyers only received notice of the lawsuit today, a Bell spokesman, when contacted by www.cartt.ca, said the company could not comment yet.
