I had the great privilege – and challenge – of leading the creative team that helped to launch M1, Singapore’s second mobile telecommunications provider, in Singapore in 1997. Not surprisingly, SingTel (ST), the telecommunications provider that originally had a monopoly on the market, took great umbrage at this cocky new upstart. So ST launched a campaign hitting out at M1 and implying that the fledging network was too small to offer effective coverage. In fact they launched three separate TVCs, making this point in different ways. Instead of trying to respond to each one of these commercials, as the client was intending to do, we advised M1 to retake the lead by coming up with five different commercials poking gentle fun at various weaknesses of ST’s own network. We could then scatter these short TVCs over a wide range of programming, making it impossible for ST to respond. These commercials only ran for a short time before M1 and ST reached a ‘gentleman’s agreement’, but they were well remembered nonetheless. In fact, Cherian George, the media commentator, actually recalled the ‘Sneezing Handphone” TVC in an article written 4 years after these commercials appeared.