Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last month, you have probably been hearing about the ad battle between AT&T and Verizon that is paralleling a political campaign with constant attacking on both sides. It all started when Verizon decided to make a silly spin on iPhone “There’s an App for That” ads by making a “There’s a Map for That” ad, exploiting AT&T’s poor 3G network coverage. To fight back, AT&T decided to sue Verizon, leading to a war of attack ads back and forth that has no end in sight.

What does the consumer do in this situation? Sit back and watch in amusement? Take sides? One thing’s for certain – they’ve been talking, and Social Radar is showing us some interesting insight. Let’s take a look.

Now let’s take a look at the sentiment after the ad battle.

The sentiment appears to have effected AT&T the most severely, appearing to be a success for Verizon. But, both brands gained at least some negativity. Though this is good news for Verizon, let’s take a look at this from another perspective.

Below is a trend chart from September 1st, 2009 through today of Droid Mentions (blue line) versus Commercial/Ad Mentions (red line) within Verizon chatter.

What’s concerning here is that as soon as Verizon began to run these AT&T attack ads, chatter around their beloved Droid devices has dramatically decreased. We can see very clearly that consumers are losing focus and beginning to chat more about their commercials than the very ammunition they are using to sell against AT&T and the iPhone.

It will be interesting to see how this continues to play out. Are attack ads a good way to point out flaws of competitors or does it simply lose their consumers’ focus?