AT&T Aims To Put Its Mark On Mobility

AT&T is taking the next step in its marketing makeover with an extensive brand advertising campaign, scheduled to begin today, that is focused on mobile life styles.

The campaign is the most recent effort by AT&T to convince consumers that the integration of the company formerly known as Cingular Wireless is proceeding smoothly and offers them additional ways to cope with their hectic professional and personal lives.

AT&T previously owned 60 percent of Cingular and acquired the rest when it took over the BellSouth Corporation. The Cingular brand has vanished; the cellular operations are now referred to as the AT&T wireless group. But the familiar orange color scheme for Cingular has been adopted by AT&T, in tandem with the AT&T ball, or globe.

Spending for the campaign is not being disclosed. But estimates are that last year, when AT&T promoted its rebranding to AT&T from SBC Communications, the company spent $1 billion on those advertisements.

Since January, AT&T has been promoting the combination with Cingular in a brand campaign carrying the theme “Your world. Delivered.” The new campaign retains the theme as it seeks to portray a “seamless world” in which mobility is the most important element.

The campaign starts with six commercials featuring actors playing characters like a globe-trotting actor, a working mother, a traveling TV reporter and a multi-tasking student. They describe how they are always on the go and need a communications company that can serve them wherever they are.

To underscore the message, the names of cities, states and countries are mashed up, or mixed together, in fanciful combinations, as when the actor declares how AT&T meets his needs as he travels through “HollyyorkazonaSouthAmeriland.”

By the end of September, AT&T plans to open an online store at att.com where consumers can personalize and buy merchandise like T-shirts and mugs bearing their own fanciful renditions of all the places to which they are connected.

The goal of the campaign is to “add meat to the bone, giving consumers more detail about the new AT&T,” Wendy Clark, senior vice president for advertising at AT&T in San Antonio, said yesterday in a telephone interview.

The commercials “tested very well” with consumers before their release, she added, in delivering the message that AT&T is remaking itself “in a mobile-centric way.”

There will also be additional online aspects to the campaign, including a Web site where visitors can create “digital personalities.” Those elements are aimed particularly at younger consumers, an important market for AT&T as it seeks to freshen its brand image with a demographic group that has most likely never heard of “Ma Bell.”

The campaign is being created by BBDO

Worldwide in New York, part of the Omnicom Group, and the BBDO digital arm, Atmosphere BBDO. BBDO, which previously created campaigns for Cingular, recently became the lead creative agency on brand and consumer campaigns for AT&T, replacing another Omnicom agency, GSD&M’s Idea City in Austin, Tex.

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