At&T Organizational Resources

Ad Spending

AT&T's $67 billion acquisition of BellSouth has short- and long-term repercussions for ad spending in the telecom category (now the fourth-largest in the U.S. at nearly $6 billion). In the short term, Cingular Wireless will be renamed AT&T Wireless, and the merged company would have to rebrand in BellSouth markets. SBC, which acquired AT&T and then assumed that venerable brand, is in the midst of a $1 billion rebranding campaign this will be merging three brands into one (MarketingVOX, 2007).

However, in the long term, spending may decline. AT&T and BellSouth spend about $3 billion combined on advertising, and AT&T now expects reduced ad expenses to be a major source of savings.

Newspapers would likely be the biggest losers, along with network and spot TV. Also, the Yellow Pages business is expected to be shaken up, AT&T and BellSouth control $6 billion of the $15 billion spent last year on Yellow Pages advertising; they recently purchased yellowpages.com for $100 million and will likely move from paper to online (MarketingVOX, 2007).

Marketing Tactics

AT&T Inc. on Wednesday took the first steps to more fully integrate wireless into its sales and marketing bundles. Essentially, AT&T is refocusing its marketing engine post-BellSouth merger, to sell a unified wireless-wire line portfolio. For instance, a combined sales force will offer both wireless and wire line service, rather than the two arms of the business remaining separate entities (Seals, Tara, 2007).

Billing convergence will be the next step. The RBOC said the full suite of both portfolios will be available on a single contract for midsized and large business by the end of the year. Also, customers may be able to make a single revenue commitment that includes both wire line and wireless calling volumes, resulting in wire line service discounts, and customers’ wire line calls could receive special on-net rates when calling other AT&T wireless or wire line business users.

AT&T is also packaging up service bundles for small businesses. A quadruple- play package of integrated local, long-distance, data and wireless services will become available in the company's 22-state local service region later this year (Seals, Tara, 2007).

The Cingular Wireless portfolio is being fully thrown open to businesses now, too. Midsized and large business customers will be able to purchase any wireless service, plan or device offered by the wireless carrier. Until now, only certain plans or devices were available to AT&T business customers as part of an integrated offer.

This announcement is not all sales repositioning, however. The company is also dipping into the fixed-mobile convergence waters with a new application: cellular access to corporate AT&T VPNs. Remote and mobile workers can use Wi-Fi or AT&T's wireless data service to access their company's VPN, business applications and corporate information (Seals, Tara, 2007).

The move to embrace wireless more fully is simply a result of demand, the company said. As of Dec. 31, 2006 revenue from AT&T's enterprise wireless business customers has experienced double-digit growth, compared with the previous six quarters, driven by strong demand from companies that are increasing their spend for wireless and mobility solutions.

AT&T Human Resources Executive Rank Changes

More change is afoot in the executive ranks of AT&T/BellSouth world. Dick Anderson, who happens to be this year's chairman of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, is leaving a high-ranking post at AT&T.

Anderson was one of the few high-ranking former BellSouth executives who stayed with AT&T in the wake of the company's purchase of BellSouth in December. He was named group president of AT&T Global Business Services, virtually running the company that was the legacy AT&T.

He is