AT&T Pushes Its New Image

You might well remember the corporate telecom monolith of old that was AT&T. Look at the company’s new ad campaign that begins this week and you might wellwonder at the erasure of that history. AT&T has a sleek new image.   Today, according to the hype, "AT&T is now a mobility-centric company capable of meeting the needs of today’smobile lifestyles."   A lot of this has to do with the iPhone, of course, since AT&T is the exclusive US network for the Apple handset. And with one million iPhones sold in just 74 days, the demand is there. It’s certainly helped AT&T reposition itself.   That reinventionappears to have been successful. The company claims that in the BellSouth region it took just 30 days after the AT&T acquisition of BellSouth for people to be more aware of AT&T thanBellSouth (the two companies had jointly owned Cingular Wireless), and the iPhone has helped establish AT&T in place of Cingular.   Nor is AT&T short on chutzpah in its new pressrelease:   "Within weeks of the late June iPhone launch, awareness of AT&T as a wireless brand surpassed the Cingular brand for the first time and customers recognized AT&T as the’best’ or ‘one of the best’ companies in the wireless space."   It’s also the biggest. That happened fairly quietly, on the day of the iPhone launch, when it acquired DobsonCommunications, which had 1.76 million subscribers. The purchased leapfrogged the company ahead of Verizon Wireless.