• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 2, 2008

Shaking off more than a century's worth of dust, the country's largest telecommunications carrier announced in December 2005 that it was shaking up its image to give the old brand new life. It launched a marketing campaign that in 2007 put AT&T on the leading edge of hip cultural trends and aligned the brand with the hottest electronics-maker on the planet, Apple.

The road to the makeover has been long. It began years before SBC Communications acquired AT&T in 2005 for $16 billion, setting plans in motion to rebrand under the 127-year-old name. The merger between AT&T and BellSouth, consolidating ownership and operations of Cingular Wireless in 2006, eventually became part of the new AT&T as well.

SBC Communications' decision to take on the AT&T name was hardly surprising. You can trace it back as far back as 1995, when Southwestern Bell Corp. took the name SBC Communications at its annual meeting of stockholders and adopted a new logo. At the time, SBC supported Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas and Texas--but in 1997 it acquired Pacific Telesis Group for $16.5 billion, adding California and Texas to the map.

"It was a big gamble for SBC because they were dealing with two damaged brands: the AT&T brand, which people thought of as the long-distance company, and the former brand, AT&T Wireless, before it was acquired by Cingular," says Jan Dawson, vice president at research firm Ovum. "There was a danger that people would remember the old AT&T Wireless brand, and negative associations would be conjured up. So far, it seems that gamble has paid off."

The company's performance in 2007 has been better than in the past few years. In the third quarter, AT&T got a big lift from iPhone sales. More than 1.1 million customers had activated service with the carrier since the mobile device went on sale June 29. More than 1 million have signed up since the start of the third quarter.

AT&T reported net income of $3.1 billion compared with $2.17 billion in the same quarter the previous year. Much of the increase in earnings came from the acquisition of BellSouth in December 2006.

The partnership with Apple helped during the transition, raising awareness and drawing in younger subscribers. Wendy Clark, AT&T senior vice president/advertising, couldn't talk about AT&T's rebranding effort without mentioning the iPhone.

"Launching the iPhone was like the company was on steroids," Clark says. "AT&T's wireless division did great work moving metrics and increasing subscribers, but when the iPhone came along, it catapulted everything."

The partnership makes sense: The new AT&T wants to appeal to a younger crowd. The Apple brand, and specifically the iPhone product, is synonymous with the tech-savvy early adopters.

To reach that target, AT&T worked with Omnicom Group's BBDO Worldwide, Rich Media and Big Icon U.S. to remake the brand. The company incorporated the signature Cingular orange hue on billing statements, online and in more than 1,900 U.S. stores, although blue remained the corporate color. The globe and the color blue are intended to remind consumers of AT&T's reputation for reliability and innovation; the orange is intended to suggest the youthful and edgier vibe that Cingular contributed.

AT&T also launched a marketing campaign and six nationally broadcast TV spots directed by hipster favorite Wes Anderson, whose movies include "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums". The spots were dubbed "College Kid," "Reporter," "Mom," "Architect," "Actor" and "Businessman." Certainly something worth sending a telegraph home about.