Cingular: you’re breaking up
Three days after Steve Jobs announced an Apple partnership with Cingular for the iPhone, AT&T announced it would be killing the Cingular brand and replacing it with its own AT&T moniker. It will also kill the BellSouth brand.
“Cingular” will join forgotten brands Pacific Bell, SBC, and AirTouch — remember AirTouch? — in the graveyard of dead brands. (Telephone and cellular services seem to be particularly afflicted with this phenomenon. See this BBC article from 2001.)
AT&T spent over $2.5 billion in the last two years to advertise the Cingular brand, reports said. But now all their crap is on sale.
You know the best thing about this story? The Giants won’t have to rename their ballpark again.
A new ad campaign, in which the company will spend more billions of dollars to erase the impression that it spent billions of dollars to create over the last two years, will start Monday. By April, all you will remember is that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
One of the details in that Ad Week story is that the animated orange asterisk-like Cingular logo is named Jack. Who knew?
Wish I was not with Sprint..they are OK, but I would love the new iPhone or what ever its name will be.
Apple & Ma Bell …. how un-ironic… but his followers line up to drink the Kool Aid & march over the white cliffs…
Jobs is a corporate tool & so are his fans…
when is his US festival anyway?
Yay, and so we have come full circle in the story of american communications oligopoly.
I seem to recall we split AT&T up for this exact reason once before.
And yeah, AT&T is one hella scary pseudo-govt organization.
Oh, I see, so when Apple was dying, it was a useless, pointless company. Now that it is successful, it is a corporate tool. You critics can’t get your phony facts straight one way or the other. At least be consecutive in your complaints!
@Tyler82: No, not exactly. Apple became an issue when they started their transition into becoming a media company, and taking their first steps against its consumers with DRM and semi-exclusive media deals. It’s bedding with Disney and the other media hogs isn’t exactly a beacon of independent media support either.
No, they’re not “evil”. They’re just part of the problem, that of massive media conglomeration.
It has nothing to do with how the company is doing, but everything WHAT they’re doing.
Agreed. Their DRM policies are aggressively pathetic. I love my iPod, but I’m so anti-iTunes downloading.
But you don’t HAVE to put iTunes songs onto an iPod, Apple gives you that CHOICE. You can CHOOSE to buy their DRM songs, or you can get them anywhere else- from a CD, a friend, or a file sharing service. Nobody is forcing you to buy songs from iTunes, the service is just there. If you don’t like it, then don’t buy it. But don’t bitch about how Apple is ruining music as we know it, when in fact it has actually helped it by providing a platform for independent artists to sell their music without having to go through the costly manufacturing process.
Besides, Apple was one of the first to come out AGAINST DRM. The record labels wanted the music purchases to be a lot more restricted and higher priced, but Apple negotiated the prices and terms down to what they are now. Apple figured they weren’t going to get it their way, so them and the music execs compromised.