It's a good thing AT&T Wireless will be acquired by Cingular. When it comes to PR and advertising. the company America trusts is also the one that can't buy a victory on the PR and advertising playing field.

Two months ago, AT&T Wireless announced an unlimited mobile-to-mobile calls option available to its customers with a two-year contract renewal. But it's Verizon Wireless that has gotten all of the great exposure for its competing plan, including the coup of those incredible Donald Trump/"Apprentice" takeoff ads that position unlimited in-network calling as a key to employee productivity. This targets the corporate core of AT&T Wireless's customer base that supposedly made the company worth $41 billion. AT&T Wireless could easily have come up with the same positioning for its own unlimited in-network calling plan, but blew it.

Then, last week in The Wall Street Journal, there was an article about wireless phone companies' Internet data offerings for seamless laptop connectivity. AT&T Wireless has had its "EDGE" network in place for months, but Verizon Wireless dominated the story. A Verizon Wireless customer was featured in the opening anecdote describing how useful this service was. AT&T Wireless received merely a passing mention at the end of the piece.

AT&T Wireless sent postcards to its New York area customers touting network improvements and even saying its GSM network was better than Verizon's CDMA coverage. (This is laughable.) But the marketing people in Seattle forgot to do basic research: the postcard mentions the town "Hastings on the Hudson" when in fact it's called "Hastings-on-Hudson," and mentions Bleecker Street but misspells it as "Bleeker."

When Cingular takes over, there will be lots of integration issues to consider. Deciding whether to keep AT&T Wireless's PR and ad agencies will not be one of them.