Three months ago things were looking good for AT&T's bid to remove the Cingular logo from Jeff Burton's racecar and swap it out for the new AT&T logo after a judge issued an injunction on a prior ruling that forbid AT&T to make the swap [1]. Earlier this week, an 11th Circuit Court ruled that AT&T cannot put the logo on the car and must remove it since it's already on the car. Since there is a race coming up this weekend, Nascar hopes [2] that AT&T will finally relent and remove the logo, but the owner of the car said "I don't want to say what will happen Sunday." Leading many to believe that AT&T isn't done fighting this.
The case started when AT&T acquired Cingular, and with it, its sponsorship agreement with Jeff Burton's race car. When AT&T decided to rebrand Cingular's wireless service to AT&T [3], Nascar informed the carrier it could not make a change to the car's advertisements because of an exclusive deal Sprint Nextel signed with Nascar previously. The Sprint deal, in effect froze its rivals in the telecommunications space from buying new sponsorships within the Nascar world or making changes to old ones.
For more on AT&T's Nascar logo imbroglio:
- read this article [4] from The Daily Report
Links:
[1] http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/att-sues-nascar-because-of-sprint/2007-03-20
[2] http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/nascar-sues-att-for-100m/2007-06-18
[3] http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/cingular-to-transition-to-att-brand-monday/2007-01-12
[4] http://www.dailyreportonline.com/Editorial/News/new_singleEdit.asp?individual_SQL=8%2F15%2F2007%4015980_Public_.htm