Media Agencies: Making The Call

Where The Media Dollars Go, Plus The Numbers On Telephone-Company Ad Spending
With the recent spate of mergers and acquisitions (Bell Atlantic-GTE, SBC-Pacific Telesis, MCI-WorldCom, AT&T-British Telecom, among others), the telecommunications industry continues to consolidate. In an effort both to distinguish themselves-and their numerous services (long distance, cellular, etc.) from the competition and to show that, even in these changing times, business is still local, telcos spent more than a billion dollars on advertising in the first five months of 1998, a 15 percent increase over the same period last year.