Cingular ads by BBDO tout the wireless phone service provider's new portability feature.

ATLANTA Cingular Wireless celebrates Portability Day with a national TV campaign tagged "Keep your number, keep your minutes."

Now that consumers can keep their phone numbers when they change carriers within the same calling area, the Atlanta-based wireless provider wants to persuade customers of rivals AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile to switch to Cingular.

Three 30-second spots by BBDO in Atlanta and New York play up portability and the company's rollover service that allows customers to forward their unused minutes from one month to the next. Print and an online component from atmosphereBBDO launch this week.

Vance Overbey, executive director of advertising and promotions at Cingular, called Portability Day an event too important to ignore. "We needed to educate the consumer and give them reasons for, if switching, to switch to Cingular. We wanted to embrace it."

To that end, the Atlanta telecom provider is using the new regulation, effective today, as another element in its overall "Cingular fits you best" campaign.

Shot in black and white, consumers speak directly to the camera about what they like or don't like about their current wireless phone service or number.

In "Victim," the speaker is tired of being jerked around and bullied by his provider's overbearing contracts. Portability gives him the freedom to move. In another spot, a young woman's phone number, Tommy Tutone's "867-5309," is too famous to lose.

A consumer knows he can switch carriers in "Rollover," but doesn't know where he should go. "The spot announces immediately what you can do with portability," Overbey said. "It literally goes from what portability is to the benefit of rollover."

Each spot dangles 500 bonus rollover minutes to persuade consumers to switch.

Overbey did not disclose campaign spending, but said it would top the $98 million spent in the fourth quarter of 2002, as reported by TNS Media Intelligence/CMR. Cingular spent $323 million between January and October this year and $425 million in 2002, according to the same media tracking service.

Cingular claims 23 million customers. Overbey said he does not know how many of the nation's remaining 125 million cell phone customers will take advantage of portability. He thinks many consumers will wait out an early rush. "Based on research and some findings in Europe, it will be towards the middle or end of the [2004] first quarter when we'll see the larger amount," he said.