RUMOR: AT&T Has Made Job Cuts At Its 'Adworks' Sales Unit

Associated Press

We've heard from multiple sources that AT&T is in the process of cutting jobs at AT&T Adworks, the cross-platform advertising network it had hoped would catch fire with clients who wanted to use AT&T's data to target users on mobile, TV and other devices.

We left multiple messages with the company for comment.

Adworks was an ambitious project for AT&T. The company had hoped to put together a network of mobile publishers - apps and so on - that it could offer advertisers, coupled with the company's own anonymized data. In May, Adworks offered a program called Blueprint that purported to offer targeted ad buys across a range of media, mobile, TV and online.

There were also rumors that it might buy a mobile ad company like Jumptap or Velti, to get the scale it wanted. Those rumors came to nothing, however.

More recently, there have been job cuts at Adworks' offices in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, our sources say.

We don't know whether the cuts are part of the normal change and churn that happens at all businesses. But the rumor in media circles is that AT&T is scaling back Adworks.

We'll update this post when we hear back from the company.