A big shocker: Sprint is dropping “Nextel” from its new consumer advertising and marketing efforts, in an acknowledgment that things went very wrong with both branding, network performance and integration. It is hoping to reinvent its image around a new tagline—“Sprint ahead”—that ignores Nextel. It will also eliminate the Nextel name from the sponsorship of the main NASCAR racing series, one of Nextel’s most successful branding campaigns before the merger. Starting next year, the Nextel Cup will be the NASCAR Sprint Cup, reports WaPo. The campaign rolls out Sunday, two days after iPhone launch on AT&T, and the timing is probably not a coincidence. Michael Nelson, an analyst with the Stanford Group, said that “This is going to be a defining moment in whether they can turn around their business.”

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Reuters: Exceptional on excluding Nextel: when it is promoting specific services, such as its push-to-talk walkie-talkie style feature, that came from Nextel. Because of Sprint’s success at signing up data customers some analysts have said that it could be most vulnerable to losing customers to iPhone.

WSJ: Carving out a clearer identity will be tricky for Sprint. The story says the company has been an industry leader in selling new services such as full-length downloads of music and movies, but other carriers have branched into those areas. Spearheading the image makeover are CMO Tim Kelly, a longtime Sprint executive who was recently promoted, and ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, which Sprint hired this year to overhaul its brand image.