Advertise parties without wastage

 
Crossmedia The Eventbooster is designed to make advertising easier, cheaper and more efficient for cultural event organizers. 
The Zurich-based cross-media publisher Cinergy has been operating the largest event database in Switzerland for years. Now it is adding a web tool for classified ads to its offering. With the specially designed "Eventbooster" tool, the Zurich-based publishing house wants to make media distribution and promotion easier for event organizers and cultural professionals in the future. Since 2001, the Swiss Event Database (SEDB) operated by Cinergy has become a comprehensive source for the local media landscape. Publications as diverse as Bluewin.ch, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, DRS3.ch, Blick.ch, 20 Minuten and Usgang.ch obtain their event data from it. The offer for cultural event organizers is now to be expanded to include a central promotion platform. Until now, two things were missing: "On the one hand, we could never definitively guarantee smaller event organizers that we would be able to record their events, because there really are a lot of them. On the other hand, professional event organizers could only book their promotions in a cumbersome way using traditional forms of advertising, often with a considerable loss of coverage," Jenny Chi, Head of Events Editorial, explains to Werbewoche.
The Eventbooster is intended to provide a remedy. For example, if an event organizer cannot find their event among those already entered by the Cinergy events editorial team, they can enter it themselves. Existing entries can also be supplemented with details or images. Changes can also be made at short notice, centrally in one place for a whole range of media. "The editorial team still checks and edits every entry and passes it on to the associated media," says Chi.
Although the basic entry in the event agenda remains free of charge, further publication is not guaranteed as it depends on the respective editorial selection criteria. However, every organizer can now book publication guarantees, highlights and promotions in Eventbooster and pay for them online with Postcard or credit card. Chi sees three main advantages over the previous options: "Firstly, organizers can cover numerous affiliated media with one entry. Secondly, they can select the publications that best suit their target group for highlighting or promotions. Thirdly, they can choose the form of advertising with the least wastage, as readers are already filtered by region, date and interests." For example, for a specific event with regional appeal, only a regional highlighting can be booked.
"In this respect, these new forms of promotion differ significantly from conventional advertising options," says Martin Glauser, Publishing Director of Cinergy. "They are also significantly cheaper. A publication guarantee costs about as much as a beer in a pub. But most of the other rates are also in the double-digit range," explains Glauser. This is possible because the Eventbooster has a high degree of automation and because the highlights do not have to compete with the prices of standard forms of advertising. They are not just pure advertising for a product outside the industry, but also have an information value that corresponds exactly to that of the environment.
While traditional classified ads such as job ads, contact ads or real estate have long since migrated from the newspaper to the World Wide Web, this development is also noticeable in the event sector, albeit without a clear refinancing model. Eventbooster aims to close this gap. Although it is a web application, the event data is distributed cross-media. Print media should not be neglected.
The classified ad tool was developed by a Cinergy working group over the past two years. The Eventbooster will be launched on Friday, November 9, 2007, and during a three-month pilot phase the web application will be further optimized based on experience and feedback.
Rona Grünenfelder
 

 
Most important provider of event informationCinergy is a cross-media agency
for entertainment and culture. As a content provider, AG supplies, produces and markets program data and editorial content; as an independent media company, it publishes its own titles. Founded in 1999, the Zurich-based company is the leading provider of cinema, TV, event, music and games information in Switzerland. Cinergy supplies well-known Swiss online, mobile and print media and publishes Cineman.ch and Teleboy.ch, the market-leading cinema website and the most widely used TV guide in Switzerland respectively. Since 2001, the company has operated the largest event database in Switzerland. Moonwalk.ch, a party portal with moving images, was added in 2003. Last year, Cinergy also took over the operation of the Events.ch platform. (rg)