Poster sites to the first, to the second...

Outdoor advertising The city of Zurich chooses
an unusual procedure. The public poster sites are raffled off.
On the
There are 8300 billboards in the city of Zurich, of which
only 2100 on public land. The latter will be equipped with a new
Poster contract put out to tender as of January 1, 2007. But not all 2100
sites are equally lucrative: 460 sites are cultural poster spaces in the
F4 format that do not generate any money. Around 920 further F4 spaces are
are subject to a maximum tariff set by the city and serve to
primarily for political advertising. The city expects that the
Management of these 1380 positions by the offering companies
outdoor advertising companies as a service.

Only 306 F4 spaces and 414 jobs are available for commercial use
different formats (large areas, F12, F200), a total of around 720
positions. There is also a variable number of areas on building walls.
However, the City of Zurich's Department of Building Construction is holding out the prospect,
that the volume of commercial space in accordance with the just
revised overall concept for out-of-home advertising "by around 15 percent
could be "increased", which would result in 110 additional jobs. These would come
at busy locations, on arterial roads and in urban areas.
which will be put to a new use.

For the tender, the building construction department chose a completely new
Procedure: It divided the existing commercial space into 16 parcels
40 to 80 positions each, which were drawn at random
and are therefore distributed throughout the city (see
www.hbd.stzh.ch). Offers for one, several or all packages can be submitted by
be submitted by April 28, 2006, said Bernhard Liechti,
Specialist responsible for advertising systems.

The procedure shows: Zurich is saying goodbye to the consortium agreement with
of APG, which obliged the latter to grant the competitor Clear
Channel Outdoor Plakanda (CCOP) to cede some of the poster sites
(see WW 7/06). In future, the city will therefore seek direct contact with
the outdoor advertisers involved. Furthermore, the concessions are also
shortened from 14 to 5 years for competition law reasons. And
Finally, we are moving away from the turnover-based concession fee,
An annual fixed amount per package is now desired. About their
However, the Department of Buildings remains silent on minimum heights.
Overall, however, City Councillor Kathrin Martelli expects "at least the same
high taxes as before".

But that makes the procedure tricky. Because APG and CCOP know very well
about the previous levies, which is why other interested parties
could feel disadvantaged. It is also unclear how the 110
additional areas will one day be distributed. Legal disputes are
therefore conceivable.

Markus Knöpfli