American director William Friedkin receives the Swisscom Honorary Leopard at the 62nd Locarno International Film Festival. On the occasion of the award ceremony, "To Live and Die in L.A." ("To Live and Die in L.A.", 1985) with William L. Petersen and Willem Dafoe will be screened on the Piazza Grande. There will also be a public master class with William Friedkin.
The Locarno Festival's Honorary Leopard honors an important film director every year. Previous recipients include Manoel de Oliveira, Jean-Luc Godard, Joe Dante, Ken Loach, Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiarostami, Wim Wenders, Alexander Sokurov, Hou Hsiao-Hsien and, in 2008, Amos Gitai.
Starting this year, the Honorary Leopard will be supported by Swisscom, one of the four main sponsors of the film festival.

The provider of global network security Open Systems is strengthening its existing communications team with Tobias Steger, who has held the newly created position of Head of Communications since the beginning of June.
The 42-year-old studied journalism and communication sciences at the University of Fribourg. After graduating, he joined the American telecommunications company AT&T in Switzerland. From 1998, he worked in various functions for the technology group ABB, most recently as Head of Corporate Communications at ABB Switzerland, where he was responsible for corporate communications for the Swiss subsidiary and managed various strategic international projects at Group level. Steger then moved to the agency side, where he held management positions at Wirz, Process Partner for Corporate Design and Trimedia Communications, supporting national and international companies in the areas of positioning, branding, corporate communications and corporate publishing.

The Goldbach Media subsidiary Orange8 Interactive from Biel has implemented the Manor summer campaign Summer Breeze as an online game. The Game picks up on the idea of the overall campaign: summer products from the current Manor catalog are blown in by the summer breeze and can be captured by the players. The players then use them to decorate a patio or living room, creating a new summer feeling with just a few clicks. The aim of the campaign is to inspire customers with new trends for the summer.
The better the items are combined and the more friends a gamer invites to play along, the higher their chances of winning one of the prizes.
The game was designed by Orange8 and implemented in a very short time (frontend and backend) - only five weeks were available from the idea to going live. The game runs on Flash and is integrated into the Manor website via iframe.

The cantonal government of Bern has lodged a complaint with the Swiss Press Council regarding articles in the newspaper Der Bund on the future of Bern's main railway station. The reports were unfair and unnecessarily damaged Bern as a business location.
Specifically, the government accuses the federal government of having repeatedly and repeatedly violated the declaration of duties and rights of journalists, as detailed in a press release issued on Thursday. For example, the newspaper gave the impression that those responsible for planning had only commissioned an external expert opinion on the planned expansion of the railroad station at a cost of around one billion Swiss francs under pressure from the federal authorities. The canton of Berne had obtained this on its own initiative.
The editor-in-chief of the Bund, Artur K. Vogel, said at the request of the SDA that as soon as the Press Council contacted the Bund, it would make a statement via the legal department of the new owner Tamedia. It is clear that the Bund will continue to report critically on Bernese politics to the same extent as before.

Radio 1 introduces a second slogan alongside the existing claim "Only for adults": "Only great songs". To this end, corresponding trailers can be heard on air, in which three songs are played briefly one after the other. This is intended to signal that the station will only play the best songs from now on, according to a statement on Thursday. "Our music concept sets us even more clearly apart from all other private radio stations," Radio 1 founder Roger Schawinski is quoted as saying. The focus is solely on the adult target group.

Grafik & Design Wenger has created the new fall/winter 2009 campaign for Calida. According to a Calida press release, the agency created an image concept that conveys Calida's brand values in an authentic way. Particular care was taken in the selection of the model: The woman should live the brand values as a self-image and radiate them in harmony. This woman was found in the Italian model Chiara Baschetti.

David Fincher, who directed the drama "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button", now wants to make a film about the internet portal Facebook. The US director is negotiating a project entitled "The Social Network" with the studio Columbia Pictures.
Aaron Sorkin's script depicts the creation of the popular network, which was founded in 2004 by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg. Filming is set to begin at the end of the year, as the industry publication Variety reported on Wednesday according to SDA. Kevin Spacey is also involved as a producer.
Initially, Zuckerberg only wanted to connect fellow students, but Facebook quickly became a contact forum with over 200 million users worldwide. The online network allows users to set up personal profiles and communicate with each other.

Freestyle.ch has a new logo this year. Zurich" has now been integrated into the lettering. The city of Zurich is thus presenting itself as the host city. According to a press release from Freestyle.ch, Zurich is thus killing two birds with one stone. On the one hand, this commitment will give the city a brand presence on site at the Landiwiese, while on the other, the host city will be integrated into Freestyle.ch's communications. This means not only prominent advertising space at the event itself, but also international advertising for the city in over 180 countries.

"The global advertising industry is not in a recession, but will remain at a permanently low level in the future." Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer confronted the assembled advertising industry with this gloomy forecast at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival on Wednesday. As reported by the Guardian, this pessimistic assessment was primarily intended as a warning for media companies, which have already been struggling with a significant slump in the advertising business for some time. According to Ballmer, they should no longer expect revenues to recover to pre-recession levels. "Revenues are increasingly migrating to the digital sector. Traditional broadcasting companies and print media will have to develop their business models based on the fact that they will only get a small slice of the advertising pie in future," says Ballmer.

In the midst of the economic crisis, publishers Boris Etter and Nils Leuzinger launch the Swiss dental magazine Dentastic. The premium magazine comprises 48 to 60 pages per issue, is published six times a year with a print run of 5,000 copies and is sent to all dental practices and distributed at training courses and congresses. The cover of the first issue features former Miss Zurich Alexandra Feybli, photographed by Oli Rust.

A number of prominent authors have each donated a text to the street newspapers in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, which they will be allowed to print over the next six months. The majority of the texts are previously unpublished. Martin Suter, Daniel Glattauer, Siegfried Lenz, Ingrid Noll, Feridun Zaimoglu, Juli Zeh, Marlene Streeruwitz, Arno Geiger - they and many other writers are taking part in the street magazine project.
"We are thrilled and surprised at how many top-class writers immediately agreed to support us with a story," said Beatrice Gerst from Stuttgart, coordinator of the German-language platform of the INSP (International Street Newspaper Network).
With this first joint campaign, the German-language street newspaper projects want to raise awareness of their work. The 30 street newspaper projects in the three countries have a total circulation of up to 500,000 copies.

Eight companies and organizations - Art & Fragrance, ITI, Kaba, Panalpina, Treuhand Suisse, Six Group, Würth Finance Group and Wirz Partner Holding - entrusted Wirz Corporate with the development and implementation of their 2008 annual reports. According to the press release, the agency's services range from content and design concepts to text, layout and typesetting work to the online implementation of the reports, depending on the project.
Wirz Corporate is a subsidiary of the Wirz Group. The agency serves national and international clients in the areas of corporate branding, public relations and corporate publishing.