Condor Commercials expands its international directing portfolio and signs the two Swedish commercial filmmakers Max Vitali and Jesper Hiro under exclusive contract. Max Vitali earned his spurs with Jonas Åkerlund before proving himself as a director. As a member of the ACNE family, he has already picked up a Golden Lion and previously a Bronze Lion in Cannes on his own. He has worked for Toyota, VW, Eurocard, Ikea, ACLU and Folksam, among others.
Jesper Hiro studied in San Francisco. He has worked alongside Johan Renck, among others. In addition to various national and international awards, he was nominated as "Director of the Year 2007". Hiro's clients include Toyota, Skoda, Nintendo, Mastercard and Borsodi.
Films by Max Vitali and Jesper Hiro are available on the Website from Condor Commercials.

After the operators of the social network Facebook filed a lawsuit against the German student community StudiVZ in a Californian court last July, Facebook is now also taking its competitor to court in Germany. StudiVZ is a plagiarism of the American Facebook, the logo, features and service have been copied. StudiVZ has also allegedly illegally gained access to Facebook's computer system and copied data such as the source code. A spokesperson for the Holtzbrinck portal told DPA that the allegations were unfounded.
In fact, the only major difference between the two platforms is their color scheme: Facebook is blue, StudiVZ is red. Otherwise, the two competitors have almost everything in common, from the nudge function to the pinboard and the design.

After eight years, the US entertainment group Time Warner is seeking to separate from its ailing Internet subsidiary AOL. According to documents submitted by Time Warner to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the company is examining the possibility of allowing AOL to operate independently in the future. However, a final decision by the Group committees is still pending. Time Warner and AOL merged in 2001 at the height of the Internet boom on the world's stock exchanges.
Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes explained that the economic environment was problematic, particularly for AOL. Bewkes announced that the Group wanted to concentrate on its entertainment and publishing business. This includes the TV channels CNN and HBO, the film studio Warner Bros and the news magazine Time.
Prior to this, the US media group announced its quarterly results. Time Warner has slightly increased its profits in the first quarter despite low advertising and falling DVD sales. As the company announced on Wednesday, the surplus amounted to 555 million dollars, compared to 548 million a year ago.
However, the turnover of the group, which includes the news channel CNN, AOL Internet and the Hollywood studios Warner Bros, fell by 7 percent to 6.9 billion dollars. This is the first quarterly result since the spin-off of the Time Warner Cable division. The Group reaffirmed its forecast for the full year, according to which earnings per share will remain stable at 1.98 dollars.

The FHNW School of Business is launching the part-time certificate course "Communication for Nonprofit Organizations". According to the press release, the focus is on the practical transfer of knowledge for everyday working life with case studies, concept and group work. Participants will learn how to strategically position their organization through communication, protect it from attacks and develop campaigns. They will also learn how to present themselves in a winning manner and how to perform confidently in front of critical audiences and convince TV cameras and radio microphones.
It is primarily aimed at specialists with communication tasks in private, church and state organizations or foundations. The course is run jointly by the Institute for Nonprofit and Public Management and the Competence Center for Integrated Communication Management of the Institute of Competitiveness and Communication at the FHNW. Lecturers include experts in NPO management and communication from the FHNW School of Business and practitioners from non-profit organizations.
The course begins in September 2009 and concludes in June 2010 with the federally recognized "Certificate of Advanced Studies" diploma (15 ECTS credits, around 450 hours).

We've been reading it a lot recently: An employee is lying at home in bed, sick and tired. Bored, she surfs the Internet and passes the time on the Facebook community platform. When she returns to the office a few days later, she is summoned to the boss's office: Zack! Dismissal on the table. If you can surf, you can work. So far, so problematic - especially from a data protection perspective. The Italian Antonio B. suffered an even more dramatic fate from a personal perspective. Stupidly, a picture of his stag night ended up on Facebook. It shows him with his head between the secondary sexual characteristics of a dancer. According to the Italian media, Valeria T., the fiancée, is said to have become so enraged that she printed out the photo on paper, added the words "Porco Traditore" and plastered the entire region of Rome with it. However, it is suspected that the story and the blurred YouTube film showing the furious bride hanging up the notes are a publicity stunt for a film called "Feisbum".

A study by the British Internet Advertising Bureau and Lightspeed Research shows that online advertising varies in effectiveness depending on the time of day. Overall, respondents across all age groups said their attention to Internet advertising increases sharply from early evening. Younger respondents generally showed increasing interest in advertising throughout the day. Higher age groups, on the other hand, showed specific peaks of attention during office hours, i.e., between 9 a.m. and noon and 2 p.m. and 6 p.m.
Only just 4.6 percent of consumers said they paid attention to advertising before 9:00 a.m.; after 6:00 p.m., however, the percentage rises to 51.6 percent, and even to 59 percent among 35- to 44-year-olds. During the lunch break from noon to 2 p.m., on the other hand, the attention span is low - only 11 percent of respondents said they were highly likely to pay attention to advertising during this time.
Maximum attention during online shopping
Surfers' attention is highest during virtual shopping sprees. 65 percent of respondents said they pay more attention to advertisements, especially during e-commerce activities. 19 percent even said it was "very likely" that they paid attention to advertising while shopping or comparing prices. The least attention is paid during reading news or emails or using an instant messenger. However, these activities cannot be clearly assigned to specific times of day.
One example of the targeted timing of online advertising during the course of the day is the VW "Night Driving" campaign. The spot, which advertises a relaxed, mysterious night drive by car (with a VW, of course), was only online towards the end of the day and at night, in order to appeal to viewers in a relaxed state and put the campaign in the right context.

Night Driving / Volkswagen

After winning the competitive presentation, the agency Ogilvy & Mather Zurich has developed an international campaign for the medical company Zimmer. Two artificial hip joints are advertised. With statements like "You may not notice much difference here. But you certainly will after reading some of the 100 technical articles on the Alloclassic® Zweymüller® hip stem" or "At first glance, both look the same. But only one of the two has been in use for 25 years." is intended to clearly establish the quality advantage over other products with the target audience.
Special anniversary logos were also developed for the 30th anniversary of Alloclassic® Zweymüller® and the 25th anniversary of CLS Spotorno®. In addition to advertisements in medical journals, the campaign will also be continued with mailings to surgeons and with an implementation at trade fairs.
Responsible at Zimmer Schweiz GmbH: Christina Klepzig (Manager Marketing Communications), Sandro Palumbo and Xavier Langlois (Global Brand Managers Hip). Responsible at Ogilvy & Mather: Gaby Zimmerli (overall responsibility), Peter Roth (consulting), Thomas Bolliger (CD), Donat Achermann and Stephanie van Ophuisen (AD), Filippo Salmina (graphics), Markus Sidler (text).

Publigroupe's Annual General Meeting on Wednesday approved all of the Board of Directors' proposals with clear majorities. CEO Hans-Peter Rohner will thus also assume the role of Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Lausanne-based company.
In particular, the Annual General Meeting approved the distribution of a gross dividend of CHF 3.50 per share from May 7, 2009. The net amount of CHF 2.275 will be paid in the company's own shares and the withholding tax of 35% will be paid in cash. The shares distributed as a dividend are valued at CHF 68.94, based on the average closing price of the last five trading days prior to the Annual General Meeting.
The Annual General Meeting bid farewell to Philippe Pidoux. He had been Chairman of the Board of Directors since 1995 and did not stand for re-election when his term of office expired. As proposed, Hans-Peter Rohner, CEO of the Group, was elected as a new member of the Board of Directors. In addition, Peter Brunner and Jean-Pierre Jeannet were re-elected for a further term of office.
The Board of Directors was constituted immediately after the Annual General Meeting, as Publigroupe also announced in its press release. In line with its intention communicated a few months ago, it has elected Hans-Peter Rohner as its Chairman and Pascal Böni as Lead Director. The latter will in particular ensure that the principles of good management are observed during Hans-Peter Rohner's dual mandate. Jean-Pierre Jeannet was confirmed as Vice Chairman.

On May 1, 2009, Thomas Hegglin will take over as Head of Corporate Communications at Swissgrid, the Swiss electricity grid operator. The 43-year-old was previously Managing Director at the Zug-based PR agency Dr. Peter P. Knobel. Hegglin replaces Monika Walser, who left the company at the end of January after more than five years.
Hegglin has several years of experience in the electricity industry. He headed the media department at the Axpo Group and was responsible for internal and external communications at Nordostschweizerische Kraftwerke (NOK). He gained his first experience in corporate communications at ABB.
Thomas Hegglin worked as a journalist for several years, most recently at the Aargauer Zeitung. He studied history and journalism at the University of Zurich, trained at the Swiss Public Relations Institute to become a certified PR consultant and completed a degree in corporate management at the Institute for Strategy and Corporate Economics at the University of Zurich.

They still exist, the cute mascots that make children's eyes light up and warm the hearts of fans. You almost wouldn't have thought it possible after Euro 08 - a huge spectacle in football terms, but the plush representatives were all the worse for it. A full 4,000 hours of work were invested in the development of Trix and Flix, and what attempts were not made later to make the two fantasy figures with the bright red hairstyles and mountainous spikes popular in this country - but the breakthrough did not happen.
Following this defeat, the current Ice Hockey World Championship - which has so far received far less public attention than the European Football Championship - has now brought to light a true hero mascot. Cooly, the laughing cow in Swiss field hockey gear, is the secret star of the World Cup and is photographed almost more often than the field hockey players. The mascot is both rustic and modern and therefore embodies the typical Swiss values of good-naturedness, sportsmanship, fairness, nature, quality and tradition in a likeable way, according to 20 Minuten. That's how it should always be!

Cooly celebrates with ice hockey fans.

As a reminder, these were the Euro mascots (with name tags, in case you've forgotten).

35 media rights organizations have signed an appeal by Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists for the release of Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi. In a letter, the organizations called on Iranian Justice Minister Ayatollah Mahmud Hashemi Shahrudi to respect Saberi's rights.
According to Reporters Without Borders, the petition was forwarded to the Iranian embassy in Berlin on Monday. It stated: "The arrest of Roxana Saberi and her conviction is unjust. The trial violates international legal standards."
A Tehran court sentenced Saberi, who also has US citizenship and worked for American media, to eight years in prison on April 18, 2009. By order of the Iranian government, the sentence is to be reviewed again.

APG Traffic, the subsidiary of the Geneva-based Affichage Group specializing in Swiss transport advertising, has introduced a new digital public transport advertising format called "Traffic Media Screen" in the vehicles of the Lucerne public transport company VBL. The passenger information system, designed as a double screen, provides around 837,000 VBL passengers a week with all important stop information.
On the right, they are accompanied by a regularly updated online news mix of regional news, national and international headlines, weather forecasts, entertainment and services. Partners for the editorial content are Zisch, the online platform of the Neue Luzerner Zeitung, NZZ Online and MeteoNews. The 3-minute program loops are broadcast seven days a week between 5 a.m. and midnight and can also be used for commercials.

The introduction of the electronic passenger information system of the Lucerne public transport company VBL provides a digital advertising format.