By offering the online football game Football Challenge 08, SRG has violated advertising provisions in the Radio and Television Act. This is an "unlicensed activity". This was stated by the Federal Office of Communications in a ruling.
A spokeswoman for OFCOM confirmed to SDA a report by the Tagesanzeiger newspaper on Tuesday. According to the ruling published on the Internet, SRG and its financing partners jointly operated a neutral website from which the game could be downloaded. In addition, the SRG pages were linked to the Fussball Challenge 08 page. In the view of OFCOM, Football Challenge 08 and the current game Ski Challenge 08 are part of SRG's unlicensed activities. "Due to a lack of predominant audience loyalty", the games are not allowed to be included in SRG's online offering.
The soccer game can no longer be found on the Swiss television website. According to SRG spokesperson Daniel Steiner, it was offered temporarily and only once around Euro 08. The current Ski Challenge 08 game is not included in the ruling, Steiner clarified.
In its ruling dated January 14 on Fussball Challenge 08, OFCOM ordered that the link to Fussball Challenge 08 be removed from the website within ten days. In addition, SRG must bear the costs of the proceedings. However, it has the option of appealing against the order within 30 days. Whether the SRG will now take this matter to the Federal Administrative Court is being examined and is still completely open, said Steiner.
Bakom became aware of the online offer on April 15, 2008 through a report on the Swiss television program "Sport Aktuell" on Fussball Challenge 08, in which the game was presented and reference was made to the prices and the possibility of downloading the game free of charge from the SF website.

Basler Zeitung Medien announced on Tuesday that its Board of Directors is once again complete. Following the resignation of Andreas Schmidt and the election of Niklaus R. Gadient and Ulrich H. Moser, the Board of Directors of Basler Zeitung Medien was reconstituted at its meeting on January 15. The eight-member Board is now composed as follows:
Dr. Matthias Hagemann (President)
Dr. Ruth Ludwig
Beat Meyer (Delegate)
Oscar Battegay
Niklaus R. Gadient
Peter E. Merian
Ulrich H. Moser
Sam Keller

The Goldbach Media Group increased its net sales in 2008 by 11.6 percent to CHF 264.6 million. The company achieved strong growth in online marketing, as Goldbach Media announced on Tuesday.
In the online segment, the advertising logistics company recorded significant sales growth of 46.9 percent with the online marketing companies acquired in Eastern Europe during the financial year. For the first time, Goldbach Media generated 30 percent of its revenue from the online business, according to a press release issued on Tuesday. The offline segment, the marketing of advertising time from private television, radio and ad screens, increased by 1.1 percent.

Expansion: The agency schneiter meier külling, which specializes in corporate identity and branding, has grown considerably in recent months. This is why it opened a second office in Zurich at the beginning of the year.
As the agency announced on Tuesday, the reason for this was the acquisition of numerous new client mandates in the areas of corporate identity and packaging design, following a large increase in annual report mandates in the middle of last year.
With a team specializing in design and consulting, the agency is now also represented at Zürichbergstrasse 7 in addition to its existing location at Rämistrasse 35.

Zurich-Leutschenbach, Tuesday afternoon at three o'clock. Not a single light is left on in the Swiss television tower, not a soul is to be found in the corridors. Is everyone with Barack Obama in Washington? Is electricity being saved? Or has TV boss Ingrid Deltenre declared a shutdown? - No, Swiss state television suffered an hour-long blackout shortly before the inauguration of the first black American president. Just like last August, when a squirrel accidentally gnawed on the wrong cable at the EWZ substation in Aubrugg near Zurich, interrupting the broadcast of the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing. The power outage was only restored shortly before 5 p.m. on Wednesday - fortunately in time for the swearing-in of President Obama. No reasons for the outage have yet been announced. It is quite possible that a conspecific of the animal that died in August was at work. When will the WWF react? Or is species protection now also Obama's job?

The German bad word of the year 2008 is "distressed banks". The jury justified its choice by saying that the phrase completely turns the relationship between the causes and consequences of the global economic crisis on its head. 2117 entries from Germany and abroad took part in the competition.
"While the national economies are in dire straits and taxpayers have to bear billions in loans, the banks (...) that caused the crisis are being stylized as victims," the jury's statement continued. The "Unwort" was selected from 1129 different suggestions. 2117 entries from Germany and abroad took part in the 18th campaign.
The expert jury also criticized the term "pensioner democracy". Former German President Roman Herzog used the term to outline the horror of a state in which "the old plunder the young".
Since 1991, linguistic slurs that are factually grossly inappropriate and possibly even violate human dignity have been branded as "Unwort". The aim of the language-critical campaign is "to promote more factual appropriateness and humanity in public language use", the SDA quotes the German jury as saying.
The year before, the bad word was "stove premium". A term that defamed parents who bring up their children at home instead of using a crèche place, according to the experts. In 2006, the jurors criticized "voluntary departure", a term used by the authorities to describe the return of rejected asylum seekers.

The Zurich advertising agency Euro RSCG, led by Advertiser of the Year Frank Bodin, is represented twice in the Yearbook of Advertising. The rollercoaster film for the Zurich Chamber Orchestra was chosen as the industry winner for cultural and community marketing (B2C). The Greenpeace campaign "Glacier Sculpture" was also included in the yearbook.

The graphics and advertising agency Xpure created an ambient campaign for the TC Training-Center Thun. The aim was to encourage passers-by to take part in a free trial training session using Post-it notes with the message "New year, new resolutions? It's time for fitness!" to encourage people to try out a free training session. The sticky notes were distributed in the city on Thursday morning. As an additional incentive, customers presenting the scattered notes will be granted a discount when they sign up for an annual membership.

The advertising agency has completed initial work for Sandoz International. The result is advertisements and brochures in English and German, in which the new client from Germany is positioned as a pioneer in the production of so-called "bioimilars".
The headline reads: "One small step for us, but one giant leap for mankind", reminiscent of Neil Armstrong's words in 1969. The banner "Biosimilars. Pioneered by Sandoz." positions the sender accordingly at the end.
"Biosimilars" are follow-on preparations of existing biopharmaceuticals, whose importance is increasing worldwide: currently, more than a third of all drugs in development are biotechnology-based. In the coming years, expensive "therapeutic proteins" will also be made available to a wide range of patients as biosimilars.
Responsible at the advertising agency: Reto Dürrenberger (strategy), Sarah Hiltebrand (CD), Michael Manzardo (text, concept), Sarah Erni (graphics), Michael Ottinger (consulting), Andi Laub (DTP). Image editing: Felix Schregenberger.

The winners of the Advertising Yearbook competition have been announced. The Zurich agency Teil.ch has been included in the new Advertising Yearbook 2009 with two campaigns.
The two posters "Weinberger Konzerte - Verwurzelt Entwurzelt" and "Stubete am See" will be featured in the new book, which will be published by Econ Verlag in March.

Computer scientist Tsila Hassine has a heart for unknown websites. Her internet search service Shmoogle helps even less visited websites to achieve a high position in the search results list. Shmoogle does not rank the hits strictly hierarchically, but lets chance decide. "Shmoogle offers users a broad overview of what the Internet has to offer in its entirety," the artist explained to the German news magazine Focus. If you enter a search term in Shmoogle, a conventional Google search is carried out first. However, this is then picked apart by Shmoogle and displayed at random. The order of Google search queries is determined by evaluating the number and relevance of incoming links to a website in order to determine its place in the search results, writes Pressetext in a press release on Monday. The more pages link to a hit, the higher it is displayed in the Google list. However, this means that those pages that are already visited by a large number of people end up at the top. This means that hardly anything new can be discovered. Shmoogle is therefore a good addition to a Google search, says Hassine.
"I believe that Shmoogle is Google's friend. It simply makes Google more complete," says Hassine. A friendship that was one-sided for a long time: after Hassine launched her Shmoogle site almost five years ago, Google blocked the project completely a short time later. The search engine is now available again, but the renewed interest generated by the Focus article has led the operators to fear another blockade.