New assignment for Ogilvy & Mather: shortly before Christmas, the internationally active medical company Zimmer decided to have the agency based on Zurich's Bergstrasse advertise its hip joint products Alloclasic, Zweymüller and CLS Spotorno. The products have been used on the global market for almost 30 years.
According to a press release on Friday, a campaign in the trade press and various below-the-line measures are planned.

In an agency evaluation, the Bals-based company MPB Executive Search has commissioned the agency Dialog Lucky Lack to develop a new corporate design. The agency is responsible for MPB's logo, stationery and a new company brochure. The agency also created a new website.
The Basel-based company MPB recruits managers and specialists for its clients. MPB stands for Management People Business.

Wirz Corporate has been entrusted by the Würth Finance Group with the conception and implementation of the 2008 annual report. According to the agency, the aim of the new concept in terms of content and design is to raise the profile of the Würth Finance Group. The new annual report will be published in spring 2009.
Wirz Corporate is a subsidiary of the Wirz Group. It serves national and international clients in the fields of public relations, brand design, brand & communication consulting and corporate publishing. The Swiss agency group was founded in 1936.
As part of the internationally active Würth Group, the Würth Finance Group acts on the one hand as the Group's in-house bank, while on the other hand it has also been offering independent advisory services on financial and insurance matters to corporate and private clients in Switzerland since 2003.

The Lucerne agency Flame has taken the transition into its tenth year of existence as an opportunity to change its name. On January 1, 2009, Flame became Schlichtmeier. And the agency means its new name literally: "Simplicity is often the best solution, communication reduced to the essentials," says a Schlichtmeier communiqué.
Among other things, the agency designs and realizes packaging for Coop's Qualité & Prix line.

Radio 1 has hired Patrik Müller as a columnist. The editor-in-chief of the Sonntag newspaper replaces Felix E. Müller, editor-in-chief of NZZ am Sonntag. Roger Schawinski is quoted in Thursday's press release as saying that a certain rotation of columnists is part of the concept. Müller can now be heard on the morning show every Tuesday at 8.10 am.
In addition to Müller, the Radio 1 columnists include political scientist Regula Stämpfli, Radio 1 founder Schawinski, Weltwoche editor-in-chief Roger Köppel and Le Matin editorial director Peter Rothenbühler.

Martin Samsel has been a member of the Jung von Matt/Limmat management team since January 1, 2009. As a trained advertising manager and communications graduate, the 38-year-old joined the Zurich agency in August 2003 as consulting group manager. From the end of 1999 to the summer of 2003, he worked for McCann-Erickson in Switzerland, where he became Account Director in 2001, according to a press release issued on Thursday. He had previously worked for various agencies such as Ogilvy & Mather Frankfurt and Publicis Munich.
Samsel's clients at JvM/Limmat include Swisscom and Panasonic. Under his leadership, the mandate for Max Shoes was expanded in 2008 to include the Vögele shoe brand. The new appearance will be visible from spring 2009.

The four media companies AZ Medien, Vogt-Schild Medien, Dietschi and Zofinger Tagblatt are extending their cooperation. As announced on Thursday, the Mittelland newspaper association will thus continue to exist in the long term. With a certified circulation of 202,670 copies and 414,000 readers, the Mittelland Zeitung is the third-largest subscribed daily newspaper in Switzerland. The mantle pages are produced by the central editorial office of the Aargauer Zeitung in Baden. From February 1, they will be produced under the management of 34-year-old Christian Dorer. Philipp Mäder, also 34, will take over as page editor and Dorer's deputy.
The Mittelland Zeitung has existed in its current form since the beginning of 2002. In 2006, the Basellandschaftliche Zeitung, which belongs to AZ Medien, was added. Since September 2007, the Sonntag newspaper has been published as the seventh edition of the Mittelland Zeitung.
Since 2009, it has been a partner in the Cityplus advertising combination (Neue Luzerner Zeitung, St. Galler Tagblatt, Zürcher Landzeitungen), while Sonntag has entered into a partnership with NZZ am Sonntag and Zentralschweiz am Sonntag in the Sonntagspool and NZZ am Sonntag plus Sonntagspool.
The basic agreement between AZ Medien AG (Aargauer Zeitung, Limmattaler Zeitung, Basellandschaftliche Zeitung), Vogt-Schild Medien AG (Solothurner Zeitung, Grenchner Tagblatt, Berner Rundschau, Langenthaler Tagblatt), Dietschi AG (Oltner Tagblatt) and Zofinger Tagblatt AG (Zofinger Tagblatt, Luzerner Nachrichten) is intended to consolidate the successful partnership model and strengthen it in the long term, the press release continued.

The Zurich advertising agency Matter & Gretener has developed an advertising campaign for the Swiss real estate fund Swissinvest. The approach was to emphasize that an investment in the Swiss real estate fund Swissinvest makes particular sense in the current stock market environment. This is because it is both resistant to economic cycles and offers high returns.
The competition may advertise with larger budgets, but with less spirit and wit, the agency writes in a press release on Wednesday. "True, real estate funds are boring. But is losing money on the stock market really that exciting?" reads one of the advertising slogans, for example.
Responsible at Swissinvest Real Estate Investment Fund: Michel Schneider (Fund Manager/Portfolio Manager). Responsible at Matter & Gretener: Daniel Matter (Creative Direction), Dominik Imseng (Text), Karin Beerli (Art Direction), Nicole Liebermann (Consulting).

In December 2008, the 141-kilogram man Nikolai Walujew and the 97-kilogram Evander Holyfield competed against each other in Zurich. There has never been a greater weight difference in a heavyweight world championship fight. In the midst of the hype surrounding the unequal fight, further fights with a painful outcome were announced in the shop windows of the Stadelhofen pharmacy. The posters were created by the Advico Young & Rubicam agency and are intended to advertise Dr. Andres Original Comfrey Ointment for bruises, sprains and contusions.
To reinforce the Wildpark look, the shop windows were designed as brick walls. The posters will remain up until spring 2009.

Responsible at Apotheke Stadelhofen: Dr. Ruedi Andres (overall responsibility). Responsible at Advico Young & Rubicam: Christian Bobst (CD), Lukas Wietlisbach (AD), Martin Stulz (text).

The Chinese search engine Baidu.com is far more successful in China than Google and has long been one of the country's flagship companies. Just over a year ago, the share price was at times 400 dollars, according to an article in the Tages-Anzeiger newspaper on Thursday. For months now, however, the company has been sliding from one scandal to the next and the share has lost almost three quarters of its value. After the milk powder scandal, for example, it became known that Baidu had censored its search results on this topic. The population would have been able to accept this fact in itself, but not the fact that the milk powder companies had paid for the news blackout. This is unforgivable for the Chinese, according to the Tages-Anzeiger, and the credibility of the search engine has been destroyed as a result.
Further explosive details and rumors about Baidu later emerged. For example, crisis-ridden companies were able to manipulate the entries on the Baidu news portal for a fee of the equivalent of 770,000 francs. Last December, the state television station CCTV also revealed that Baidu was making money from illegal drug advertising. The search engine company has also had to justify itself in court for years for illegal music downloads.
The company has now appointed a new head of communications and hopes that users and shareholders will soon forget the past months of scandal.

Students eat spaghetti with tomato sauce every day, ride bicycles and buy clothes in second-hand stores. And only very few of them are able to turn their long period of study into material wealth later on. Florian Flechsig and Yvonne Feller are not content with this fate. Over a beer last summer, the students from the Visual Communication course at the Berlin University of the Arts decided to design their final project as a euro competition. The first person to collect one million euros within six months wins. It doesn't matter how you get the money. And so, over the past three months, Flechsig and Feller have already tried out a wide variety of ways of earning money - and documented everything on their personal blogs on the website Wirsindjungundbrauchendasgeld.de. While Flechsig went through the subways as a Knut lookalike in a polar bear costume and made himself available as a photo subject, his rival took guitar lessons and performed as street musicians at bus stops and train stations. They both want to appear together on Jörg Pilawa's quiz show soon. Despite their scientifically documented, diligent efforts, the big windfall has yet to materialize: Flechsig is currently 998,451 euros short of the million mark, Feller even 999,639 euros. Anyone who wants to can donate.