As announced in summer, the new Bianco magazine was launched on December 18, 2008. The magazine aims to focus on the contemporary alpine lifestyle and takes as its theme the special living space far away from the urban centers. Among other things, the magazine shows what it's like to live as a local or as a guest in the mountain resorts of St. Moritz, Lech, Cortina Val d'Isère or Garmisch and, in addition to the places and landscapes, also presents architecture and fashion trends. In addition, the Sensor, Guide and Agenda sections provide tips on hotels, restaurants and places to go.
Bianco takes a critical look at the coexistence of the local population of the mountain regions with the guests from the world's metropolises who come here on vacation, according to a press release. Especially in times of change, original values "as they can be found in the Alps" are important again: "The genuine, the pure, the unspoiled".
The first issue of Bianco shows on 132 pages among other things the topics history and cult of the alpine bitter Braulio, the skyscrapers of Sestriere, the outbreak of modernity in the Arosa mountains, the first alpine sturgeon farm in the Bernese Oberland, top chef Sandro Steingruber in the fairy tale park Waldhaus Flims, the lion tamer from Jakobshorn Davos, the ingenious guitars of Claudia and Claudio Pagelli, Engadine landscapes in the focus of Michel Comte, the lonely heroes of the ice speedway race track in Flims and the Ski Zai.
Bianco is published by Boll Verlag in Urdorf, which also publishes the Swiss Living Review, and the advertising agency Spot Werbung in St. Moritz. After the first official issue of the magazine, two issues are planned annually. The magazine will have a print run of 20,000 copies and will be available in selected hotels, boutiques and other locations in the leading Alpine destinations. In addition, subscribers to Wohnrevue will receive it as a supplement.

The S&W advertising agency has won two new clients for the coming year. The advertisers are creating a new corporate identity for Immo Baden and are also changing the brand name, as the real estate company, which previously operated mainly in the greater Baden area, will be active throughout Switzerland from 2009. The first measures for the real estate company with around 30 employees will be developed by S&W in spring 2009.
The law firm CHKP Conrad Höchli Kink & Partner commissioned the agency to create a new communication presence and redesign the corporate design. The first implementations will also be seen here in spring 2009.

Eurid has launched an advertising campaign to promote the new .eu internet domain in the transportation and logistics sector. The message is that now is the right time to register a domain name. Interested parties are directed to the www.goingfor.eu where you can directly check which domain names are still available. It is also possible to register the desired domain name immediately.
A .eu internet address helps companies to overcome borders on the internet and express an international identity, writes the domain name management organization Eurid in a press release on Monday. In addition, .eu is seen as a trustworthy internet address. With over three million registered domain names, it is one of the ten most used top-level domains in the world. Advertisements in European trade newspapers and banners on transport and logistics websites are still running until the end of December.

The event agency Kleistermeister, which is actually primarily active in Switzerland, unexpectedly landed a contract in Moscow. In February, the Russian Minister of Culture, Igor Pushkin, crashed the major event organized by the Lucerne agency in the igloo village of Engelberg-Titlis. He had heard about the Eskimo Extravaganza on the Internet and came to Switzerland without further ado to find out whether the concept could also be adapted for Siberia.
Apparently immediately taken with the event (to which he was not actually invited), he soon joined in the celebrations, writes Kleistermeister Managing Director Marc Zehnder. "Fortunately, the guests had fewer problems with this than I did. Nevertheless, I tried to isolate him as much as possible - and provided him with vodka, which he drank as if it were water." Around one o'clock in the morning, it happened: Pushkin asked if Zehnder would organize his birthday party. In Moscow.
Pushkin later traveled back to Switzerland to discuss the details: He had a troupe from the Russian state television station Ruskki TV in tow, which followed his trip abroad at every turn, the agency's letter continues. Kleistermeister suddenly found himself in the Russian television found again. The party organized by the event agency in Moscow finally took place on 14 November.
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And now the denouement: this story would be a good story if it were true. Unfortunately, it is fiction. The conclusion: More paste than master.

Contrary to many negative forecasts, the Goldbach Index shows zero growth in the advertising pressure recorded by Media Focus for all media in November. The Internet medium even surprises with further unchecked growth.
The "all media" item remains at 194 index points. The same applies to the total of electronic media at 432 index points. The Internet gained 13 index points, improving from 337 to 350 points. Teletext was able to improve again with a plus of 5 index points to 154. TV and radio remained in the red at 453 and 246 points respectively.
The index initiated by Goldbach Media for advertising pressure in the overall market and electronic media is based 100% on the Media Focus data collected and published monthly. It should be noted that the monthly seasonality is filtered out of the time series in a two-stage process. The 13 previous months are shown in the short-term analysis. Media Focus November still only contains data for display advertising.

The advertising agency Bärtschi, Meroni and Bolleter is recalling the classic game Trivial Pursuit with radio spots for the toy manufacturer Hasbro. Just like the question and answer game, the spots are designed to get listeners excited. A player can't quite remember which American president said the sentence "I'm a something too" in which place, in front of which goal.
> Spot 1
> Spot 2
> Spot 3
The series of radio spots can now be heard on Radio Energy.

Responsible at Hasbro Switzerland: Petra Durrer (Marketing Manager). Responsible at BMB: Flavio Meroni, Markus Tränkle (creation), Christian Baertschi, Marion Schwager (consulting), Sam Bolleter (realization), Hastings, Zurich (sound production).

The Bishop of the Diocese of St. Gallen Markus Büchel goes online: For the first time this year, his Christmas message will be published in the Internet broadcast as a video film.
The bishop is speaking on the feast of the Incarnation of God and is addressing in particular those who are alone and feel the pain of loneliness, especially over the Christmas period, according to a statement from the diocese.

In its current issue, the business magazine Bilanz named Martin Kall, CEO of Tamedia, as the media manager of 2008. The controversial head of the Zurich publishing group - partly due to the recent events surrounding the Bern daily newspaper Der Bund - was already declared the most influential media maker in 2007.
The ranking list was drawn up by a five-member jury consisting of Josefa Haas, Head of the Media Institute of the Swiss Press Association, Karl Lüönd, media consultant and publicist, Rainer Stadler, media editor of the NZZ, Kurt W. Zimmermann, columnist, publisher and owner of Consist Consulting, and Stefan Barmettler, deputy editor-in-chief of Bilanz.
In its statement, the jury wrote: "The golden age is over for the time being at Tamedia, which focuses mainly on print products (20 Minuten, Tagesanzeiger, Sonntags-Zeitung, Annabelle) - as it is elsewhere in the media industry. But Martin Kall, who has been at the helm of the Zurich publishing group for a good six years, is steering the company calmly through the rough seas. It is thanks to his prudence that the Bern-based Espace Media Groupe (Berner Zeitung, der Bund) was integrated into the Group without any major problems."
Kall's specific achievements are described as follows: "The 47-year-old German has been regarded as a pacesetter in the industry for some time; he set benchmarks with the highly profitable free newspaper 20 Minuten, the launch of the Tagesanzeiger regional editions and the start of the online news network. The internet alliance of the Berner Zeitung, Basler Zeitung and Tagesanzeiger has quickly become the leading news platform in Switzerland, with 1.6 million visitors per month."
With regard to the cooperation at TA, the jury writes: "Critics had suspected that Kall, who had been able to run the company unchallenged in recent years, would be tightened under the new Chairman of the Board of Directors Pietro Supino (rank 9). Contrary to expectations, the manager and his publisher have found a fruitful courant."
Alongside Martin Kall, the same fighters have been battling for the top spots in the Bilanz rating for years. Behind Kall in second place was Südostschweiz publisher Hanspeter Lebrument, followed by Pierre Lamunière, publisher of Edipresse, who remains the undisputed top dog in French-speaking Switzerland. Hans-Peter Rohner, whose Publi Groupe is suffering badly from the economic downturn, has fallen from third to 13th place and thus dropped out of the top group. Ralph Büchi, CEO of Axel Springer Switzerland and publisher of Bilanz, and Albert Stäheli, the new CEO of the NZZ Group, have risen up the rankings.
(Pictures: Keystone)

The Beromünster transmitter is switched off on December 28. The end of medium wave radio is helping digital radio to make a breakthrough, and DAB devices are selling better than ever. Almost half of the 340,000 listeners had previously received the radio station via the 531 kHz frequency and will now have to switch to cable, satellite, internet or DAB, says Manuela Schmid, spokesperson for Schweizer Radio DRS. For many, a digital radio set is likely to be the alternative.
Last but not least, the sale of DAB devices is being boosted by advertising from Radio DRS. The radio station is trying to make the digital wave appealing to listeners of the traditional medium wave. For example, it offers Home visits or organizes a digital radio day at the Zurich radio studio the day after the switch-off. DRS assumes that over 200,000 digital radio sets will be in use by the end of 2008, compared to 80,000 a year ago.
Founded in 1931, Radio Beromünster became a legend during the Second World War. Even if the old Swisscom Broadcast land transmitter is switched off, the 215-metre-high transmission tower will remain. Lucerne's monument preservation authorities have applied for it to be listed. However, the decision of the responsible department is still pending. It is also unclear how the facility will be used in the future. According to Swisscom spokesperson Myriam Ziesack, a decision will probably not be made until next year.

Is Google News that easy to trick? At the end of September this year, a system error in the news archive caused the search engine to mistakenly publish a dusty report about the American Airline United Airlines and sent its share price plummeting, the most visited website on the planet has once again succeeded in selling old news as new.
Anyone who has searched for Marc Rich, former oil trader and entrepreneur, on Google News in the past few weeks has come up with a Article from Weltwoche listed as brand new on May 15, 2007. The reason: Google's search algorithm had a system error. When the Sonntagszeitung discovered the accident, all Weltwoche articles disappeared from Google's automatic news service. The paper was only reinstated after two days.
Has Weltwoche managed to trick Google's secret search formula? According to the Sonntagszeitung, Weltwoche displays the current date on every page for reasons "that it probably only knows itself". In this way, old articles feign a false topicality. Has this trivial trick succeeded in revealing Google's well-kept secret? Weltwoche didn't want to know. Webmaster Andreas Thut: "Our explosive and relevant research doesn't need any dirty tricks to achieve a high ranking on Google". We can look forward to seeing what news the Internet - or Google - will bring us next year.

Jean-Blaise Defago will remain Head of Communications at the Department of Defense, Civil Protection and Sport (DDPS) in 2009 under the new head of the DDPS, Ueli Maurer. While Defago had to act as head of information in the background under Samuel Schmid, he now has a dual mandate as head of communications and personal advisor to Maurer. A spokesperson for the DDPS confirmed corresponding reports in the Sonntags-Zeitung and NZZ am Sonntag.
The former head of the DDPS, Samuel Schmid, appointed Defago as the new head of communications for the DDPS at the end of 2004. Between his time with the SVP and his current role at the DDPS, Defago held a management position in PR consulting and was subsequently Head of Corporate Communications at the health insurance company Visana.
Defago has already worked closely with the designated head of the DDPS, Ueli Maurer, in the past: From 1996 to 1999, Defago was Head of Information and Deputy General Secretary of the SVP Switzerland and then SVP General Secretary until 2001. Maurer was president of the SVP Switzerland at the time and remained so until 2008.
(Image: Keystone)