The walk to Canossa has been revived. However, unlike Emperor Henry IV, who was struck by the papal ray of excommunication and who in 1077, barefoot and wearing a busman's shirt, pranced around in front of the Pope's castle in the hope of being rehabilitated, the protagonists of the recently publicized supplication were traveling by car. We are talking about Robert Nardelli, Alan Mulally and Richard Wagoner, the CEOs of the "Big Three" of the American car industry: Chrysler, Ford and General Motors. They traveled from Detroit to Washington to ask Congress for a total of 34 billion dollars for their companies. Without the taxpayers' money, the three car manufacturers, on which around three million livelihoods depend in the USA alone, would not survive the financial crisis.
However, the idea of traveling by car last week only occurred to the CEOs when they had to travel to the second hearing. At the first one two weeks ago, they took the company's private jet, a small luxury that cost the bankrupt company around 20,000 dollars. A first-class flight would have cost 800 dollars. That was not the case with the not exactly well received by the American presswhereupon the three CEOs for the next trip not only took the carbut also cut all their bonuses and reduced their annual salaries to one dollar (whereupon the Wall Street Journal immediately asked itself, what you can buy with one dollar). The demonstrative modesty of the three top managers even went so far as to show up in small cars, drive without a chauffeur, eat in snack bars and use public toilets. The symbolic actions are unlikely to fail to have an effect, The message certainly got through to the Senate. Henry IV has found worthy imitators.

Publicis is advertising for Swiss for all travelers who prefer to spend their winter elsewhere. From January to March, the airline offers particularly cheap flights all over the world. Publicis has implemented this visually with a radar screen from air traffic control, which displays cheap flights. In the newspaper advertisements, you can see the destinations to which the planes are flying in the winter sky, writes the agency. The advertisement is also available as an e-board and on the Internet.
" Ad large view
Responsible at Swiss: Marcel Benz (Head of Marketing Communications), Christine Moch (Manager Advertising) and Corinne Weishaupt (Advertising). Responsible at Publicis: Martin Denecke (CCO), Peter Rettinghausen (CD/text), Denis Schwarz (AD), Franziska Langenbacher and Valentin Cheli (graphics), Stephan Lanz and Myriam Mojon (consulting).

Due to increasing competition, Cablecom wants to increase its corporate efficiency and refocus on its core areas in future. To this end, the organizational structure is to be streamlined and IT and back-office functions are to be merged within the Group, according to a press release issued on Monday. The customer service area will remain largely unaffected by the changes and will be sustainably improved.
In this context, the company is also considering job cuts in Switzerland with up to 150 redundancies. This corresponds to around ten percent, said Hans-Peter Nehmer, Head of Corporate Communications, when asked by Werbewoche. The job cuts would primarily affect the back office and IT departments. "Under no circumstances will customer service be affected," Nehmer emphasized several times.
Measures such as a recruitment freeze, natural fluctuation, alternative working time models or early retirement are also being examined, it is reported. The consultation process with employee representatives has been initiated in order to safeguard employees' statutory participation rights. A final decision on any compulsory redundancies will be made in January after the results of the consultation process have been evaluated.
The cable network operator also announced a change in management: Rudolf Fischer, who has held various management positions at Cablecom since 2001, has decided to step down as Managing Director. He will remain in his position until a successor has been appointed. Until then, Fischer will work closely with Gene Musselman, President and Chief Operating Officer UPC Broadband.
At the end of September, the company reported that it had over 1.5 million television customers, 477,00 Internet customers and 308,000 telephony customers. At the end of December 2007, Cablecom generated revenues of over CHF 1 billion.
The Communications Union has noted Cablecom's intentions with great consternation. According to SDA, it is demanding that the company does not make any redundancies but offers all those affected by the job cuts an internal solution.

(Pictures: Keystone)

Radio Grischa is celebrating its 20th anniversary on Tuesday, December 9, 2008. During the anniversary, a special program will look back on the past 20 years. Former employees will describe their most memorable experiences and Grischa founder Matthias Lauterburg will talk about the early days of the Grisons regional station. The radio producers also present the funniest mishaps and slips of the tongue.
The station is also giving away a total of 6,000 cakes. These will be distributed from 6 a.m. on Tuesday morning in a 12-hour campaign that starts at Chur station and runs through the entire broadcasting area. Each cake contains a lucky ticket with the chance to win the birthday jackpot of CHF 3,000, which will be raffled off in a show on the evening of the birthday. When and where exactly the radio team will be on the road will be announced on the station on an ongoing basis, writes the Graubünden regional broadcaster in a press release on Monday.
Radio Grischa went on air on December 9, 1988. To mark its 25th anniversary, the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) had the idea of producing its own radio station for Graubünden for a month. Under the direction of Bernese radio man Matthias Lauterburg (formerly of Radio DRS), the newly created Radio Grischa went on air for the first time on June 13, 1987 at midnight with the night show "Grischa Nachtfalter". The station then applied to the federal government for a license for permanent operation. On December 9, 1988, it was broadcast for the first time as a full 24-hour program.
In addition to program director Matthias Lauterburg, the 15-strong team at the time included Andri Franziskus (now SF Tagesschau), Gieri Spescha (now head of PR for Graubünden Ferien), Gianluca Galgani (now SF Italy correspondent), Yvonne Dünser (now Radio DRS) and Roman Howey Senn, who recently made a comeback at Radio Grischa.

According to the Jobpilot Index, job vacancies on the internet have fallen slightly for the first time in five years. The index fell by 5 points to 2001 in October compared to the previous quarter. However, the number of jobs on offer is still around twice as high as at the start of the series of measurements at the beginning of 2001, writes the job placement company Monster Switzerland in a press release on Monday.
The number of job advertisements on job boards rose by 5 points to 193, while a relatively significant drop of 24 points to 219 was recorded on company websites. According to Falk von Westarp, Country Manager Switzerland at Monster, the slowdown in the economy is first apparent on company homepages, as these are the quickest to adapt to changes.
A decline in job vacancies was registered in most occupational groups.
The decline in job vacancies was particularly sharp in personal care, cleaning and housekeeping (-113 points), transport, storage and security (-47
points) and IT and telecommunications (-26 points). Medical professions (+8 points) and sales and customer service (+1 point) were among the areas to see an increase.
The WEMF statistics are used as a basis for measuring job vacancies in the daily press for comparison with the development in the print media. According to the press release, the standardized print index, which is directly comparable with the Jobpilot index, fell by 1 to 50 points between August and October 2008 compared to the previous quarter. This means that the print media index fell slightly less than the job market index.
The Jobpilot Index measures Swiss job vacancies on the Internet on a quarterly basis. It is compiled by Monster Switzerland in collaboration with the University of Zurich and the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland. It takes into account the most important Swiss job exchanges and the job offers on the websites of around 1,000 Swiss companies and organizations. In July of this year, the index rose to an all-time high of 206 points.

The 2018 Winter Olympics should take place in the Lake Geneva region, at least according to a group of sports and tourism experts. They are now calling for political support and a national debate for a bid. The umbrella organization Swiss Olympic refuses to give its support.
The conditions for a bid are not yet right at present, the working group exploring the chances of a bid from the city of Geneva wrote on Monday. Whether the Games could take place in Switzerland after 2018 would depend, among other things, on the support of the federal, cantonal and municipal authorities.
The aim now is to initiate a nationwide discussion about the Winter Games in Switzerland in 2018 or 2022. Only a bid on behalf of the whole of Switzerland could be successful.
As Swiss Olympic President Jörg Schild told SDA when asked, the umbrella organization of Swiss sports federations is not happy about the Geneva working group's advance. The association had already communicated earlier that it did not want to support the Geneva Olympic project.
A candidacy must stand for the whole country and not for one region, said Schild. In the opinion of Swiss Olympic, Switzerland should be a candidate for a later edition of the Olympics. At present, two conditions for a Swiss candidacy are not fulfilled. On the one hand, the International Olympic Committee has a tendency to award Olympic Games to places where it wants to achieve something, for example politically or for the promotion of sport. On the other hand, the mood for major sporting events was lacking in Switzerland.
The city of Zurich's bid for the 2014 Winter Games already failed due to a lack of political will and finances, prompting the promoters in Zurich to abandon their plans. It is possible that the 2018 Winter Olympics will take place just outside Geneva, but on the French side of the border. The town of Annecy in Haute-Savoie is bidding to host the Games in the internal French competition.

Publicitas Cinecom is launching a new cross-media advertising opportunity in Swiss cinemas. In future, moviegoers will be able to take part in a Cine-Picture competition via SMS before the commercial break and win daily, weekly or grand prizes.
For the first two months, the car manufacturers Daihatsu and Seat, the watch brand Lotus, FTWO Snowboards and the Silvaplana vacation hotel Julier Palace have already been secured as partners, writes Cinecom in a press release on Monday.
The "SMS Cine-Picture Competition" will be broadcast by Publicitas Cinecom in cooperation with Pathé cinemas throughout Switzerland on a total of 70 screens and 76 advertising screens, so-called "adscreens", and will be shown on the cinema screens as a cine-picture for approximately two minutes before the advertising block.

The Zurich agency Mediaxis has won Lidl's launch account. The communications company will evaluate for the food discounter which advertising materials and media should be used for the launch campaign.
The Europe-wide food giant is part of the Schwarz Group and will open its first stores in Switzerland in spring 2009. Lidl now operates 8,000 stores in 22 countries with more than 150,000 employees. In Germany alone, there are 3,000 stores and around 50,000 employees.
Founded in 2000 and based in Zurich-Schlieren, Mediaxis-MPG now has around 19 employees and serves clients such as Orange, Swisscanto, Reckitt-Benckiser, Lindt&Sprüngli, Ricola and Calida.

Rod Kommunikation has launched a dialog marketing campaign for the Zurich-based advertising technology company Frontwork. Three hundred opinion leaders from the communications industry have recently received an oversized black notebook designed to encourage them to develop ideas in an oversized format. This is a reminder that, as the press release states, frontwork makes ideas possible - no matter how big or unusual they are.
Responsible at Frontwork: Fabio Vareni and Susanne Casanova (management). Responsible at Rod: Maurus Zehnder, Sascha Borsai, Regula Fecker and Petra Hiltenbrand.

The Zurich agency Seed has produced two advertising films for ABB. The focus is on the Group's commitment to education, including apprentice training and the ABB technical school.
The first movie "ABB - Our commitment to education" is shot in the style of a short documentary and is used in presentations and on the ABB Switzerland website. The second film is designed as an endless video and works without spoken language. This version will be shown at recruitment fairs and similar events.

Ogilvy Interactive has realized an online campaign for Alfa Romeo. The aim was to make the new small car segment known to a young group of buyers with a website tailored to the model and other online measures, the agency writes in a press release. A multi-level e-mail program, video banners and expandable banners, video projections and extensive search engine marketing (SEM) have been leading interested parties to the homepage since early summer.
Anyone who registered as a member of the community could take part in an exclusive concert and party tour of Swiss clubs and sign up for a test drive in the new Alfa. By September 27, 2008, when the new small car was launched on the Swiss market, a total of over 1,000 test drives had been booked. Swiss celebrities were also members of the website: singer Fannie and actor and stuntman Daniel Bernhardt wrote about their experiences and adventures with the new Alfa in a special diary.

The Zurich-based communications and PR agency Open Up is expanding its consulting capacities with Andrea Müller and Claudio Mascolo. Andrea Müller studied media and communication science and journalism at the University of Fribourg. The 28-year-old then worked as a journalist for the Neue Luzerner Zeitung and as a web content specialist and copywriter for a large telecommunications company.
Claudio Mascolo studied journalism and organizational communication at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. Most recently, the 26-year-old worked as a press spokesman for Siemens Switzerland.
The communications company Open up was founded in 2001 by Urs Thaler and Kilian Borter. It specializes in media relations, corporate publishing and internal communications. The agency is increasing its capacity in order to cope with the increased volume of orders in 2008, the agency writes in a press release.