Do not change the logo, present a visual world and leave the printed matter in its previous form: these were the most important briefing points in January 2008. Wapico did everything differently than requested. And with this "disobedience" finally won the mandate from the Stadt-Theater Bern in a competitive presentation. Six months after winning the contract, a new website and a whole host of printed materials such as posters, monthly brochures, flyers and programs have now been designed and produced. The advertising agency also worked on the interior design, where the first results will soon be on display in the theater.
Small intervention, big effect
And what did Wapico do differently? A simple intervention in the logo resulted in a new icon, and a simple Times font was proposed for the previously individually drawn font. In the logo, the two previously small colons have now been made rather "huge". "This enlargement makes the lettering stand out better and is much more noticeable," CD René Walker is convinced.
Not a simple visual world
When it came to the visual world, Wapico "absolutely did not want a visual world". For one simple reason: "The Stadttheater itself and its performances are far too colorful and diverse to be squeezed into a visual world," says consultant Olaf Pilleri. Wapico therefore switched from previously complex image compositions to simple, very comprehensible and varied photos. However, there are differences within the images. For the three-genre theater in Bern, the images for drama and music theater are explicitly made without actors - only symbolic images are used based on the content of the piece. For dance theater, on the other hand, dancers from the ensemble are deliberately used. In this way, "an image" has been created for each piece that runs throughout and can be seen everywhere from posters and flyers to program booklets and websites.
In terms of format, Wapico has reduced the quantities encountered and also created a new format for the monthly programs that can also be used as a small poster. Visually, a pragmatic solution was found for the website, but technically a "small work of art with widget call-up and electronic newsletter has been created," says Regula Urbanek from the Stadttheater Bern.
Andreas Panzeri

Change of management at the Theater am Neumarkt, Zurich. With the new directors Barbara Weber and Rafael Sanchez, the theater also presents itself with a revised website. The Zurich agency mitLinks has worked hard to create a clearly structured website. The site is primarily based on text modules that provide information on plays, the ensemble and background information. The implementation was carried out in a specially developed content management system and enables the Theater am Neumarkt to manage the website independently. The design was created by Alain Kupper and implemented by mitLinks. The new site is based on just one illustration as an introduction. This refers to a currently running play. As there will soon be several productions on the program at the same time, this image will rotate. The idea could also be further developed with a Flash animation. As the season progresses, interested parties will also be able to download high-resolution photos of the production in a gallery. Otherwise, the company has deliberately dispensed with other visual elements, as project manager Lorenzo Mutti and designer Watezz Bleuer explain to mitLinks.
The integration of the Showsoft software allows direct ticketing for the audience and ensures the intended high level of user-friendliness for the small ensemble theater.
Andreas Panzeri

Maybe there's an even better job out there
Due to Switzerland’s persistently low unemployment rate, passive job seekers are becoming an increasingly important target group in the search for new employees. That’s why this group is the focus of the new advertising campaign for the Stellen-Anzeiger. After all, who knows—maybe there’s an even more interesting job out there. Under this motto, the campaign—created by Spillmann Felser Leo Burnett—showcases people with absolute «dream jobs» who, despite their fantastic working conditions, still take a look at the job listings to stay up to date. Three creative concepts are being used as posters in Zurich and the surrounding area, as ads in daily and Sunday newspapers, and as cinema slides.

When flying is even more wonderful
Swiss flies from Germany to Switzerland x times a day, and the fares are quite affordable. From Hamburg, Berlin, Hanover, and Stuttgart.
The Zurich-based agency Publicis has launched a campaign to promote these flights, which is now running in Germany. It consists of print ads, billboards, and radio spots. The campaign focuses, first, on the large number of flights: There are so many every day that you can easily skip one flight and take the next one. And second, the campaign also highlights Swiss’s low fares.

Dominic Geisseler has resigned from his post as Editor-in-Chief of Schweizer Illustrierte with immediate effect and is leaving Ringier. According to the statement, the break between Geisseler and the publishing house came about "due to differing views on the future journalistic direction of Schweizer Illustrierte.
The separation is by mutual agreement of the two parties. The editor-in-chief of SI will be taken over on an interim basis by Executive Board member Urs Heller, and talks are currently underway to find a successor for Geisseler.
Even before Geisseler took up his post on January 1, 2008, the position had been held by Urs Heller on an interim basis since February 2007 - in other words, for almost a year. During the long, futile search, Geisseler was chosen as a Ringier man; he had already worked for SI from 1989 to 2000, the last five years as deputy editor-in-chief.

In view of the fact that, according to Mach Basic 2008-2, all Swiss German TV magazines have once again lost reach, in some cases significantly, compared to the previous year, it is no surprise that Axel Springer Switzerland is now lowering its rates. However, the extent of this price reduction shows that the Förrlibuckstrasse in Zurich is taking a consistent approach: Tele, the title with the highest reach, is reducing its gross price per 1/1 page by CHF 1,000, TV-Star costs CHF 1,400 less, and TV2 and TVvier are now even CHF 3,000 lower. At least for the last three titles, the price reduction is significantly greater than the loss in reach, which is why the thousand-reader price (TLP) is also falling.
But that's not all: the price reduction also means lower prices for the various packages, in particular the Millionenkombi (Tele, TV-Star and Beobachter), which was only introduced in July. And what is most surprising is that the new rates will not only apply from 2009, but already from next week. More precisely:
as of October 1.
Jörg Tobuschat, Publishing Director TV Magazines at Axel Springer Switzerland, explains this measure as follows: "Although we are taking an offensive line, we see the price adjustments in a broader context: one year after the takeover of Tele, TV2 and TVvier from Ringier, we are continuing to work intensively on revamping our TV magazine portfolio," he says. The current "price adjustments" are merely a further step towards competitiveness.
Among the things that have already been implemented, he cites in particular the repositioning of Tele as a "premium magazine with a strong TV focus", while TVStar remains consistently geared towards TV celebrities. In addition, the program section of both titles has been made clearer and the editorial teams have been placed under the overall management of Gion Stecher. Advertising sales were also reorganized in July: although the TV magazines retain their own sales teams, these now work closely with those of Beobachter and are also headed by Sandra Peiti, previously advertising manager at Beobachter. All these things happened slowly but steadily and, for some, almost imperceptibly. "We have not yet communicated these fine-tuning measures to our readers and the general public," says Tobuschat. But that will change soon: "We also want to work on the image of TV program guides again and are therefore planning a campaign and a separate usage study specifically for the advertising market," he says.
Back to the new tariffs: Regardless of whether you want to appeal to household leaders, 18 to 49-year-olds or high-income earners - in terms of structural values, reach and thousand-reader price, the Millionenkombi and the two Tele-Kombis are now ranked directly behind the top two, CoopZeitung and Migros-Magazin, and well ahead of Schweizer Illustrierte and Schweizer Familie. The aim is "to give TV magazines the relevance they deserve in the advertising market again," says Sandra Peiti. "We also want to make customers aware that our TV magazines today offer them exciting topics and many creative, individual options, even in the program section, where advertising was taboo not so long ago."
Markus Knöpfli

The numbers are impressive. Cineman.ch can boast up to 660,000 unique clients per month on its portal for all information about the world of cinema. Cineman is thus "the most used cinema portal in Switzerland". The website Teleboy can boast the similarly valuable attribute of being "the most visited online TV guide in Switzerland". A third offering, Moonwalk.ch, is considered Switzerland's largest event database for concerts, parties and other action. All these record holders belong to the Cinergy empire. The Swiss pioneer for targeted content on the web was founded in 1999 by Martin Glauser and Tobias Asch. Today, the two leaders of a company with over 30 employees are still actively involved in the business. However, Glauser and Asch sold the majority of their Cinergy shares this summer to Thomas Sterchi and his Tom Talent Holding. This is not an act of resignation in the explosively growing online business. By integrating their "Internet pearl" into Sterchi's internationally active and financially strong "Talent" company, Cinergy should be able to really take off in the future. Of course, this also requires more active marketing.
Sandor Laczko has been working in the background since March. Now, the new Head of Sales & New Business is making his duties public for the first time. This is a good reason to take a closer look behind the scenes at Cinergy.
Cineman's recipe for success is based on a sophisticated combination of theatrical play dates with comprehensive reviews and a whole range of multimedia formats: In addition to trailers, there are also interviews, making-ofs and the in-house produced video reviews of the new releases. And of course, Cineman.ch also features the audience, which under the name "m&m's Movie Charts" not only provides the largest film jury in Switzerland, but also stands for a success story in terms of sponsorship. For 6 years now, m&m's has been the sponsor of the format.
Daily tips for more than 100 stations
With Teleboy.ch, Cinergy launched a similar site for television programming in 2001. Here, the user can find playtimes and daily tips for more than a hundred stations. Like Cineman, Teleboy is also the market leader in the field. Aware of the rapid developments in the world of television, Cinergy has been operating Teleboy.tv for several weeks, the first comprehensive WebTV guide that combines a daily editorial selection with automatic feeds from various broadcasters and media houses.
Another large platform called Moonwalk developed in 2006 from Clubgirl.ch, which was already launched in 2002. Today, Moonwalk is Switzerland's largest events database for concerts and parties. The first party videos in Switzerland can also be found on the nightlife portal. With Eventbooster.ch, Cinergy has also developed a B2B platform for cultural event organizers. On it, organizers can not only enter or add to their events, but also book highlights and ads on a wide variety of other platforms and pay for them online.
In addition to these own publications ("Cinergy Media"), the company is also considered the largest content provider ("Cinergy Content") in terms of "Entertainfo". The customer portfolio includes everything that is important in Switzerland: Bluewin, Search.ch, Google, NZZ, Sonntagszeitung, Orange, SBB and many others. For Sacha Wigdorovits' Punkt.ch, for example, Cinergy produces the daily TV program in the innovative "Genre View Format", the cinema guide and the events calendar for all five regions, ready to print.
Currently, 32 editorial and IT staff share around 18 full-time positions. The marketing department in particular is currently undergoing major expansion.
And this is where Sandor Laczko comes in. His job is to "manage Cinergy's platforms even better." In earlier years, there was a strong focus on the products and their quality. Cinergy has already received several awards for its platforms, such as silver at the Best of Swiss Web this year for Eventbooster.ch or the "Internet pearl" from the NZZ-Folio. With this almost automatic success, the active distribution of the brands has not yet become so urgent. So far, only one campaign for Cineman has been hung up at APG and a few ads have been placed in 20 Minuten. For marketing, Cinergy has worked with mainstream marketers. "Now we are pushing self-marketing and are in line with the industry-wide trend," Laczko explains. These days, he has already been able to hire the first specialized employee for this sale of online advertising. "And the department will continue to grow."
Cinergy has implemented its own ad management system, "where we work closely with marketers but manage everything ourselves." Laczko wants to maintain good contacts with the three big players AdLink, web2com and Admazing, as well as working with other agencies or direct customers. With its own marketing, Cinergy wants to be able to respond even more to customer requests. "Respond quickly, which is not so easy with a marketer," Laczko says. As an example, he mentions m&m's Movie Charts. This largest audience ratings database in Switzerland is published in various print and online media. Such a sponsoring partnership would "hardly be possible if there was an agency in between". And sponsoring with such special productions is a "big topic that we're going to push," Laczko reveals.
The new Head of Sales has the ideal background for this job. Sandor Laczko studied media science in combination with business administration and computer science at the University of Zurich. For a long time, however, his greatest passion was music. Even in middle school, the drummer was allowed to play in various bands of his music teachers. "At some point, I made a living out of it," he says. He performed in double concerts with Sting, Status Quo or even Pierre Favre. To do this, he practiced at least six hours a day. "Either like this or not at all anymore," was then his decision to give up the drums, because "as a hobby, it's no use if you have such a demand." Music, however, continued to play an important role in his professional life. Laczko is closely associated with the establishment of the Zurich jazz club Moods. Later, he was head of marketing at Rec, Switzerland's biggest indie label, before moving to Sony BMG as promoter and PR manager. In 30 months at that major, he spent a lot of energy bringing more Swiss bands into the media. At Sony BMG, he "set up the first department in Switzerland for sales broader rights management of artists." In other words, support that goes beyond the conventional selling of records and also includes management, concert bookings, merchandising and sponsoring.
After MusicStars, Laczko built the band Myron from 0 to 100 in this model and took it to the top 10 on the charts. "The new synergies enabled us to form partnerships that had never existed in this form before," Laczko recalls of gigs for McDonald's, where he had half a million placemats printed with the band's flyer. He has also brought the boys of Myron to the top via a health insurance company or with a concert tour for Volvo. Because these tasks required him to attend a party, concert or other event several times a week, the manager was now looking for a job again where he could work no less, but more concentrated. At Cinergy, he wants to use all the synergies from his previous work.
Andreas Panzeri

The prehistory of Cinergy goes back to 1995. For Bluewin (then: The Blue Window), Glauser and Asch developed a first event database and the cinema guide Cinemachine. In 1999, they went into business for themselves, founded Cinergy AG and premiered the product Cineman.ch, the first cinema guide with the complete cinema program of the whole of Switzerland. For almost ten years, Cineman.ch has been the address for cinema and film information on the Internet. Since 2006, the portal has also been available in French and English, and in 2007 Cineman.de was successfully launched in Germany. Cineman.fr, .at and .it are in preparation. And under Cineman.com, video-on-demand is to be offered on a large scale before the end of the year.

GEMI The Goldbach Index shows that the total advertising pressure recorded by Media Focus fell by one index point to 199 in the reporting month of August. On the other hand, the medium of the Internet is showing positive results with a continuous increase of 3 to 295 (292) index points. Radio increased by one index point to 264, while teletext again recorded an increase of 9 points to 149 (140). TV fell more sharply than in the previous month, by 3 index points to 460 (463). As a result, the index for electronic media as a whole also fell by 2 points to 437 (439).
The index initiated by Goldbach Media for advertising pressure in the overall market and the electronic media is based 100 percent on the Media Focus data collected and published monthly.
The GEMI provides information on the indexed development of the various electronic media in comparison to the overall market since the introduction of the first advertising window in 1993 (Adscreen December 2004 by AIS, no survey).

Barbara Lüthi has been interested in the development in China for many years. On the one hand, China shows an insane dynamism with a gigantic economic growth, on the other hand there are the farmers who have almost nothing and are even worse off due to land expropriations. "This gap interests me and at the same time the difficulty of reporting from this country," says the China correspondent of Swiss television.
For a "Rundschau" report on "Land Expropriation in China," she has now been named Journalist of the Year by CNN. A jury of well-known editors-in-chief from Focus, SF, RTL, National Geographic, DW-World, ORF and Süddeutsche Zeitung judged over 300 contributions from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
In the print category, Alexander Stefanidis won with his first report on Barack Obama's grandmother in Kenya. The story has been printed 40 times so far "and copied endlessly," as jury member Ueli Haldimann pointed out in his laudation. Last year's winner Chris¬toph Feuerstein was "offered four book contracts" after his research on Natascha Kampusch. A top-class round, then, in which the Swiss journalist emerged as the overall winner. She had already won the TV category in 2005 with a report on working conditions in Chinese toy factories.
Barbara Lüthi studied economics in Zurich and languages in Sydney. After starting as a VJ at various stations, she joined "Rundschau" in 2001 and has now been in Beijing since 2006. Her husband Tomas Etzler works as a correspondent for Czech television. For her research, Lüthi works with a Chinese producer. She finds it important to act as a mouthpiece for local colleagues in a country where freedom of expression is limited. Sometimes, she says, she has to be diplomatic when Lüthi deals with authorities. "But I fight to expose unjust things, and that's what I'm nominated for here," she explained at the award show.
Her stories are mostly about the contrast between city and country. "That's why I'm there. There are dollar millionaires and farmers who have nothing." Talking about it makes sense to Barbara Lüthi. She has no fear. "The worst that can happen to me is that I'll be deported."
Andreas Panzeri

For the seventh year in a row, a team from the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland rated the quality of Swiss companies' annual reports. Swiss Post was chosen as the winner, followed by Georg Fischer and Holcim in second and third place.
The study examined the annual reports of the largest Swiss companies and a number of selected SMEs in terms of their corporate governance. Social, ecological and economic aspects were examined.
The study attaches great importance to corporate governance and is based on the international sustainability standard of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), according to a press release issued by the FHNW on Wednesday.

Mediafocus Compared to the previous year, advertising pressure rose by 1.2% to CHF 231 million. The cumulative increase since the beginning of the year is 5.9%. As in July, the key market of beverages benefited from the advertising-intensive product launch (Rivella yellow) - up 34.8%. The key market of consumer electronics/photo/film increased its gross advertising pressure by 38.7%. The tobacco (+100.3%), services (+22.4%) and cosmetics/personal care (+16.9%) markets also recorded very positive development in the advertising month of August 2008.

Nobody from the talent pool of our creative U-28 team came up with this idea in the "Only an advertisement can do that" competition organized by the Swiss Press Association. The idea would probably have been taken as a bad joke. In fact, advertisements were placed in the Italian press and in the English Financial Times at the beginning of this week in which the insolvency administrator Augusto Fantozzi was looking for a buyer for Alitalia, which was threatened with grounding. Over the past two years, there has been countless speculation about the imminent demise of the company, which in good times had even flown the Pope around the world several times. At the time of going to press, it was not yet possible to confirm whether the truth had finally emerged on the publication date of this advertising week.
However, as a communications industry specialist, we dare to hope that the idea of the advertisement will work a truly Italian miracle after all. A lion in gold for this advertisement would be the least we could do in Cannes next spring, although the creative design of the Alitalia advertisement hardly goes beyond a little play with typography and logo, as we saw in La Stampa. In any case, a pan-European Effie would also have to be considered if this advertisement for the sale of Alitalia could actually save thousands of jobs.

The claim in the advertising for Riposa is "for a strong back". To communicate this argument, Euro RSCG used the idea of "train your back while you sleep".
For Snap Film, this story was more or less a made bed to be able to realize another pretty well-rested commercial. "With the commercial for Riposa, we can show that we are not just a production for funny comedy films, but that we also have the people to shoot stylish commercials with great imagery," says Michael Kindermann at Snap Film in Zurich. For him, the Riposa project was tailor-made for Nico Beyer. This top international director is new to Snap's portfolio - but has been in the business for over 17 years. Beyer worked with Kindermann back in 1992, when he was still in Hamburg. Now they have found each other again. In addition to representing Nico Beyer in Switzerland, Snap Film is also responsible for the Asian market, the Middle East and "some European countries", as Kindermann explains. As a contract with Frank Brendel has also been signed recently, Snap is making clear its intention to realize more international films from Switzerland in the future.
>To the spot
In the Riposa commercial, people do sport while they sleep. They illustrate the campaign idea of strengthening the body while sleeping. The film was shot in Zurich's City indoor swimming pool and on the Sihlhölzli sports field using a high-speed camera. The Phantom was developed for military purposes and records 1000 images per second. As the film was shot at night, a lot of additional and skillfully used light was required. The camera also had to work under water in the indoor swimming pool. The actors were sports professionals who were able to show an absolutely confident physical feeling even with their eyes closed.
Andreas Panzeri

Nico Beyerwho created the Riposa commercial for Snap Film and Euro RSCG, has also shot for companies such as Lexus, Mercedes, MTV, BMW, Lucky Strike, Nike, Panasonic, Nissan, Coca-Cola and Swatch. Beyer enjoys working with new visual ideas and is constantly looking for new techniques and ways to implement them. Beyer studied graphics and design before he started working as a video artist.