Matter & Gretener has added another TV commercial to the natural gas image campaign that has been running since this spring. The Zurich-based advertising agency announced this in a press release on Tuesday. The commercial shows an idyllic mountain lake, under the surface of which a group of fish form a natural gas leaf. As in previous commercials, the green leaf as a key visual is intended to convey the clear but also emotional message that natural gas as an energy source protects the environment.
Responsible at Matter & Gretener: Daniel Matter (Creative Direction), Dominik Imseng (Text), Jochen Hennecke, Leonie Bachmann (Consulting). Panam, Zurich (film production). Südlich-T, Munich (3D animation). Alex Kirschner, Zurich (music).
Responsible at the Swiss Gas Industry Association: Urs Zeller (Head of Marketing), Daniel Bissig (Head of Advertising).

With prejudice slogans like "Jedä Tschugger het ä Schnoutz" and "D'Bulle si schtier" the Bernese cantonal police advertises for the recruitment of future policemen and policewomen. Over the next two years, 150 of them are to be trained.
The Bernese Cantonal Police has commissioned the advertising agency Freiburghaus und Partner BSW to create advertisements, banners, posters and the website for its provocative advertising campaign. The communication measures will also be implemented at trade fairs.
The aim of this campaign is to encourage the public and the target group of 20 to 35-year-olds to critically question the common clichés about the police profession and to engage with the job description. The aim is to address candidates who have not yet been reached through communication - for example, those who have completed their first vocational training, but also people with a baccalaureate or university degree.
Responsible at the cantonal police of Bern: Hans Rütti (Deputy Head of Human Resources).
Responsible at Freiburghaus und Partner BSW: Pascale Berclaz (Strategy, Management), Regula Hochuli (Consulting), Simon Freiburghaus (CD), Youri Laubscher (AD).

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) filed a complaint with the US Department of Justice on Sunday against the planned alliance between Google and Yahoo in the field of search engine marketing. The cooperation was successfully initiated by Yahoo in its fight against the takeover by Microsoft. The ANA represents major American advertising clients such as General Motors and Procter & Gamble. The latter was named Advertiser of the Year 2008 in Cannes this year.
The complaint filed with the US Competition Commission is aimed at the dominant market position that the cooperation between the two largest advertising providers in search marketing would entail. It would give Google the right to sell search and text advertising on Yahoo, whereby the revenue would be shared with Yahoo. In 2007, Google had a market share of 76.6 percent in US search engine marketing, Yahoo held 17.9 percent and Microsoft 5.5 percent.
According to the Wall Street Journal, it is uncertain whether the lawsuit will be successful. Nevertheless, it carries great weight due to the high prestige of the Association of National Advertisers and is a heavy blow for Google and Yahoo for this reason alone.

Zentralschweiz am Sonntag, the seventh edition of the Neue Luzerner Zeitung, was published for the first time last weekend. Alongside Sonntag, Sonntagszeitung, NZZ am Sonntag, Sonntagsblick and Südostschweiz am Sonntag, it is the sixth Sunday newspaper in German-speaking Switzerland.
The first issue has 96 pages, half of which are filled with advertisements. The circulation at the start is 130,000 copies, after that it will be 122,000. As LZ Medien's own printing plant is working to capacity on Saturday, it will be printed by Basler Zeitung for the time being. It is then expected to be printed at the company's own plant from early summer 2009.
In contrast to the nationally oriented Sunday papers, Zentralschweiz am Sonntag sees itself as a regional newspaper. The basic structure is based on the weekday edition. For this reason, a new editorial team was not created, but the existing one was expanded. There is a separate edition for the canton of Zug.
The Sunday edition will be delivered to all subscribers to Neue LZ and its regional editions free of charge until the end of 2008. After that, the subscription will initially cost CHF 19 more. The Sunday edition alone cannot be subscribed to, but can be purchased at newsstands.
The first bundle combines the Switzerland, Foreign Affairs and Culture sections, followed by the Sports, Central Switzerland Region and Business sections. The supplements Piazza (replacing the magazine Leben, which used to be included on Saturdays) and Wissen are new.
The front page features a picture of the Israel-Switzerland match and the results of a survey on the Harmos referendum in the canton of Lucerne. It will be a "nail-biter", it says, with the supporters only a nose ahead. Reference is also made to an initiative for an "energy intervention force" for building renovations.
Editor-in-chief Thomas Bornhauser is convinced in an editorial "that there is a need for Sunday-compatible regional journalism". Zentralschweiz am Sonntag is the first Sunday title to consistently focus on the region and invest "seven figures" in this.
At the end of June, it was announced that Zentralschweiz am Sonntag and Sonntag from AZ Medien would be joining forces for advertising. A combined discount of 10 percent will be granted under the name Sonntagspool.

At the end of August, the Board of Trustees of the Swiss Public Relations Institute SPRI accepted Daniel Herrera and Fabio Corti as new members. Herrera replaces Pierre Buntschu, who resigned in 2007, as representative of French-speaking Switzerland. Corti now represents the interests of the Swiss Public Relations Society SPRG. He succeeds Markus Berger, who has been director of the SPRI since April 2008.

The movie marathon of the 4th Talent Screen, which took place on Friday in the fully booked Zurich Gessnerallee, was won by a team led by Serge Wohlgensinger with a short film on the given topic "Dreck am Stecken". The advertising film parody "Laboratoire Salopiere" (to the film), which revolves around an imaginary brand of mascara called "Dreck am Stecken," was the most popular with the audience. The short film won out in a play-off against "Das Leben kann Scheisse sein" from Lukas Kaufmann's team.
The winning team, which was awarded the Golden Stag, included Wohlgensinger, Marietta Jemmi, Sibylle Dubs, Marcel Keller and Florian Inhauser. They won prizes worth a total of 13,000 Swiss francs. The SF Talent Screen Award worth 10,000 Swiss francs, presented at the same event, went to Franziska Freiermuth and her team for the film "Tag153". The best performance in the Pitch Battle - screenwriters have to pitch their script to the audience in a duel situation - was delivered by Luc Walpoth, the 2005 winner, who beat Boni Koller, according to the voting audience.
Around 100 films were shot for the Movie Marathon between August 29 and 31. This means that the Talent Screen competition, which is being held for the fourth time, has recorded a new record number of participants. The films have the specifications that they must not exceed the maximum length of three minutes, and that they must revolve around a given theme. This year's theme "Dreck am Stecken!" was given by Swiss director Oliver Rihs. On September 10, the ten winning films and selected films from the Movie Marathon will be broadcast on CH:Kulturszene on SF1. At Talentscreen.ch all films can be found.

Do you use a Chinese site? Or a Dutch one? Why not? How often do you visit LeMonde.fr? Do you read sites ending in .at? Few people are aware that the Internet is split into language groups, countries and political villages. In each group, each region, each village, the balance of power is different, and everywhere people politicize for all they're worth.
Welcome to Switzerland
Even if the politically impossible were made possible and every Swiss person were reached with a super web service, this would still not be a particularly capital-intensive undertaking. With the stingy surfers and the Rappenspalter advertising budgets, you can hardly make more than one or two bucks per user. But the web is not primarily about money. It's been clear since Obama at the latest: it's about politics first. Every YouTube trifle is measured right and left. Every tulip grower's message is scrutinized for its SVP, SP, FDP, CVP friendliness.
And all the political figures have long been present: the conspiracy theorists. The hippies. The world changers. The ones who always think everything is bad and do nothing themselves. The know-it-alls. The cynics. The Fudi citizens who spy on the street behind the curtain of "media criticism" and secretly scratch every car with a screwdriver that exceeds the parking time by a minute. Good old Switzerland.
Nothing Web 2.0
It is not citizen journalists, but well-known politicians who lead the field of bloggers. Blocher and Leuenberger are the only really well-known bloggers outside the Swiss blog camp. The two political opas are also among the few who don't just blog about blogging, but actually offer their own topics.
Our digital dwarf state is a rocky environment for social media: The wisdom of the masses, which flourishes on Wikipedia, for example, moulders away here. Not because there is a lack of wisdom, but because there is a lack of mass. The Swiss market is too small for models that rely on superscaling. Common Web 2.0 functions only work in the .ch area if you are Bluewin, a major newspaper or a blogging Federal Councillor. Otherwise, the same people always comment on their own blog, often using several pseudonyms. Some even run several Rumpelstiltskin blogs and applaud themselves all day long.
Galactic laws
The English-language Internet is governed by completely different, almost galactic laws. Of the 1.4 billion Internet users, an English-language site can theoretically count on almost a billion potential surfers. With the unpredictable quantum leaps that repeatedly turn everything upside down on the English-language web, new suns and solar systems form almost daily; suddenly Google is there, suddenly Facebook shines brighter than a thousand suns.
This is fascinating and makes some hobbyists dream of cosmic money. However, in 99.99 ... percent of cases, these dreams remain dreams. Most of the time, there is a problem in the political sphere. In the big web, big politics is made first. Google is not a company, Google is an empire. Due to the cosmic laws that govern this huge market, such an empire can suddenly collapse or be conquered within weeks. That's what happened to Altavista, and right now the presidents of MySpace, Yahoo and eBay are trembling.
The only way to reach a large audience is with an electoral political smash hit (the slogan "Everything free for everyone" works wonderfully) and the support of insiders in Silicon Valley. Social media and social graph applications were created in a large political arena, made for this galactic political arena and used most efficiently by politicians; the spread of digital friend technology has not privatized the Internet, but politicized it even more. Even if the Swiss-German Internet has almost nothing else in common with the big one, the next wave of digital personalization (and thus politicization) will soon flood it too.
Oliver Reichenstein is an information architect who lives and works in Tokyo.

As of today, the new posters of butter manufacturer Floralp can be seen at 800 billboard locations in Switzerland. The posters show slices of bread spread with Floralp butter. However, on 60 of these posters, placed in seven large Swiss cities, a large hole yawns. And it's right through the billboard. The reason: a butter lover has eaten the inside of the pictured slice of buttered bread, and now only the crust remains.
The poster campaign was designed by the Zurich advertising agency Spillmann/Felser/Leo Burnett (SFLB). It was realized in collaboration with the Swiss Milk Producers Association Swissmilk, APG Allgemeine Plakatgesellschaft and Clear Channel Plakanda. The implementation required unusual effort: 60 poster sites had to be specially converted for the transparent sandwich posters.
However, anyone who spots one of these eye-catching butter sandwich posters need not fear a national butter thief, Floralp writes on its website. Floralp butter will continue to be available in all grocery stores.

Switzerland is represented by eight of the fourteen jurors at the 11th German-language radio spot award Das Goldene Ohr. The jurors are:
Peter Brönnimann, CD, Spillmann/Felser/Leo Burnett,
Marianne Friedli, copywriter, walker,
Michael Rottmann, CD, Jung von Matt/Limmat,
Markus Ruf, Managing Director, CD, Ruf Lanz,
Roland Schmid, Managing Director, Jingle Jungle,
Christian B. Schoop, Managing Director, schoop projects!,
Hanspeter Swiss, CD, Wirz advertising and
Philipp Skrabal, Executive CD, Advico Young & Rubicam.
The deadline for entries is October 10, 2008, and the awards ceremony will take place in Zurich on October 31, 2008.

Internet advertising marketer Adlink Media is opening a new office in Bern. The office of the online company, which is part of the Goldbach Media Group, is located directly in the Stade de Suisse in the same premises as IP Multimedia Bern, which belongs to the same media group. According to a press release from Adlink Media, the shared address will enable greater use to be made of synergies in consulting and planning. The opening of the Bern office is intended to meet the demand for customer proximity in the Bern region and French-speaking Switzerland.
Remy Ruefli from Bern will fill the office as the new Key Account Manager Bern. He previously worked in the online business for over five years, most recently as Online Manager at Espace Media Groupe. "By opening an office in Bern, we want to maintain a smooth and close business relationship with our customers," Ruefli is quoted as saying in the press release.

Watching "Musicstar" means suffering. The moderation was mostly deep in the realm of the embarrassing, the jury as a whole was just as much of an imposition, and the songs could sometimes make your blood drip from your ears. Admittedly, this is a complaint at a high level, even if the word level is perhaps somewhat out of place in this context.
Now the thing goes on February 1 into the fourth round. In about a month, the preselection will begin, and with it the production of those infamous casting films in which not-so-talented contemporaries expose themselves to complete ridicule, and whose broadcast should actually be punished as a screen crime.
As if the matter wasn't already bad enough, a Bernese named Marco Pfeuti - better known as Gölä - has now also been appointed to the jury. Maybe it's time to make a long-cherished dream come true and put the TV at the side of the road and thus turn my back on Swiss television forever and never pay Billag fees again. Uf u dervo.

Following a pitch, CSS Insurance has decided to give the online marketing agency Swissclick overall responsibility for its online media campaign. Together with the traditional advertising agency Pinx, the Kloten-based agency has developed a creative concept that will be implemented this fall not only on the Internet but also in offline media. The main aim of the campaign is to attract new customers to CSS Insurance. This is why websites, newsletters, partner and search engine marketing are being used.
The online campaign covers the three CSS product lines 10sekunden.ch and CSS Basis as well as the online product advisor www.myFlex.ch, which was launched in August. Also new this year is a dream drawing competition, which Swissclick designed and implemented as part of the autumn campaign for 10sekunden.ch.