The Zurich agency Wirz Corporate has won the PR mandate of luxury bed manufacturer Vi-Spring in a competitive presentation. The Wirz subsidiary for corporate communications will be responsible for communications work in the Swiss market, with a focus on media relations and activities surrounding the major European furniture trade fairs, according to a press release issued on Tuesday. The background to winning the mandate is the expansion strategy of the British company Vi-Spring in selected countries on the European mainland.

 
Following a competitive presentation, the railroad company BLS has opted for a consortium of several partners for the reorientation and implementation of the customer magazine Streifzug. It consists of the Bernese communications agency Republica, the Biel-based text agency Textatelier.ch and the previous printing partner Fischer AG for data and print. In addition to printing, advertising acquisition and visual design, the mandate now also includes the content and editorial realization of the magazine. The magazine, which is available on BLS trains and reaches around 9,000 subscribers, is to be journalistically enhanced and enriched with additional reading material, as detailed in a press release on Tuesday. BLS Passenger Transport will continue to be responsible for the editorial content, including the choice of topics. In future, Streifzug will be published four times a year instead of the previous two, with a circulation of 35,000 copies. The first issue with the new concept will appear in April 2008.

 The much-talked-about but little-watched quiz show «Zart oder Bart» on Swiss television is being canceled and will air for the last time on April 14. According to the SDA, SF announced on Tuesday that the Monday night program had not been successful enough with viewers and would therefore not be produced any further. The gender-based competition, hosted by Röbi Koller and Tania Kummer, had only been added to the lineup in late summer. Kummer left her spot in front of the camera back in December 2007 to work behind the scenes. It will be replaced starting in September 2008 by the quiz show «1 gegen 100.» In this show, a contestant must use knowledge and strategy to eliminate 100 opponents from the game. According to SF, the format from B&B Endemol is currently one of the most sought-after quiz formats on the international market. In the meantime, from April through September, the weekly quiz show «Al dente» will air on Monday evenings. Starting August 25, 2008, «Al dente» and «1 gegen 100» will alternate every two weeks.

 
Whether the European Football Championship 08 will actually be a European Championship 0815 because of the disenchantment with football in Switzerland, as the Tages-Anzeiger magazine recently mockingly predicted, cannot be answered by the survey now available. What is certain is that around 54% of Swiss people are looking forward to the 2008 European Football Championships. However, and this is the less pleasing finding of the study, interest has hardly increased at all in the space of a year. Of the 1005 people surveyed in German-speaking and French-speaking Switzerland, a further 38% said they were not interested in the event. Two percent have not yet formed an opinion and six percent are even annoyed by it. Critical arguments have gained support. 49% of respondents believe that the European Championship is a waste of taxpayers' money and 31% are now convinced that the risk of terrorist attacks will increase massively during this major event. A year ago, 22% thought the same. On the other hand, 80% of respondents continue to believe that the European Championship is good for Switzerland's reputation in the world.

 
 
The editorial team of the daily newspaper Bund runs a blog in which editor-in-chief Artur K. Vogel also likes to comment from time to time. Recently, he devoted himself to another exponent of the media scene with a middle initial: Frank A. Meyer. Vogel was struck by the last page of Sonntagsblick, where editor-in-chief Marc Walder has been interviewing Frank A. Meyer on a wide variety of topics for several weeks. In the last issue, the duo practised the "knowledge-less interview", says Vogel. Walder broached the subject of the World Economic Forum, to which Meyer admitted in his first answer that he had never attended this event in Davos. However, he then goes on to instruct the reader "without any knowledge of the subject matter" about what to make of it, Vogel complains. His attack on Meyer ("gifted producer of cultivated blah-blah") is countered by a Bundblog reader with a change of subject: he once again joins in the lamentations about the sports section in his favorite newspaper, which has been produced by the Berner Zeitung since 2006. And suggests to the head of the Bund that the sports editors should interview him in full-page interviews about sporting events that he did not attend. Firstly, this would be cheap, secondly a good FAM parody and thirdly hardly any worse than what is usually found in the sports section. Perhaps in his next blog entry, Artur K. Vogel will now address the old adage: "As you call into the forest, so it echoes back".

 
According to the Swiss Press Council, Weltwoche violated its duty to tell the truth in an article about alleged abuses of asylum law and omitted information that would have been important for readers to understand the context. In addition, the people concerned were not able to comment. A complaint from lawyers of asylum seekers was partially upheld, as the SDA quoted a press release from the Press Council on Tuesday. In the article "Fluchtgründe ab Fliessband" ("Reasons for flight off the assembly line") from June 28, 2007, Weltwoche denounced asylum abuses based on two examples, both of which were presented as prototypical for the systematic abuse of Swiss asylum law. An Ethiopian asylum seeker was granted asylum in May 2007 after his application for asylum in 2004 and his reconsideration application in 2005 had been rejected. In the opinion of the Press Council, these undisputed facts were not sufficient to prove the abuse at least alleged by the magazine.
According to the article, the reasons for flight were adapted to the changed practice of the Asylum Appeals Commission in 2005, according to which conscientious objectors from Eritrea are now generally granted asylum. According to the Press Council, the author should have explained why the authorities deviated from their original assessment in the individual case. According to the Press Council, Weltwoche would have been obliged to "provide the readership with additional information on the generalizable abuse of asylum law described".
Weltwoche also failed to obtain an official statement from the responsible authority. The "various voices from the administration" quoted were not sufficient. The other parties concerned were also unable to comment. Weltwoche claims that lawyers and the accused asylum seekers could not be reached for comment despite extensive efforts.

The ADC Gold Cubes for Jung von Matt/Limmat caused a stir in the industry. ADC President Jean Etienne Aebi has now announced a discussion about the submission regulations. Whether the guidelines will be changed at all and become more open or more restrictive as a result will therefore be examined. Advertising Week asked the German ADC what it thinks about these issues.
In our northern neighbor, whose creative competition has also been open to Austria and Switzerland since last year, the conditions of participation state: "The work must have been published or developed either in Germany, Austria or German-speaking Switzerland". The German ADC is thus opening up the field: it is not mandatory for a work to have been conceived in Germany, Austria or Switzerland. It is sufficient if it was published in these countries.
"We are more open, you could say that," confirms Michael Preiswerk, spokesman for the board of the German ADC and managing director of the Stuttgart agency GPP. "Our philosophy is that we can't close the borders in the age of the Internet." The German ADC's annual competition exhibition is also one of the largest in the world. Of course, Germany has a very different approach to Switzerland: the business volume and budgets are many times larger. The conditions for the German ADC cannot be transferred one-to-one to the situation in Switzerland.
Preiswerk, himself a native of Switzerland, is aware of problems with works that come from a network partner of a German agency, despite the ADC's open attitude: "It has already happened that German agencies have submitted works from abroad with false credits. If we notice this, these works are credited to the actual author."
Germany has also prepared itself for so-called fakes, i.e. works that were only created for the competition: "This topic comes up every year, along with discussions about what actually constitutes a fake. The boundaries are sometimes blurred," says Preiswerk. The German ADC has tightened up the relevant regulations in recent years. A first hurdle against fakes is a confirmation from the client, which the submitters must provide for each work. This should prove that the work was commissioned. The agencies must also provide details of when and in which media an article was placed. "The work is then checked in two stages: First by our office and then by the jury, which is required to check suspicious work again." As Preiswerk says, the German ADC has had very good experiences with this course.
Carole Scheidegger

 
With the Radio and Television Act (RTVA) in force since April 1, 2007, radio and television broadcasters no longer require a license, but must register with OFCOM before broadcasting begins. In the meantime, around 30 notifications have been received from 18 radio and twelve television broadcasters. The radio stations include twelve stations broadcasting via cable or satellite and the internet and six stations broadcasting exclusively via the internet. The television stations include seven information channels, four channels broadcast via satellite or cable and one web TV channel that broadcasts music video clips, including the TV information channel of cable network operator Cablecom, that of the Rega air rescue service and that of the Vaud municipality of Bussigny, as Bakom spokeswoman Caroline Sauser told SDA on Tuesday. The radio stations Radio Lune (Neuchâtel) and Radio 105 (Zurich) have also registered. The remaining notifications have mainly come from Internet radio stations, Sauser continued. Since the entry into force of the RTVA, these are also obliged to register with OFCOM.
The Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SRG) and other broadcasters with a performance mandate require a license, regardless of whether they receive a share of the fees or not. This applies in particular to those broadcasters who claim FM frequencies. In future, there will still be licences for 54 local radio and TV stations. Who will receive one will be announced in early summer. Some of the licensed stations will receive fee money.

 
The Zurich agency Heads is designing the new image of the Ewz.Selection photography platform and is supporting the ten-year-old institution of Swiss photography in its communications. A new image became necessary with the change of the main sponsor and the associated change of name. The new main sponsor of the platform, formerly known as The Selection vfg, is Elektrizitätswerk Zürich (EWZ):
Romano Zerbini (D.O.K. Zerbini) and Lucia Degonda and Jérôme Bischler (Vfg), Harry Graf and Carla Stoppini (EWZ). Responsible at Heads Corporate Communication: Marco Simonetti (CD), Donovan Szypura (graphics), Ralph Hermann and Nadia Francioso (consulting).

Urs C. Keller joined the B2C sales team at Publimag Glattbrugg as Key Account Manager on January 1, 2008. In this role, he is responsible for the publications Ticino 7 and Teleclub Magazin. He also supports the sales team of the magazine Schweizerischer Hauseigentümer in its contact with advertising and media agencies. These three titles will therefore now be managed by a single person with integral responsibility for the agencies. Keller has previously worked in national advertising marketing for various publishers.

 The specialist publication Holmes Report has named the Pleon communications agency network as European consultancy of the year. The international industry report for public relations cites Pleon's European focus, its internationally oriented management team at country level and its extensive service portfolio as the main reasons for its selection. Pleon received this award three years after it was founded. The European PR company emerged from ECC KothesKlewes and the former European branch of Brodeur in the fall of 2004. Today, Pleon employs 1050 people in 22 European countries as well as in South Africa, the Middle East and the Russian Federation. In Switzerland, Pleon has two offices in Zurich and Geneva.

All Swiss dialog marketing agencies have until Thursday, January 31 to submit their work from the previous year for the 2008 Dialog Marketing Prize. All further information and the entry form are available on the website. All campaigns will be on public display from February 28 to March 1 at the Papiersaal in Zurich. The award ceremony will then take place on May 23.