On Friday, the regional television station Tele Oberwallis will go on air for the first time. This not only means that the German-speaking Upper Valais will have its first regional television station, but also that the tug-of-war with the Lower Valais regional television station Canal 9 for the federally subsidized Valais private television license, which is expected to be awarded at the beginning of the summer, will begin. The driving force behind Tele Oberwallis is Christian Stärkle, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Radio Rottu. Together with partners Walliser Bote and RhoneZeitung, half an hour of broadcasts will be produced daily, including a five-minute news program, which will be produced at Radio Rottu due to the lack of a studio. Two further hours of programs per day are bought in. The program design must be based on the financial possibilities, Stärkle told the Walliser Bote. 750,000 francs are initially available for the launch of Tele Oberwallis.
Although Tele Oberwallis has only just launched, it already has expansion plans. Under the name Valais Valais TV, it is applying for a regional television license from the federal government together with the Lower Valais media Nouvelliste, Radio Rhône and Radio Chablais. This would allow Tele Oberwallis to receive part of the CHF 3.2 million in licence fee money distributed by the Confederation, which would enable it to expand its programming. The competitor for the regional television license, which covers the entire canton, is the French-language channel Canal 9, which has already been in existence for 25 years. OFCOM is expected to make its decision at the beginning of the summer.

 Swiss companies do not score well in a study on the reputation of large corporations. This is the result of a ranking by the Geneva-based company Covalence, which scrutinized the 200 largest companies in the world based on ethical criteria. It combed through the information published about these companies over the last three years, as Cash Daily reports. Of the Swiss companies, Nestlé was ranked 31st, Credit Suisse 58th, followed by UBS in 59th place. Roche is ranked 172nd, Syngenta 180th and Novartis 188th. According to the author of the study, the fact that the pharmaceutical multinationals are ranked poorly is also due to the fact that the entire industry has had a difficult year. Covalence Director Antoine Mach told Cash Daily that the rather lukewarm rankings of CS and UBS were due to the fact that the two banks are reluctant to communicate on topics such as social responsibility and sustainability. The public is demanding more transparency here. Nestlé has apparently learned: the food multinational was ranked 200th in last year's ranking and has now worked its way up to 31st place. According to Mach, Nestlé is now responding better to critical voices.

The hit parade on DRS 3 and Virus has found a successor for presenter Patrick Hässig, who is moving to the private station Radio 24: Nik Thomi will present the chart show from March 2008. The 27-year-old from Thun has been working for DRS station Virus for the last three years. The former singer and lyricist of a hip-hop, rock and funk band originally embarked on a career as a primary school teacher, but swapped this for a career in radio at an early stage. He gained experience at Radio Beo and the bilingual radio station Canal 3. Thomi joins the hit parade in an anniversary year: the show is celebrating its 40th birthday this year.

 The Basler Zeitung is expanding in the southern German border region: The Stellefant, the newspaper's Friday job supplement, will now be regularly added to the titles Die Oberbadische, Markgräfler Tagblatt and Weiler Zeitung. They are published by the Oberbadische publishing house Georg Jaumann. This step increases the Stellefant circulation by 22,000 copies and now totals around 220,000.

 
In the coming year, total advertising expenditure on the internet in the UK is set to exceed that of television. This is according to a report by WPP subsidiary M Group, which is available to Horizont.net. According to the predictions, advertisers on the island will increase their spending on online advertising by a good 30 percent to 3.4 billion pounds in the current year. This means that online marketers will almost close the gap to television, traditionally the advertising medium with the highest turnover. However, Adam Smith, Futures Director at Group M, has no doubt that, in view of the ongoing development in favor of online opportunities, spending on the Internet in the UK will definitely exceed that on TV advertising in 2009. According to Smith, this is already the case in Sweden. In Denmark, too, it will not be long before the Internet has overtaken TV advertising.
The search engine marketing segment, which already accounted for around 58 percent of web investments in the UK in 2007 and which, according to Group M analysts, is set to grow significantly by another 35 percent this year, is likely to contribute to the further upturn in internet advertising in the UK. The two other online advertising segments analyzed by Group M - traditional display and classified advertising - are also expected to grow by 20 percent in 2008.
The situation is different in Switzerland. The market share of television advertising is still many times higher than that of internet advertising. The picture in Switzerland is similar to that in Germany, where the TV share is around 24 percent. In Germany, Smith believes it is likely that the growth of the Internet will be at the expense of print advertising. This could easily also be the case in Switzerland, where the market share of the entire print sector is over 55%.

 The SVP Switzerland is to change its public communication style. The SVP Thurgau wants the federal party to take a constructive course and also be involved in the government, as reported by SDA. This is the only way the party can influence the course of events, said Thurgau party president Martin Stuber and National Councillor and Farmers' Association president Hans-Jörg Walter to the media on Thursday. They emphasized that they wanted to work towards the SVP Switzerland adopting the style of the cantonal party. In the Swiss SVP, the behavior of "certain people" must be addressed in public. The Thurgau party is mostly in agreement with the federal party on factual issues, but "we don't bash our political competitors", said Stuber.
Walter, for his part, expressed the hope that it would be possible to bring the two SVP federal councillors back into the parliamentary group during the current legislative period. Efficient, measurable, bourgeois politics were necessary if the party was to continue to be successful.

 Following a relaunch, Coopzeitung.ch is offering various new services. The focus of the Coopzeitung's online presence is no longer on the content of the newspaper itself, but on added value for readers, according to a press release issued on Thursday. For example, every week recipe author Claudia Stalder shows step by step how to prepare the weekly recipe from the Coopzeitung. Various content from the printed edition is also available to listen to as a podcast. You can also select and download a PDF of the Coopzeitung campaign overview by region.
These innovations mark the start of the expansion of the online offering, with new services to be added on an ongoing basis in the coming weeks. The new website of the newspaper, which has over 2.5 million subscribers, was developed together with the company Previon in Zofingen.

 The presidential primaries begin on Thursday in the US state of Iowa: Democrats and Republicans can vote on their candidate for president. The two parties have spent almost 40 million dollars (around 45 million Swiss francs) on TV ads in Iowa up to the end of the year. That is three times as much as in the last election in 2004, as CNN.com writes. By December 29, 50,000 political ads had flickered across the screens in the US state. Democratic candidate Barack Obama spent the most money: According to CNN, he poured 9 million dollars (10 million francs) into around 40,000 spots. His rival Hillary Clinton invested 7.2 million dollars (7.8 million francs). According to CNN, the two leading Republican candidates John McCain and Rudy Guliani are still holding back in Iowa and want to score more points in the states of New Hampshire and Florida respectively.

 On Wednesday, the Basler Zeitung (Baz) published a large advertisement on the front page. The advertisement promoted Subaru. For the Baz, which is now operating under its own management, the advertisement on the front page was a first. It annoyed some readers: In a letter to the editor, one reader wrote: "For a newspaper as renowned as the Baz, advertising of this size on the front page is far below par. This is only just acceptable for free newspapers." In the readers' forum on the Baz website, one user says that the advertisement on the front page is "massively exaggerated, even indecent". The fact that the Basler Zeitung published a large supplement on CO2 consumption on New Year's Eve makes the advertisement even more piquant for the car manufacturer Subaru. The Baz has terminated its management contract with Publicitas and has been operating under its own management since the beginning of the year (see
). The subsidiary Basler Zeitung Medien Werbe AG is now responsible for the advertising business of the Baz.

 The American pharmaceutical industry spends almost twice as much money on advertising as on research. In 2004, companies spent 57.5 billion dollars on advertising, while research and development expenditure amounted to 31.5 billion dollars. These figures emerge from a study by York University in Toronto, Canada. The results confirm the public impression that the pharmaceutical industry is marketing-heavy, the authors of the study write in a specialist journal. The pharmaceutical companies' advertising campaigns included the distribution of free product samples, advertisements, letters and emails, visits to doctors and seminars promoting the use of a new drug.

 The "100 Best Posters" association is organizing the international design competition "100 Best Posters of the Year Germany Austria Switzerland". Poster designers, clients and printers from the three countries are invited to submit posters of all genres and design media by February 15, 2008. The posters must have been printed in 2007. Entries can be submitted from January 1, 2008 via the competition website, where further information is also available.

 Competition in the telecommunications industry is in full swing. Things are particularly heated between the providers Sunrise and Swisscom. In the Handelszeitung, Swisscom CEO Carsten Schloter criticizes the competition, saying that Sunrise is currently trying to destroy Swisscom’s image instead of focusing all its efforts on its own offerings. He argues that this is a form of competition that benefits neither Switzerland nor its customers. In response to the observation that Swisscom isn’t exactly known for playing by the rules in the market either, Schloter says: «But we compete with new products and are massively upgrading our networks. Sunrise would be better off investing in its own infrastructure.»
Schloter expects competitors to offer, among other things, lower prices and more bundled packages in 2008. «Customers will likely start to feel the effects of last-mile unbundling starting this quarter. Already, one-third of all telephone lines are unbundled, and competitors can now use this to attract customers.» However, Swisscom will not sit idly by and watch as customers walk away. Swisscom’s most important asset is the trust of its customers. The company plans to step up its efforts with new products and lower prices. It also aims to grow in the Bluewin TV segment.