The great expectations of media companies and mobile phone operators with regard to mobile TV do not yet seem to have been fulfilled. Opinions differ on the long-term success, but it is certain that the big boom has yet to materialize. Many network operators are now trying to create additional incentives with increased sports coverage. The broadcasting of football matches in particular is set to become a kind of reinsurance for the mobile TV medium in future. Both the British TV broadcaster BskyB and the German mobile phone provider Vodafone D2 are planning to broadcast significantly more live broadcasts via mobile channels in future. For example, D2 offers all German Bundesliga matches at a monthly price of EUR 7.50. Despite these efforts, mobile sports consumption will remain a niche product, Pressetext.ch notes in its report. For the majority of users, watching a complete game on a cell phone screen is only a "last resort".

 Euro 08 in Switzerland and Austria may already be dominating the media, but the slogan and mascots of the upcoming European Football Championship are not yet widely known: "Trix & Flix" are familiar to around one in four Austrians, but only three percent can spontaneously name the mascots. Just under one in ten respondents guessed the cartoon characters "Fix & Foxi" or Wilhelm Busch's rascals "Max & Moritz". The losers of the Internet poll, "Flitz & Blitz" and "Zagi & Zigi", were also thought to be the mascots of Euro 2008. According to Pressetext.at, this was the result of a telephone survey conducted by market researcher Makam Market Research. One in ten Austrians identified the slogan "Experience emotions" as that of the 2008 European Football Championship, while one in four respondents confused the official advertising slogan of the 2008 European Championship with that of the 2006 World Cup "Visiting friends". "Taking part is everything" and "We are Europe" were each mentioned by one in five Austrians.

 Due to its rapid growth, online advertising is expected to have overtaken print advertising in terms of advertising volume by 2011. These are the latest forecasts from Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS) for the US market. According to the VSS study (see ), the online advertising sector is expected to grow by 21 percent annually and reach a volume of 62 billion dollars by 2011. By contrast, only 60 billion dollars are predicted for the newspaper sector. Similar forecasts have already been made for the UK and Sweden this year. "I think this thesis is a bit bold. It won't be very long until 2011, so I don't necessarily believe in this forecast despite the accelerated growth in the online sector," says Peter Drössler, Chairman of the Austrian Advertising Association, countering the study in an interview with the news portal Pressetext.ch. In the longer term, the boundaries between the individual advertising media will become increasingly blurred anyway. Due to digitalization and cross-media business models, the current separation could therefore become obsolete sooner or later.

 In view of the increasing PR pressure from politics and business in the media, this year's Herzberg Conference is looking for suitable ways and means of maintaining quality in journalism. In line with the title of the event: "Journalism on the drip of authorities, public relations officers and PR. Does quality fall by the wayside?", speakers include René Grossenbacher, Managing Director of Publicom, Sacha Wigdorovits, who will soon be launching .ch, Ueli Scheidegger, Head of the Canton of Berne's Office for Information, and several journalists, including Weltwoche editor Urs Paul Engeler. The conference will take place on November 7, 2007 at the BaZ City Forum in Basel and will last from 9.45 am to 4.30 pm.

 Publisher Rolf-Peter Zehnder is launching a new weekly newspaper, the Uster Rundschau, in the Uster and Wetzikon area from September. The free newspaper will have a circulation of 44,484 copies, according to a press release issued on Wednesday. According to SDA, a total of eight new jobs will be created for this purpose. Three people will be responsible for the editorial section and five for advertising sales. According to the media data, distribution will be handled by Swiss Post. The Uster Rundschau is printed at Zehnder Verlag's printing center in Wil/Rickenbach and is the publishing house's 22nd weekly newspaper. As Rolf-Peter Zehnder writes in a communiqué, the launch of Uster Rundschau is a reaction to Tamedia's decision to discontinue the weekly newspaper Uster Nachrichten in June (see
). The latter newspaper was founded 26 years ago by Zehnder himself, but changed hands several times over the years and eventually became part of Tamedia. Rolf-Peter Zehnder is the publisher of Zuger Woche, Züri Rundschau and Züri Nachrichten. He handed over the remaining titles of the publishing house to his son Andreas a year and a half ago (see
).

 According to an annual study conducted in the USA, media usage per person decreased by 0.5 percent last year. It now stands at 3,530 hours. According to a survey conducted by Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS), this decline is hardly due to a reduced interest in media, but rather to changes in consumer behavior. Due to the high demand for quick information and short news reports, media consumption is shifting more and more from print media to online publications. There, a much more targeted and therefore less time-consuming supply of information is taking place. The advertising market is also reacting to these developments: according to a VSS forecast, the Internet is set to overtake traditional newspapers as the largest advertising medium in 2011.

 The Basel-based Oswald Siegfried Advertising Agency (OSW) has a new employee to support Managing Director Nadine Siegfried. Miriam Gramelsbacher will support the Managing Director in the areas of organization, strategy and customer care. She studied business administration, specializing in marketing and corporate communications. The young advertising agency with national clients such as Feldschlösschen, Manor, Büro Fürrer and Serimo now has four permanent employees. It also plans to grow prudently in the future.

 The Elternsein Foundation, publisher of the parents' magazine Fritz+Fränzi, is ending its collaboration with the Feldmeilen-based company Kretz, which was previously responsible for advertising, on August 8. The Zurich-based company Pauletto is now exclusively in charge of advertising. Daniel Pauletto and his team have been working successfully in the media business for many years. Pauletto was head of advertising for the Sonntagszeitung for over seven years. Most recently, he held the position of national cinema sales manager at Cinecom.

 It is not only in Switzerland that alternative television offerings are struggling with serious growth difficulties. Internet television, launched with great fanfare by German Telekom a year ago, is also lagging far behind expectations in terms of customer numbers. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on Wednesday, Telekom boss René Obermann now expects only 100,000 to 200,000 customers by the end of the year instead of the originally hoped-for figure of one million. The company had started too early, Telekom managers have now admitted. In addition, technical problems with the expansion of the high-speed VDSL network had made the launch more difficult, and the offer is now to be relaunched for the International Consumer Electronics Fair (IFA).
A special "Entertain Comfort VDSL" subscription, which includes a flat rate for telephone, surfing and television for just under sixty euros per month, is intended to create a new incentive. The showpiece of the program is the Bundesliga football matches. However, if you want to watch them, you have to pay an additional ten euros. The broadcasting rights cost the broadcaster a good 50 million euros per season.

 The German media group Axel Springer published its half-year financial report on Wednesday. According to the report, the company increased its sales in the first half of 2007 by 3.1 percent to 1208.5 million euros (compared to 1172.7 million in the previous year). This growth was primarily driven by the Group's international activities. International sales increased by 25.9 percent to EUR 233.9 million (previous year: EUR 185.8 million) and reached a new high with a 19.4 percent share of consolidated sales. As CEO Mathias Döpfner explained, Springer has thus made very good progress on its way to becoming one of Europe's leading multimedia-integrated print, online and TV companies. "We have driven forward the digitization of our business with carefully prepared acquisitions and considerable investments in existing activities," he emphasized. Pro-forma revenues from existing and acquired online businesses even increased by 50 percent to around 102 million euros.
According to the press release, the Zurich-based Jean Frey Verlag, publisher of Bilanz and Beobachter, which Springer took over last year, also contributed to the growth in sales.

 From October 14 to 19, 2007, the Golden Drum advertising festival will take place in Portoroz, Slovenia. Workshops, seminars and exhibitions will be held over the five days, with evening events rounding off the program. Around 1,800 delegates from Southern and Eastern Europe are expected to attend. The festival ends with a grand awards ceremony on October 19. The Golden Drum New Europe Competition is open to agencies from Central and Eastern Europe, while the Golden Drum Open Competition is open to agencies from all over the world. The following categories are available for the latter competition: Design & Art Direction, Interactive, Media Campaigns, Film & TV Promo, Advertising Campaigns, Open Ad TV, Open Ad Print and Open Ad Web Design. Entries must have been published for the first time between January 1, 2006 and September 9, 2007. The deadline for these two competitions is September 10, 2007.
There are also other competitions: the Portorož Piran Advertising Awards, the Corbis Photography Award, the Prologue and the Western European ICAC Pre-Selection (see
). Entries for these awards must be submitted by August 31, 2007. The Corbis Award for Creative Photography is organized by Corbis, which is represented in Switzerland by the Ringier subsidiary Specter. The competition rewards the creative use of photos in advertising with 5,000 euros. The following categories are on offer: Print, Online, Promotion, Direct Mailing, Packaging and Outdoor. Every European agency and every photographer is eligible to take part. The work may or may not have been published. The prerequisite is that they were created in 2006 or 2007. The shortlist of the award will be exhibited in the Minorit Monastery in Piran (neighboring Portoroz).

 Swiss Television is taking stock of the "Pfyn Pile Dwellers - Stone Age Live" program, which ran from July 25 to August 21, 2007. The first ten broadcasts were watched by an average of 486,000 people, which corresponds to a market share of 50.9 percent. The second broadcasts of the episodes on SF info were watched by an average of 81,000 people. At peak times, up to 10,000 users per day visited the show's website. The webcam with live images from the pile-dwelling village has been viewed 44,000 times so far. The scene of the program cannot be visited. SF has therefore set up an information center in the "Trotte" in Pfyn - with a live webcam, information about the project, a small archaeological exhibition and an online game. The information center is visited by up to 800 people every day. SF expects around 10,000 visitors by the end of the project on August 21, 2007.