Education The new distinctive sign stands out: A large yellow six attracts those interested in training to the new center on Zürcherstrasse. Here in Zurich Stettbach, new advertisers will find their professional maturity in the future. Sawi has seized the opportunity to create a modern and generously equipped competence center in the Zurich region. It will open in September. On four floors, Sawi intends to establish a pioneering institute for marketing, advertising, communication and sales. It will offer high-tech equipment that meets today's requirements. An independent foundation has been set up to finance the project. (pan)

Radio DRS Musigwälle is the most listened to Swiss folk music station. With a print campaign, they now want to visually evoke feelings of home. The advertising agency Spillmann Felser Leo Burnett has created musical images of home. Traditional photos were folded into Örgelis, the most popular instrument in Swiss folk music. Finally, the claim "Die Heimat im Radio" makes it clear that DRS Musigwälle is behind it. The campaign will appear in various Swiss print media in July 2007.

 Theiler Druck in Wollerau, publisher of the Höfner Volksblatt and the March-Anzeiger, is taking over the Richterswil printing plant as of August 31, 2007. Seven of the 15 employees at the Richterswil printing plant will lose their jobs. According to a press release from Theiler Druck, socially acceptable solutions will be sought on an individual basis.
The reason given for the takeover is that it would not make economic sense for Druckerei Richterswil to go it alone in the long term. Theiler takes over the customer base and the machinery. Production will continue in Wollerau.
Theiler Druck employs 55 people; the company is run by Philipp Theiler, the fourth generation of the family to do so.

Office Lexmark offers finishers for its color laser multifunction devices - and brings wireless LAN to inkjet printers. Things have been quiet around printer manufacturer Lexmark for a long time. Too quiet. The competition, above all HP and Kodak, has set the tone with low-cost ink offers and shaken up the printer market a little. Martin Kofler, Marketing and Sales Manager at Lexmark in Thalwil, said at a recent press conference that it was better to offer customers a good price for the printer.  
Simple WLAN connection To ensure that its inkjet printers remain successful, the US printer manufacturer is increasingly focusing on technology as well as attractive prices. The company has recognized the trend towards greater mobility and recently launched a whole range of wireless or WLAN printers on the market for the first time - "at affordable prices", as Product Manager Isabelle Hofmann from Lexmark Switzerland explained at the presentation of the new devices in mid-June. This addition was necessary, as Lexmark is not the first company to offer a wirelessly controllable printer. Apart from the very affordable entry-level prices - the cheapest WLAN device, the Z1420, is available for 129 francs - the new inkjet printers impress with their very simple connection to a WLAN-enabled PC or laptop.
 
In addition to the wireless printing and the resulting possible decentralized use of the device, the printing of photos with the all-in-one devices is particularly appealing. These can be used to first print out an index sheet of the images made accessible via the memory card, which can then be scanned in and the desired images selected in order to have the photos printed automatically. Thanks to the additional software supplied, it is also practical to print web content, which is simplified by a special toolbar in the browser. You can choose between "text print only" or "photo print only". This guarantees the printing of page content without annoying advertising. This WebToolBar extension alone should make the decision to purchase one of the three multifunctional devices or the two pure inkjet printers - as an already WLAN-capable or WLAN retrofittable variant - easier for many. The X9350 office inkjet printer gives users access to the new waterproof Evercolor2 inks, which are said to last for up to 100 years.
 
Expansions on the toner front Lexmark also had new products to announce in the toner segment. What is surprising here is the move towards complete solutions: Lexmark now also offers A3 printers with, for example, the X940e and X945e, which can also be used to create booklets thanks to a finisher. According to Frank Blickensdorfer, Market Manager Laser, a new toner should also lead to better printing results thanks to "rounder particles". Lexmark has also optimized the usability of the devices so that, for example, documents captured with the scan unit can be sent directly via e-mail, saved in a network directory or on a USB stick, sent as a fax or printed out directly as a copy. The company addresses the issue of document security by entering a PIN code on site at the device or with batches - so that documents are only printed when the creator/recipient of the document is at the device.
 
Jürgen Franck

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) is launching the NZZ Campus magazine for the first time on September 25. It will be enclosed with around 150,000 copies of the NZZ and will also be published in a special edition of 30,000 copies. The publishing house is distributing these at universities and further education institutes, but also at other places where students spend time, as NZZ Product Manager Andreas Häuptli told Werbewoche. NZZ Campus is aimed at students and graduates, but also at people with professional experience who are interested in further education. The magazine replaces the previous supplement "Studium und Karriere".
For the time being, the supplement will be published twice a year, at the beginning of each semester. However, Häuptli explained that Falkenstrasse is considering publishing the magazine more frequently. The German Uni-Spiegel, for example, would serve as a model here. However, nothing has been decided yet: "It depends on how the first issue is received by the target group and the advertising market". If the print edition of NZZ Campus is a success - as the online project already is, according to Häuptli - further projects are conceivable, such as a further expansion in the direction of print.
There will not be a separate editorial team for the supplement, but rather editors from the various NZZ publications will work on it. Jan Mühlethaler, who already coordinates the NZZ Campus online project, will be in charge. The bloggers who talk about their everyday lives on the online presence will also be involved: "Under the guidance of the editorial team, they will certainly contribute texts for the new supplement," said Häuptli.
In terms of content, the editorial team focuses on three areas: studying, the world of work and student life. "We are making a magazine for students, not for professors," said Häuptli. It reports on experiences with the Bologna reform, the situation of graduates, the "war for talent" on the job market and student life at home and abroad.
But how will NZZ Campus stand out in the flood of publications available at universities? By staying close to the parent newspaper, explained Häuptli. The supplement should be clearly "NZZ-like": "It will not be a nightlife magazine". The topics will be student-oriented, but there will also be space for the finer things in student life.
The magazine will be published in a format slightly larger than A4, namely 22 x 30 cm; it will have around 64 pages. "NZZ Campus will look different from the Folio, for example. In terms of layout, it will still be very tidy, but more spacious than the Folio or Magazin Z," says Häuptli.
Carole Scheidegger

SF archive It will take several months before Swiss Television can make its damaged program archive fully accessible to the public on the Internet again. Where and why the mess happened remains a mystery. Both SRG and Schweizer Fernsehen SF have been saying for weeks that it has not yet been possible to determine the cause of the defect. This much is known: Since mid-March, most of the freely accessible program archive of Swiss Television has no longer been available on its website sf.tv (WW 25/07, front page). The corresponding data, confirms SF multimedia boss Walter Bachmann, has been irrevocably damaged. This affects several thousand hours of SF productions prepared for online retrieval: seven years of "Tagesschau" and "Schweiz aktuell", six years of "Rundschau" and "Kassensturz" and more - all gone and goodbye. The raw recordings of the programs are not affected by the mega-breakdown.  
Challenge not overcome during move Rumor has it, and this has been confirmed by SRG employees who do not wish to be named here, that data was lost during the evacuation of the General Management building at Giaccomettistrasse 3 in Bern. The servers with SF's video data were located in the basement of the property. Because the high-rise building is currently being renovated, the hardware had to be stored in a temporary server room next door at Swissinfo. Something must have happened on the way between house numbers 3 and 1.
 
Those responsible had been aware for some time that the move would be a delicate operation. In Swissinfo's 2006 annual report on projects for the current year, the Head of Information Technology writes: "A major operational challenge is moving all systems from the previous data center to the new premises without noticeably interrupting the production systems."
 
Apparently they were not up to the challenge. There are no backup copies of the deleted data. The case is now being investigated by SRG's internal audit department. Its head, Martin Hirschi, did not wish to provide any information on request. Regardless of its findings, Swiss Television is now working to complete the limited archive offering again. To do this, the existing original data of the affected programs must be converted into a format that can be read by the Realplayer playback software.
 
Better quality in future The cost of this data preparation is limited both technically and financially. As SRG is currently having its entire stock of historical film material digitized anyway, the restoration of the defective SF data can be completed in one go with the major project (see box). But it won't be without additional costs. "The bottom line is that it costs more than if we hadn't had to do it," says Walter Bachmann, who is responsible at SF. However, he does not say what amounts are involved. It is also still unclear who will pay for it, as SF is demonstrably not responsible for the damage itself. As it stands, the accounts of Swissinfo will have to be debited.
 
But the loss of data also has a positive side. All those programs that are now being reprocessed for online use will be available to the interested public in better quality than before. However, it will still be a while before that happens. "If we can keep to the timetable, we'll be able to put the contributions back on air in the next six months or so," says Bachmann.
 
Nick Lüthi
 
 
 
The robot rattles in Ticino  
In seven years' time, all film material is to be
The entire content that SF, TSR and TSI, SRG's three regional language television companies, have produced over the last 50 years or so will be stored and available in digital form. Since March, thousands and thousands of beta videotapes, where the programs are recorded for backup, have been transferred in digital form to LTO magnetic tape mass storage in Comano at Ticino Television. An industrial robot helps to process the 200,000 hours of video material. The system was developed by a private company on behalf of SRG.  
In addition to facilitating the current TV production
- Television employees can access any sequence from the enormous pool of images more quickly - SRG also has plans to make the historical material available to the public. Exactly what form this will take, whether for a fee or free of charge, has not yet been decided. The political requirements, i.e. the licensing provisions, must also be taken into account in this context. "The draft of the new SRG concession explicitly provides for the possibility of a fee-based service," says Walter Bachmann, Head of SF Multimedia. (nil)

Column For the foreseeable future, Switzerland will remain an experimental laboratory for the media, which is also being closely observed in neighboring countries The Swiss media landscape is in such a state of flux that the publisher of Basler Zeitung, Matthias Hagemann, has diagnosed an "earthquake of magnitude 12": Tamedia took over the Espace Group at the end of May - and with it the two capital city papers Berner Zeitung and Bund. Shortly afterwards, Ringier sold its TV magazines to Springer and Bauer. Prior to the deal, the in-house tabloid Blick mobilized Swiss fears of German foreign infiltration in a veritable campaign - and the merger of Ringier with Springer had presumably already failed at an earlier stage not least because of such concerns.  
Recently, another major German media company, Der Spiegel, entered the small but apparently lucrative local print market - albeit only with a supplement about the supposed "world power Switzerland", which probably missed its target group: it gave readers in Hamburg rather than Zurich a "new" view of Switzerland. After all, the timing was favorable: Facts and Cash, the two most direct competitors for the North German invaders, had been discontinued a few days earlier.
 
In the greater Zurich area, the two local rivals, the publishing houses of Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Tamedia, are also fighting a fierce battle for the last remaining independent local papers, which they are absorbing one by one into their empires or fighting over with their own regional editions.
 
From an analytical perspective, two overlapping trends can be observed: On the one hand, Switzerland is being hit by an overdue concentration push in which foreign investors are also making their bargains: For example, while the fact that nine daily newspapers continue to be published in Berlin for 3.4 million people is already seen as unique newspaper diversity, dozens of titles are still printed every day for just under 4.8 million German-speaking Swiss.
 
On the other hand, consumers' willingness to pay for newspapers and magazines is clearly declining. A murderous fight for survival is therefore underway in the overcrowded segment of high-quality print products. Cash and Facts are the first victims, but circulation is also crumbling at other quality papers and many regional newspapers, and part of the advertising business is migrating to the Internet, never to be seen again.
 
In contrast, the free newspaper 20 Minuten has risen to become the most widely distributed newspaper in the country. It has just distributed 550,000 copies - the record to date. A lot of money is earned in this lowest market segment; in German-speaking Switzerland alone, around 120 million francs are generated in advertising money. This is why imitators have long been at work and further free projects are in the maturing phase. There is a danger that the major publishers will cannibalize their own higher-quality print media. A first example of this could already be the weekly newspaper Cash - although Ringier publishing manager Christoph Bauer, who is responsible for the launch of the free title Cash daily, vehemently denies this.
 
Only at first glance is it surprising that a country like Switzerland, which also tends to stand for solid high-price products in the media sector, has become a pioneer of free newspapers. The explanation for this is simple: while in Germany a defensive cartel of large publishers blocked free newspapers, Tamedia, the most aggressive player on the Swiss-German market, acquired the first Swiss free newspaper, occupied the market segment itself and expanded it at breathtaking speed.
 
It looks as if Switzerland will remain an experimental laboratory for the media industry for the foreseeable future, which will also be closely observed in neighboring countries. The next step, as media expert and former Tamedia manager Kurt W. Zimmermann has just recommended, will probably be to earn a lot of money with a free Sunday newspaper. There have already been two of these for a long time: Il Mattino and Il Caffè are published in Italian on the southern side of the Alps. However, the two fruits of the Ticino "lemon market" (see Advertising Week No. 24/2006) are not yet really perceived as successful models north of the main Alpine ridge.
 
Prof. Dr. Stephan Russ-Mohl heads the European Journalism Observatory at the University of Lugano.

Lifestyle George Clooney and Nespresso are back in the spotlight together. The film star plays the leading role in "George Who?", the new short film from Nespresso. The television premiere is in September. But Clooney fans can be doubly pleased. The Oscar winner is so enthusiastic about the brand that he wants to be an ambassador for the company until 2009.

 Fewer newsstand newspapers have been published in Switzerland in recent years. Their total circulation has also fallen. This is according to a publication released on Wednesday by the Federal Statistical Office (FSO). In 1939, 406 different titles were still being published in Switzerland. This number then fell continuously by around half. In 1950 the number fell below 400 and in 1980 below 300. 205 titles were still counted in 2006.
In 1939, the total circulation amounted to 2.05 million copies. This figure rose steadily thereafter, reaching a peak of 4.26 million in 1995. From the mid-1990s, there was a decline, particularly in the smaller titles. In 2006, the total circulation reached 3.70 million copies.
However, according to SDA, the FSO statistics do not include free and special interest titles. Instead, they include papers with comprehensive content that appear at least once a week under an independent name. Although not included in the statistics, the SFSO mentions the phenomenon of free newspapers in its commentary. This new genre has more than doubled its readership in the last six years.

Poster research The SWA speaks plainly and recommends APG's SPR+ research approach In its latest newsletter, the Swiss Advertising Association (SWA) recommends that its members "rely on the SPR+ service when planning and monitoring the success of their poster advertising". This support for the poster research system of outdoor advertiser APG is remarkable, especially as competitor Clear Channel Outdoor Plakanda (CCOP) has been pursuing a second approach called More for two years.  
SWA Director Jürg Siegrist is also aware of this. The SWA has "remained neutral for as long as possible", he writes. But now he has "run out of patience". The reason, according to Siegrist: CCOP CEO Beat Roeschlin is not keeping his promises.
 
Flashback: Exactly two years ago, CCOP withdrew from the poster research project Swiss Poster Research (SPR) conducted with APG - due to differences over the measurement method. Roeschlin announced the More approach instead. But Siegrist, who considers two research systems "an absurdity", mediated and brought the two teams back together on February 19, 2007. Four days later, according to Siegrist, Roeschlin wrote to APG CEO Christian Kauter that he would "shortly be submitting a detailed proposal" regarding a possible research collaboration. APG is still waiting for this, writes Siegrist. However, SPR is now fully functional, while More in the Zurich area is only in a trial phase. This means that the opportunity for cooperation has been lost, which is why the SWA is now recommending the SPR+ system.
 
However, Beat Roeschlin told Werbewoche that the SWA accusation was "fundamentally wrong". He had indeed met with Kauter in May. The discussion in the presence of Toni Jarvis, Head of International Research at Clear Channel, was "interesting", said Roeschlin.
 
Markus Knöpfli

Competition The readers of the industry magazine Media Trend Journal have once again chosen the winners of this year's Media Trend Awards. And Cinecom once again took first place. This comes after the Swiss marketing company for audiovisual media had already won the Media Trend Award in last year's competition. Cinecom was therefore delighted to win the title again. Cinecom is thanking its customers and partners for their trust with an advertisement in the Media Trend Journal. The thank-you advertisement was realized by CavegnWerbung. In it, Cinecom charmingly relegates its competitors to second and third place.

 The new media agency Mitlinks has developed an online marketing concept for the "children" segment for Toggenburg Tourism. Variants were developed and visualized to show how children from the age of 5 can be attracted to a vacation region at an early stage as "tourists of the future" and how they can be retained. The study concept includes virtual playgrounds and children's camps, interactive game ideas and measures for sustainable community building and networking for children.