Piet Beyers, Marketing Director of the Geneva-based luxury group Richemont, is leaving the company. He will retire at the end of June and will then also step down as a member of the Executive Board. Beyers has held his position since 2000. The new Head of Marketing will be Anne Dellière, who has worked with Beyers since 2003. However, the native South African will not be replaced on the Executive Board, as Richemont announced on Monday.

With its Viomalt products, Wander is taking a steel-hard approach to iron deficiency. In order to publicize its natural remedies, Wander has enlisted the creative services of Startbahnwest to create new advertisements to promote Viomalt bottles. The products from Wander are available in four varieties. According to the press release, Viomalt Iron in particular should be advertised and made better known. The Zurich agency Startbahnwest has emphasized the naturalness of the product through the reduced visual language of the advertisements.
The first advertisement will appear in the upcoming Beauty & Lifestyle, a Coop magazine.

On Monday, Advertising Week received a media release titled "Unbelievable! Eavesdropping attack on J.-P. Love". The editors had a bad feeling: Are the prudish times back, when the dissolute sex life of a porn star was enough to be entered in a file by the State Security? But anyone who suspected a snooping operation in the style of the Fichen affair was quite wrong. The U1 TV station wires its long-haired presenter itself. For a fee of 50 centimes per minute and 1.50 francs per call, anyone can listen in on what Love is up to. The press release promises that you can participate in the life of the porn star around the clock: "J.-P. Love can be listened to 24 hours a day, whether he is on a porn shoot, drinking coffee with his mother or in a spicy situation with a playmate (or even playmates?)". And the joy isn't short-lived: "J.-P. Love is expected to be unable to have a private conversation for an entire year!" U1 TV hopes Love will provide a lot of talking points.
The popping mime has already made the press roar a few times in recent weeks. Namely because of his alleged scandal video with Baschi, the nation's favorite ex-casting show contestant. The only question is whether Love isn't already so much "yesterday's news" that it can't even bridge the awkward silence during the elevator ride with the boss.

The advertising agency Contexta, together with the University of Bern and Basler Versicherungen, is presenting the Advertising Talent Award for the first time. According to a press release from Contexta and the University of Bern, the best communication concepts from students at the Bern Institute of Marketing and Management can also be put into practice before graduation. Students from the Bern Institute of Marketing and Business Management have proven this. As part of the newly created Advertising Talent Award, they developed concepts to attract young target groups for Basler Versicherungen. The students worked as junior communication agencies.
Everyone benefits. The advertising agency Contexta can keep an eye on future advertising talent and be inspired by their ideas. Basler Versicherungen, for its part, can gain access to young target groups thanks to them. The students are given the opportunity to work under realistic agency conditions.
The winners of the Advertising Talent Award were honored for the first time on June 8. The jury consisted of senior executives from Contexta, Basler Versicherungen and the Institute for Marketing and Corporate Management at the University of Bern.

Switzerland is now advertising abroad with "Discover the Plus". In the new location marketing campaign, the Zurich agency Spillmann/Felser/Leo Burnett praises the diversity of the small country with the plus on its flag.Once the claim "Discover the Plus" had been defined, it was time to fill it with content. SFLB created various advertisements that can already be seen in Germany, England, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia and Spain. According to the press release, Switzerland is presented as an interesting location for international companies, as a diverse vacation destination, as a platform for research and education and as a safe and beautiful place to live. Values and characteristics that represent the modern and traditional Switzerland of the four cultures and which would make the country unique.
The advertisements present Switzerland at its best. From now on, Switzerland will advertise neutrality with cheering Swiss football fans, greatness with a microscope image, celebrity with Heidi and stability with the Matterhorn. From June 2007, the images will be used to promote Switzerland in the foreign press and on Switzerland.com. They can also be seen on the Swiss Cross roadshow, which visits the most important European cities.

The cross-media communications agency Maxomedia has secured the advertising mandate for Swissquote. Maxomedia prevailed against three competitors and will be responsible for all advertising measures of the online trader in the future. According to a media release, the agency impressed in the presentation with a selection of promotion and campaign proposals that use all advertising channels, can be deployed online and can be tailored to different target groups. The first work for the new client will be on display in July.

The Zurich-based agency Mitlinks handled the visual implementation of the corporate design for the website of the organic delicatessen Yanick + Fée. According to a press release from Mitlinks, the organic delicatessen Yanick + Fée had its website designed by the agency. On the Flash-based website, visitors can find information about the Swiss company, the brand, and its organic product line. The organic products will be available starting in September 2007 at upscale retail stores throughout the German-speaking region.

The campaign for Amnesty International is a hit. The Walker agency has not only won numerous awards for its work, but has now also been commissioned by AI Denmark with a corresponding adaptation. "Not here, but now" is the slogan on the effective posters designed by the Zurich-based Walker advertising agency on behalf of Amnesty International. The campaign resulted in a twenty-fold increase in visitors to the Amnesty website. It also caught the eye of the Danish campaign manager. As a result, she even commissioned Walker to adapt the campaign, according to a press release.
From July 25, the "Not here, but now" posters will make an impact in Denmark's five largest cities. Originally, Walker had staged scenes of torture in an urban, Swiss setting to draw the public's attention to the constant use of torture. For the Danish campaign, Federico Naef, who had already photographed the Swiss campaign, traveled as far as Scandinavia with his camera.
An adaptation for the American market is also currently being considered.

At the Best of Corporate Publishing 2007, the largest European competition for corporate communication, the agency Metadesign was nominated for the annual report of the Espace Media Group. Almost 600 works were submitted to the Best of Corporate Publishing 2007, more than ever before. According to the press release, the nominated project, which Metadesign created for the Espace Media Group, was an unusual, curious, yet publisher-appropriate annual report. The central idea is to present the special role that the publishing house and its media play in society in general and in the Swiss Plateau in particular.
Students from the Bern University of the Arts had explored this topic in a competition. The best designs were included in a special section of the annual report. In this way, the core theme of the publishing house, the handling of information, was critically examined and presented in a completely different way. It was an opportunity for the students to make their work accessible to a wide audience.
The winners of the Best of Corporate Publishing 2007 will be announced on June 27 at the congress "Print meets Digital: Corporate Publishing Media for the 21st Century" in Munich. A total of 27 awards will be presented in categories such as business-to-business, electronic publishing, print innovation and recycled paper.

The Winterthur-based broadcaster Radio Top is concluding a company agreement with the Swiss Syndicate of Media Professionals (SSM). This is the first collective labor agreement (CLA) in the private electronic media industry in Switzerland, the two contractual partners wrote in a communiqué on Monday. The CLA comes into force on January 1, 2008 and applies to around 45 employees of the broadcaster as well as interns and trainees. Among other things, it regulates the maximum duration of internships, the recording of working hours, stipulates minimum wages, remunerates journalists' copyright, guarantees a 13th month's salary as well as generous vacation and vacation arrangements.
The negotiations for the contract took two years. Last Thursday, the staff of the private radio station Top in Winterthur unanimously approved the contract. The Board of Directors of Radio Top followed suit on Friday.
Together with Radio Top, the SSM union wants to send a clear signal in favor of employees and take a stand against precarious working conditions in the private media industry. The agreement shows that it is possible to guarantee fair and just working conditions despite great economic pressure.
Unfortunately, precarious working conditions are on the rise in the media industry, the press release continues. There are major injustices, particularly in the area of internships and traineeships. According to the union, the agreement at Radio Top is intended as a signal that an active social partnership should be established in the private electronic media sector and that fair and respectful working conditions should be guaranteed for employees.

The research company Net-Metrix has published the data of the Net-Metrix-Profile study for the first time. The study allows the user profiles of individual websites to be described in detail. 44 websites or website combinations and 74 subcategories took part in the study. Bluewin, Search.ch, Blick Online, Sf.tv and 20minuten.ch are in the lead. The study measures so-called unique users. This value indicates how many people use a website in a given period. Bluewin recorded 1,782,000 unique users per month in the study period from October to December 2006. Search.ch came to 1,176,000 unique users. The third-placed website, Blick Online, recorded significantly fewer visitors with 548,000 unique users. Sf.tv reached 502,000 and 20minuten.ch 480,000 unique users. In sixth to tenth place are NZZ Online, Tagesanzeiger.ch, Tsr.ch, Espace.ch and Teletext.ch.
The data is based on a complete technical measurement and on survey data. This combination of different survey methods can achieve a new quality in terms of informative value and reliability of the published data, writes Net-Metrix in a communiqué. In addition, a range of target group information can be evaluated to describe the users of a specific website in detail. For this purpose, a total of 35 different categories on socio-demographics, Internet usage habits and subject interests are available. The comprehensive reach and target group information is intended to be useful to operators for marketing their websites and for strategic analyses of the positioning of their own website in the user market.
The Net-Metrix-Profile study incorporates the measurement data from the Net-Metrix-Audit web statistics as the basis for the new performance values. However, Net-Metrix-Audit does not collect the number of individual users, but rather the number of computers (unique clients) via which a website is accessed, as well as the number of visits to a website. The number of computers cannot be equated with the number of visitors. Therefore, Net-Metrix estimates the number of unique users based on the unique clients in a complex evaluation process. The measurement data is supplemented by survey data collected in an online survey and a telephone survey. By including the measurement data, it is possible to collect reliable reach data not only for websites, but also for thematic subcategories.
The Net-Metrix Profiles study is published twice a year. Data collection for the second wave of the study in 2007 will be completed at the end of June. The results of this second study wave will be published in fall 2007.

On Monday, the Net-Metrix-Profile study was published for the first time. It provides information on the number of visitors to the 44 websites surveyed and offers sociodemographic data on these users. The birth of this new form of Internet research, which emerged from the predecessor studies conducted by WEMF and SRG, was not entirely smooth. Website operators voiced criticism, among other things, regarding the costs of the comprehensive model comprising four modules. Now, however, progress seems to be being made with the individual research modules—at least as far as the two modules, Net-Metrix-Audit and –Profile, are concerned. As Christine Diemand, project manager for Net-Metrix Profile, told *Werbewoche*, more sites have already signed up for the second wave of the study than for the first. «We’re already breaking even with Net-Metrix Profile. Since more websites will be participating, we’ll be able to lower prices starting in 2008.»
One major player in the field of online advertising is missing from the study: Google. According to Diemand, the study focuses primarily on operators of traditional online advertising: «Google already has a great deal of information about the profiles of its own users and employs a different form of online marketing.» That is why the search engine is not included in Net-Metrix.
The Audit and Profile studies collect different types of data: Audit measures the number of computers and visits, while Profile tracks individual visitors. Net-Metrix has consistently emphasized that it is not possible to draw direct conclusions about individual users from the clients, i.e., the computers. Furthermore, the measurement statistics do not provide any target audience information about the website users. For this reason, two studies are necessary.
In both studies, however, the top five are very similar. According to Diemand, this can be explained by the fact that websites accessed by many computers usually also generate a large number of users. There are, however, some differences: While Sf.tv, ranked sixth in the Net-Metrix Audit, does not make it into the top five most-visited sites, the TV site ranks fourth in terms of monthly users.
«The number of users cannot be measured directly, unlike the number of computers. We estimate it based on data collected from the onsite survey regarding website users» Internet usage habits. The measured computers (clients) serve as the basis for determining the number of users. If a website is accessed primarily from a single location—for example, at home—the conversion process results in a higher user-to-client ratio than if a website is regularly used by its users from many different locations, resulting in more computers (clients) being counted per user,” explained Diemand.