Following an agency evaluation, the Swiss office chair manufacturer Giroflex has decided to partner with Spillmann/Felser/Leo Burnett.
Giroflex has commissioned Spillmann/Felser/Leo Burnett (SFLB) to handle its repositioning and the development of a visual identity. In addition, SFLB is to create various advertising concepts for the company’s global distribution channels. The first results will be unveiled in the summer of 2007.

Internet With the purchase of the online portal Zanox, PubliGroupe discovers the virtual distribution channel. The future lies on the Internet. This has been made clear by the takeover news in recent weeks. PubliGroupe caused quite a stir in the media. Together with Axel Springer Verlag, the Lausanne-based company is buying the Berlin-based online marketing portal Zanox for 215 million euros. The acquisition is a commitment to the booming Internet business. The Swiss offline dinosaur wants to equip itself for the digital business of tomorrow.  
The trend: advertising investments will increase by 50 percent worldwide, according to a study by Google and the British industry association CBI. As sales from traditional media are dwindling every year, PubliGroupe is betting on the web. Which has its price. The acquisition of the portal is the most expensive purchase in the company's history to date.
 
"The acquisition will have an impact on all business areas," said PubliGroupe CEO Hans-Peter Rohner at the press conference. As the traditional value chains are being put to the test, the digital business must be systematically expanded. Rohner left open how the company intends to use Zanox's technologies. However, he was obviously impressed by the vision of the Berlin-based company. Their ambitious goal: "We want to monetize the Internet." The Zanox founders were self-confident at the press conference in the posh Mariott Hotel: "The vision has worked quite well to date." The company is growing by 100 percent every year. Money is mainly earned with affiliate marketing. Unlike marketers of banner advertising, Zanox works with a "success-based online marketing solution".
 
This can be compared with the classic agency model. For example, an advertiser places a link on a website (publisher) in order to sell its goods or services. Zanox assumes the role of intermediary between advertiser and publisher. The company brings the two parties together and handles the technical and commercial services. If a purchase is made, for example if the user follows a coded link, the publisher receives a commission from the advertiser and Zanox receives remuneration from the publisher. The principle works according to the same rules as when a sales representative sells a vacuum cleaner to a customer. The interesting thing about the online solution is that a bookseller only has to pay for a campaign or an advertisement if a purchase is made. This is not the case with banner campaigns.
 
Affiliate marketing is a promising concept. Hardly any other discipline is currently booming so strongly online. Zanox is still the only provider in 30 countries on all five continents. But the competition is not sleeping. The search engine giant Google is also entering the cost-per-action market. In addition to Zanox, other affiliate platforms such as TradeDoubler, ValueClick and Affilinet are also bringing a lot of movement to the market.
 
The purchase will open up an attractive market for PubliGroupe and Axel Springer Verlag. Germany is one of the leading e-commerce nations in Europe with a turnover of 15 billion euros. If the experts at Forrester Research have their way, this development will accelerate and grow disproportionately worldwide. This is why Zanox wants to increase its reach to publishers from 1 million to 50 million over the next few years. This will not be difficult with the PubliGroup network. The takeover will enable the Swiss media group to market 80,000 of its customers with the help of Zanox, which will translate into hard cash. However, the competition between Google and PubliGroupe will also be more exciting in the coming years. According to a growing number of reports, the search engine giant is planning to enter the offline business. Conversely, the Swiss media group operates the recently launched search platform local.ch.
 
Christian Lüscher

 One man's sorrow is another man's joy: the publishing groups Handelszeitung and Jean Frey, which belong to the Axel Springer Group, are taking over the entire subscriber base of the weekly business newspaper Cash from Ringier. The German Axel Springer is thus further expanding the market position of its Swiss business titles Handelszeitung, Bilanz and Stocks.  
The anticipated discontinuation of the print edition of Cash at the end of June will bring unexpected growth to the other Swiss business publications. From July, the 43,000 Cash subscribers can choose to receive either the weekly Handelszeitung (circulation: 30,776 copies), the bi-weekly Bilanz (circulation: 38,100 copies) or the fortnightly investor magazine Stocks (circulation: 18,250 copies). According to Axel Springer-Verlag, existing Cash subscribers will receive the magazine for the entire paid subscription period at no additional cost. Ralph Büchi, Chairman of the Group Management Handelszeitung and Jean Frey, is convinced that this step will significantly improve the market position of the three business publications: "We expect very positive effects on both the reader and advertising markets."

Amuse Bouches Reinhold calls for Annemarie Wildeisen's cooking magazine: "Men to the stove". Reinhold is already in his fourth year of advertising Annemarie Wildeisen's cooking magazine. The flagship of AZ Fachverlage now has a circulation of 100,000 per month. Among its readership of 316,000, 30 percent are men. Some of them are certainly worthy hat wearers. However, a majority of interest to the medium can be found in the "newcomers" category. And it is through this promising group that Reinhold now wants to get even more gourmets interested in cooking and the magazine of the same name. The magazine already contains the new "Cooking for beginners" section as a tool for this. In the advertising, this tool is presented as a signet that is somewhere between a hammer and a wooden spoon. The matching campaign has the claim: "Men to the stove".  
The campaign not only works with witty motifs that take the topic of "men and cooking" and turn it into a slightly sexist joke. The upbeat advertising idea is also supported by the campaign: Annemarie Wildeisen is looking for the worst cook in Switzerland. For Reinhold Weber and consultant Marco Schönenberger, this idea is a strategy to use the man as an advertising figure to attract women as subscribers.
 
The campaign launched this week is intended to bring celebrity chef Annemarie Wildeisen to the fore as editor-in-chief of the magazine. Although, unlike Betty Bossi, she actually exists and cooks all the recipes herself, Wildeisen is only to be included in the advertising as a reliable name and less as a visible figure.
 
Reactions desired Weber is convinced that men's inability to cook as the subject of a campaign "will certainly lead to reactions". It is hoped that men will feel offended by this statement. That would be entirely in the interests of the cause. So far, Reinhold's direct advertising for cooking has generated a response rate of almost five percent. In an industry where one percent is already considered very good, "all potential addresses have probably been sucked dry", which is why they wanted to look for a new twist.
 
Correspondence about the competition for the worst chef can be found at www.maenner-an-den-herd.ch. You can also order a "starter subscription" here, as the trial subscriptions are called in this sophisticated campaign.
 
Andreas Panzeri

As the new Head of Consulting at Ruf Lanz, Michael Gassler wants to give creatives even more impetus to take off. It had to be a job in the media. Michael Gassler already knew that in secondary school. His boyhood dream was to be a sports reporter. His hobby at the time: match reports for FC Zurich, which he distributed to his colleagues. Later, the business school student played in a band in Ebnat-Kappel in Toggenburg. This brought him into contact with advertising for the first time. The son of a photographer, who also flirted with art school for a while, "but wasn't quite keen enough to make a living as an artist", designed flyers and posters for the concerts of his rock combo. The cover of a CD is also reminiscent of this time. "On the cusp of minor success", however, the band then broke up, "despite a record deal". What now?  
The current head of consulting at a top three agency fought his way through the phone book and sent 25 applications to the best addresses on the Zurich advertising scene. Some of them replied. But none responded positively. So the media man, who was still held back in the starting box, first earned a bit of money in customer service at a paint laboratory and then traveled to America for four months. On his return in 1985, his father placed a very small advertisement on his pillow. The newly founded Radio Wil was looking for "employees of all kinds". Gassler sat down on the edge of his bed, picked up his guitar and made a demo tape.
 
Shortly afterwards, he was the only permanently employed editor of the morning show, responsible music editor and roving reporter, before the newly hatched troupe of self-taught radio pioneers was "put in front of a writing professional". They resigned "collectively", and Gassler sought new fortune at St. Galler Verlags AG.
 
The challenge set him on the right path. Still "basically unemployed", he was given the opportunity to manage the marketing for several free newspapers, was given responsibility for his first advertising budget of CHF 60,000 and was encouraged to train as an advertising assistant. After graduating, he rewarded himself with a four-month French course in Paris. Then it should finally work out at a real advertising agency. But if you want to reach the top, you often have to take a little longer. The top agencies he approached showed no interest in Gassler. Instead, Zurich Insurance was experiencing a boom and had to expand its advertising department to 15 people. Gassler was allowed to lead a team of consultants and is still "very grateful" for this time. That was the era when the head of advertising, Rita Kopp, was "still completely unconventional for an insurance company" and focused on the most creative advertising possible. "That also gave me the virus for such ideas," Gassler believes. As an example, he remembers the "Relax" campaign by Wirz. Now very close to his goal on the client side, he trained as an advertising manager in 1994 and - "because five years in insurance was too monothematic" - switched to an agency for the first time at Zogg Kettiger Gasser. Peter Kettiger was President of BSW at the time, and the agency was responsible for Masterfoods' large budgets. Gassler found the environment at his new workplace correspondingly professional. "I learned a lot about marketing from Peter Kettiger and the people on the client side, who often came from universities and were also familiar with in-depth analyses from the USA." Controlling ideas were also part of the repertoire for the first time, with the aim of measuring the efficiency of advertising. "I'm interested in the big picture, not advertising as l'art pour l'art," says Gassler about his professional approach. However, he is "convinced that creative advertising sells better".
 
With this premise in mind, it was a good decision for Gassler to be introduced to Rolf Zimmermann from Advico by Christoph Bürge, with whom he worked as an advertising manager. Five years followed at AY&R, where the young up-and-comer Gassler suddenly found himself "at the same table as the stars of the industry". The creative environment spurred him on to "passionately devour" all the important books by international advertising greats. Gassler became more and more interested in strategy. Above all, he learned how only a creative consultant who thinks creatively can sell the work of copywriters and art directors to clients.
 
The new job at Ruf Lanz is not just "holding up cardboard at a presentation". The "Head of Consulting" introduced by Danielle Lanz and Markus Ruf in their creative boutique is intended to provide the outstanding creation with an equal consulting service. The new member of the Executive Board has spent the last four years as Managing Partner in the management team with Stefan Erhart and Dieter Hofmann at Exxtra Kommunikation, gaining the final tools for this highest responsibility in his career to date. "Exxtra was an important step in entrusting me with this role and seeing it as a challenge to reposition the consultancy within Ruf Lanz." In 2006, Gassler also completed an Executive MBA in Marketing at the Zurich School of Economics.
 
He had previously known Markus Ruf and Danielle Lanz "from their campaigns, of course, but not personally". With his background and "creative idea of advertising", Gassler finds it the right happy ending that he has now landed with these two. The topic of "independence and passion as a control for the mission" instead of dependence on a group and external profit expectations had also been on his mind for a long time. However, he wanted partners with similarly high standards. At Ruf Lanz, Gassler is now to "expand consulting with regard to larger clients" and also give more weight to integrated communication and cross-media "without changing the creative positioning of the agency".
 
Michael Gassler is married to a Turkish woman, plays football for FC Witikon and prefers to drink beer with his teammates rather than champagne at an advertising party. "I think it's important in this industry to stay as grounded as possible."
 
Andreas Panzeri

Apple wants to bring YouTube content into the living room. From mid-June, videos can be streamed directly from YouTube wirelessly via Apple TV and watched on the widescreen TV.
According to Wednesday's press release, Apple TV users will be able to browse, find and watch YouTube videos directly on their TV. When Apple TV launches in mid-June, thousands of the latest and most popular YouTube videos will be available. In addition, YouTube will add more videos every week and it is expected that the full YouTube offering will be available for Apple TV in the fall. Apple has also announced that it will offer a new configuration of Apple TV with a 160GB hard drive. The larger hard disk offers four times the storage capacity and costs 579 francs (the 40GB version costs 429 francs).
Apple TV is ideally compatible with iTunes and offers a convenient way to wirelessly play your favorite movies, TV shows, music, photos and podcasts from iTunes from your PC or Mac on your widescreen TV. Apple TV requires a widescreen TV set and a WLAN network so that it can automatically synchronize with the computer.

The Mediapulse Foundation Board has appointed a new Board of Directors. In addition to Chairman Marco de Stoppani, six new members have been elected to the BoardAfter the resignation of the Chairman of the Mediapulse Board of Directors, Walter Rüegg, it was decided that the Chairman of the Foundation, Marco de Stoppani, should take over the office. It was also decided that the Board of Trustees would have to elect six new Board members at the end of May. Their names are now known. According to Thursday's press release, the new Mediapulse Board of Directors consists exclusively of men: Walter Rüegg (SR DRS), Martin Schneider (Publisuisse), Filippo Lombardi (Telesuisse), Martin Muerner (VSP), Klaus Kappeler (Goldbach Group) and Jürg Siegrist (SWA).

Bier Numéro 10 in Bern has created a buzz campaign for Cardinal Bier with a small budget and a big impact. "We live in a time when we are all overwhelmed with too much information. That's why advertising has to look for new ways to still reach its target audience." Gilles Aeby from Numéro 10 has written this realization, which is becoming more and more true every day, thickly in his strategy book. The agency for branding and communication in Bremgarten, Bern, has been specializing in dynamic communication and, above all, buzz marketing, in addition to classic advertising, for some time now.  
"Buzz" can be translated as "rumor". Buzz usually works in combination with the three other "dynamic" campaigns guerrilla advertising, blogs and viral marketing.
 
The Numéro 10 campaign for the launch of the new Cardinal wheat beer is a buzz campaign that is currently causing quite a stir in French-speaking Switzerland despite a small budget. This anniversary beer for the 850th birthday of the city of Fribourg is brewed with selected wheat from the Fribourg region. During the teaser phase of the campaign, the agency ran several small advertisements in the local newspapers for three weeks featuring Dominique de Buman, a well-known member of the National Council and former city administrator in Fribourg, without comment but with an ear of wheat in his mouth. "What's the point?" the public had to ask. Of course, a link was soon made between wheat and beer. However, as Mr. de Buman is a highly respected personality who nobody would trust with a sideline advertising appearance, the first speculative articles with possible explanations soon appeared. The blogger scene naturally also had its own thoughts. "The rumor mill was churning," Aeby rejoiced when the newspaper Le Matin published a notice accusing politician Buman of unsuitable advertising business.
 
It was only on the day before the launch of the new beer that the agency revealed the secret at a media conference attended by twelve journalists. Mr. de Buman is an official member of the city's anniversary committee and has therefore allowed himself to be involved in the traditional Fribourg brewery's anniversary beer. All the media in French-speaking Switzerland subsequently reported extensively on this campaign. The French television station TSR even devoted a lengthy report to the subject.
 
In parallel to these media reports, Numéro 10 presented the new product in advertisements in which Dominique de Buman personally explained the background to this limited-time beer.
 
Andreas Panzeri
 
 
 
A city in the throes of victory  
The dynamic possibilities of communication
Numéro 10 also played around the victory celebrations of the Benetton Fribourg Olympic Basketball Club. When this club won the Swiss Cup, the aim was to publicize the event to a wide section of the population.  
In a guerrilla action
Numéro 10 covered important street signs with the names of the basketball players on the Monday after the cup win. The monument to Père Girard was covered with a club jersey, and such jerseys were also hung on washing lines above the streets. It was all illegal, of course, but nevertheless caused a sympathetic stir among the population. (pan)

 Following the billion-dollar wave of US acquisitions in the online sector, Europe is following suit: CBS Corporation is buying the social community site Last.fm for around 300 million dollars. CBS Corporation has thus made the largest Web. 2.0 investment on the old continent. CBS intends to increase its online reach with the acquisition.  
With over 20 million users in more than 230 countries, Last.fm is the largest social community for music. CBS is correspondingly euphoric: "Last.fm's management has an excellent understanding of how to maintain a balance between growth, a committed community and the potential for monetization." It has been agreed that the founders of Last.fm, German Felix Miller, Austrian Martin Stiksel and Englishman Richard Jones, will continue to manage the network. According to the press portal, the partners share the vision of intelligent, personalized media offerings and social networking. Felix Miller: "Together, we will offer people a new way of consuming media in the areas of news, sport and entertainment."
 
Last.fm has been bringing listeners, artists and music together since 2002. Users can listen to their favorite music on their iPods, itunes, winamp and 50 other players and "scrobble" with the Last.fm software: With the help of their own song collection, a personal music profile is created, which contains their own charts, individualized radio stations, music and concert recommendations. Based on these user profiles, Last.fm also searches for like-minded people and offers its users the opportunity to add friends and create groups in which users with similar musical interests can come together.

Maps Map Link is advertised by the agency Hochspannung in the manner of Tells. To promote the Map Link advertising platform from search.ch, the Swiss search engine commissioned the advertising agency Hochspannung to develop a nationwide advertising campaign. The source of inspiration for the Zurich-based creatives was the red and white target that marks the locations of companies and stores on the map.search.ch Internet portal.  
The paid ads always appear when you search for something in the vicinity of the entry. This offer is aimed at SMEs that want to draw attention to themselves. To ensure that the message gets across visually straight away, the eye-catching targets have been staged in the real world in an appropriately large format, which traditional militarists will presumably only accept in the advertisements. The subjects have been in use throughout the country since the beginning of May.
 
Christian Lüscher

Posters II The APG branch in Aarau wants to open up another dimension of perception to the conventional poster. As part of an Affichage innovation project, the subsidiary of outdoor advertising specialist Allgemeine Plakatgesellschaft (APG) is currently targeting another sense in addition to our eyes: the sense of smell. At ten selected locations in Aarau and also in Zurich railroad stations, "scented posters" are currently being used to investigate the acceptance of these actively or passively scented advertising media.  
The pilot trial, which started on May 21, is the result of a partnership with and initiative by Vifor, a member of the Galencia Group. The acceptance of the Vifor product Perskindol is therefore being tested. "This gel, which is used for muscle and joint complaints, is probably familiar to all sports enthusiasts - as is its smell," explains Alexandra Schär, responsible for marketing at Vifor. She adds that this move is linked, among other things, to the amended Medicinal Products Act, which now prohibits the distribution of product samples as in the past: "Outdoor advertising and now the test of the scented posters are part of a strategy adapted to these changed conditions."
 
Two techniques - one fragrance Overall, the Affichage would like to offer two variants, should the currently launched project ever develop into a permanent product. On the one hand, a more classic approach: when passers-by rub on preferably marked or highlighted areas on the poster, the poster emits the fragrance intended by the client. Hutter Werbeproduktion AG in Wohlen, a company familiar with poster printing, is responsible for applying the fragrance to the otherwise completely normal posters and has acquired special expertise in the production of this medium, also known as the scratch poster. The scent of a brand or product is applied or printed onto the subject using a concentrate infused in microbeads.
 
The second version relies on significantly more technology. A specially developed fragrance device, developed in collaboration with the University of Applied Sciences North-Eastern Switzerland as a further partner, is mounted on the poster panels and emits the desired or filled fragrance composition at defined intervals. "The device used in the pilot project can also look completely different later on or," says Bernhard Schnyder, Key Account Consultant at APG, "it can also be integrated into the poster frame."
 
Pilot test with an unclear outcome Schnyder, the project manager of the pilot project, is looking forward to the evaluations, which are also being carried out by the University of Applied Sciences North-Eastern Switzerland. He has high hopes for the project, but also knows that olfactory perception is still an under-researched area and that the project is therefore on uncertain ground.
 
Who knows, perhaps the UAS students are doing some groundwork here. They have been conducting market research since the first scented posters were put up on May 21. In a total of 300 face-to-face interviews, the acceptance of both the scratch-off posters and the posters with the scent apparatus is to be determined with the help of a structured questionnaire.
 
Those responsible at APG are still somewhat vague about the costs. While the surcharge for 100 scented posters is around CHF 4,000, Schnyder says that "more can only be said about the cost of installing and maintaining one or more scented boxes once the prototype has been evaluated".
 
For Bernhard Schnyder, much more important than the success of the project is the fact that the pilot project initiated by Affichage must not damage the poster's image under any circumstances. "If the results of the survey are not successful, we will simply stop the pilot project," explains Schnyder laconically.
 
That would be a shame. After all, if the scented posters are used carefully and sparingly, they are an enrichment in outdoor advertising. Which is of course purely a "matter of taste".
 
Jürgen Franck
 
 
The partners 
The initiator was a customer:
Vifor, a member of the Galencia Group, was looking for new ways to draw attention to its product Perskindol. The aim of the "multi-sensory marketing concept" is to anchor the gel more firmly in the minds of consumers.  
The project management
and the APG branch in Aarau was responsible for coordination. 
The scented posters were printed by
Hutter Werbeproduktion AG in Wohlen. There, a special printing process is used to apply the fragrance substances embedded in microbeads.  
Last but not least
the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland developed the scent apparatus in collaboration with APG and is currently still conducting the 300 surveys.  
To be collected,
how many passers-by noticed which of the two poster types and how much they liked the posters. The basic attitude towards scented posters is also determined. (jf)

Column Strong brands sometimes do good and change the world, but:Microsoft has fundamentally changed our world in recent decades: our working methods, our information, entertainment and communication behavior and, last but not least, our social coexistence. The brand has become one of the most valuable in the world. This brand success has made its founder the richest man in the world. This amassed wealth is now setting out to massively change the global landscape in the healthcare sector. And with tax breaks: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has become the most important and influential player in the world's healthcare sector - in terms of annual spending volume and in comparison with the World Health Organization, for example.  
In the Financial Times, Michael Schrage appropriately describes the current wave of foundations as epochal "tax-supported ambitions to change the world". He points out that these philanthropic institutions are spending their billions to change the work and outcomes of usually responsible public policy institutions. They no longer operate modestly and complementarily in the shadow of political institutions such as parties, parliaments, authorities, governments and international institutions. They are becoming their rivals and competitors. The Gates Foundation decides to a greater extent and with a more drastic effect than the United Nations, the body actually responsible for this, which diseases appear worth fighting worldwide. Schrage summarizes this succinctly as "philanthrophic imperialism" and correctly misses the corresponding democratic control mechanisms.
 
Historical observations make it clear that this altruistically driven desire for change goes back a long way and that foundations have always accompanied the development of the modern world in large waves. The institutions from the last of these large waves of foundations around the turn of the century before last - associated with names such as Ford, Carnegie and Guggenheim - are very present in the development of our current societies. Nevertheless, some aspects of the current wave of start-ups beyond historical continuities seem remarkable.
 
Political scientist Herfried Münkler reminds us that foundations can also be seen as a "dictate of the dead hand". Founders are traditionally attracted to the instrument of the foundation not only by the tax aspects, but above all by the fact that their will can be fixed as influential beyond their death. To put it this way, foundation activities can still be controlled by their founders from the afterlife.
 
This seems to be of secondary importance to Bill Gates. He explicitly points out time and again that he still wants to use the instrument to improve the world in this world. He believes in its creative power here and now. For him, the foundation is the way to use superior entrepreneurial action for more efficiency and more effectiveness to change the world right now. As head of the foundation, he places his creative potential above that of the company boss and, as the latter, is stepping down at a time not even close to retirement age.
 
As CEO, Bill Gates recognized and used the value-creating function of the brand. His name is associated with one of the most valuable brands in the world. Now he is using this created value to create one of the most important institutions of our time with his name. This is also how brands change the world.
 
Jürgen Häusler is CEO of the Interbrand, Zintzmeier and Lux Group in Zurich and an honorary professor at the University of Leipzig.