The Swiss Direct Marketing Association honored advertising agencies for their performance for the ninth time. The Spillmann Felser Leo Burnett agency in particular came away with seven awards. The Swiss Dialog Marketing Award 2007 was presented on Friday. As can be seen from Monday's press release, motivational coach Sigi Möhre and co-host Susanne Kunz presented 6 gold, 8 silver and 12 bronze awards to 15 agencies.
In addition to the SFLB agency with its seven awards, OgilvyOne and the Publicis agency Fisch Meier Direkt were also richly rewarded with three awards each. This year's SDV Innovation Award went to Simplex, which took gold for its Turbo Mailer. The Audience Award went to Euro RSCG for their campaign with Riposa.
The Dialog Marketing Award is organized by the Swiss Direct Marketing Association (SVD). In addition to an entry fee, the agencies undertake to pay a contribution of CHF 600 towards the litho and printing costs for the award publication if they win an award.

 The search engine trio Google, Yahoo and Microsoft - GYM for short - is a bloodsucker of traditional print media companies. This is the impression you get if you believe the account of Michael Hack, manager for the Central European region of the Norwegian software company Fast. "It's perverse, because Google doesn't produce anything of its own, but profits from the work of others and makes a very good living from it," said Hack in an interview with Pressetext. While Google is growing rapidly, the turnover of traditional media companies is declining, he said, explaining the imbalance in the online market. Fast operated the search engine Alltheweb until 2001 and today develops the software Fastmedia, which is used by many media companies, such as the Financial Times Verlag. Fast's search solutions enable smaller companies to become independent of Google and its AdSense advertising program. According to a Fast representative, the large search engines have broken the relationship between media companies and advertising customers. The software company now wants to help traditional media companies to respond to GYM, which is taking more and more market share, claiming the majority of online revenues for itself and growing at an above-average rate.
On the one hand, the newspapers' online sites benefit from Google, which directs traffic to their websites and thus generates additional advertising revenue. On the other hand, Google uses the content without authorization and without paying for it. Google itself describes its relationship with newspapers as a partnership and profitable for its media partners. With the AdSense program, Google helps its partners to generate billions in additional revenue. Google sees the problem more in the imbalance between Internet usage and revenue from online advertising. A Google spokesperson: "Media users spend 20 percent of their time on the Internet. However, the internet only has a small share in the distribution of advertising money among the media - in Austria, for example, only 2.5 percent compared to TV or print"

 It has not yet been decided whether the Basler Zeitung will also be published on Sundays in future. We will wait and see what the Mittelland Zeitung experiences, which will launch a seventh edition in mid-September. Matthias Hageman, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Basler Zeitung Medien, could not hide a certain skepticism as to whether a seventh edition would be successful in the market. Hagemann did not hide his skepticism. Reader research shows that the enthusiasm of subscribers to a daily newspaper to pay more for a seventh edition is limited, he told SDA. The concept is apparently in the drawer. If the Mittelland Zeitung (MZ) is successful with its model, the BaZ could quickly follow suit. If this is not the case, BMG has other projects in the pipeline.

 iPods are potentially dangerous for pacemakers. This is shown by an initial series of tests on around 100 US patients. In 50 percent of the cases, electrical interference with the implemented pacemaker could be detected when the iPod was held over the chest for a few seconds. In isolated cases, the iPod produced interfering signals even at a distance of 40 centimeters, resulting in incorrect reading of the heart signals. Fortunately, according to the 17-year-old initiator of the study, most pacemaker patients are not iPod users. Vienna also gave the all-clear: According to university professor Harald Gabriel, the risk of a pacemaker being completely put out of action by an electronic device was close to zero. According to Gabriel, general technological progress has not stopped at pacemakers. These are now far less susceptible and will switch to an emergency program in the event of a corresponding interference signal. Nevertheless, the following safety measures are indicated: As a guideline for the safe placement of an electronic device in the vicinity of one's own body, physicians give around 20 to 30 centimeters. According to the recommendation of the German Heart Foundation, electrical devices such as MP3 players, as well as cordless and cell phones, can be used without hesitation. The rule for cell phones is that they should not be worn on the pacemaker side and should be used on the side away from the pacemaker when making and switching on calls.

 One way or another, Switzerland will not miss out on the Eurovision Song Contest: The song contest will continue to be marketed from Switzerland in the coming years. Lucerne-based Team Marketing and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) have extended their cooperation until 2012, as the parties announced on Saturday. Previously, a TV station from the organizing country had been responsible for marketing. Team is a subsidiary of the Pfäffikon-based media company Highlight Communications and also markets the UEFA Champions League. According to its own information, the company employs around 110 people in Lucerne.

 Last September, Matter & Gretener won an agency evaluation to revamp the overall image of Good Energies, an investment company specializing in sustainability investments with offices in Amsterdam, Jersey, New York, Toronto, Washington DC and Zug. The first project has now been completed: the development of a visual identity that clearly reflects the complex structure of Good Energies by integrating the Good Energies word mark into a consistent system of word mark, figurative mark and sub-brands. With its new image, Good Energies remains unmistakable in the investment company sector and "re-signs" its principles of ecological, social and corporate responsibility.

 The pointing finger is getting heavier: European surfers react on average to two out of every thousand banners they see. The overall European click rate in the first quarter of 2007 is 0.18 percent, the lowest it has ever been. These are the findings of a study published last Thursday by the German marketing company Adtech.  
"From our regular advertising analyses, we know that click rates develop cyclically. They collapse at the beginning of the year, but rise with the temperatures and remain stable until the end of the year," says Dirk Freytag, CEO of Adtech, interpreting the figures. The overall negative trend is nothing new; the average click-through rate in Europe is falling slightly year on year. "Users have become increasingly accustomed to online advertising," says Freytag, explaining the declining figures. New formats such as video ads are needed to generate attention and clicks. Layers and leaderboards, on the other hand, score with a high recall effect beyond the web.
 
There are clear differences in click behavior between the banner formats and the European countries. Most clicks are on video ads (4.6%) and pop-ups and layers (0.6%). Users click on the traditional full-size banner (0.2 percent) more frequently than large advertising spaces such as skyscrapers (0.11 and 0.15 percent) and leaderboards (0.12 percent). The most avid clickers in Europe are in France and Italy. Their click rates of 0.24 and 0.23 percent are twice as high as those of the Danes and Finns (0.1 percent each).

 The TV stations and their marketers - Publisuisse, Cinecom, IP Multimedia and IP Radiotele - supply advertising data to Media Focus free of charge. The company processes this data and converts some of it - and then sells it at a high price to the advertising clients. There is now resentment in the industry against this practice. According to a press release issued by the Swiss Advertising Client Association (SWA), it has commissioned the consulting firm Media Audit to investigate the situation. This has now revealed that the data supplied by Media Focus is not only expensive, but also inaccurate, as it is based on planning data rather than actual broadcast data. This can result in differences of over 30 percent in the evaluation of the stations' target group and performance figures, which further relativizes the value of the data, at least for more precise analyses.
 
The SWA, whose members account for a good 70 percent of Swiss advertising expenditure, has now approached Media Focus - with the support of the marketers - with a list of demands. The demands include a price reduction and the establishment of a control board to oversee binding conventions and guidelines for all TV advertising data in Switzerland. Further details on the problems with the collection of relevant TV media data and the SWA's demands can be found on the SWA homepage.

 Now that's some really good news: According to a survey by the U.S. magazine Forbes, a majority of Americans are tired of the almost daily reports about party girls Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. Seventy percent think the two women take up too much space in the media.  
Yet media consumers are even more fed up with the relentless coverage of Spears than with that of hotel heiress Hilton: While 72 percent of those surveyed can’t stand Britney anymore, the figure for Hilton is 68 percent. Among the biggest nuisances were also Spears‘ ex-partner Federline, actor Tom Cruise, Lindsey Lohan, and Nicole Richie, daughter of crooner Lionel Richie. Michael Jackson and Donald Trump also made it into this inglorious top ten.

 The social networking portal Facebook is launching its own advertising marketplace, making it a competitor to traditional advertising papers and newspapers. From Friday, the 22 million active Facebook users will be able to place ads online for free via Facebook. The new service is being watched closely by other portals with free advertising markets such as Monster or Craiglist.  
The Facebook marketplace is divided into four sections: Living, Jobs, Selling and Other. Buyers can get an idea of the seller by seeing how they are linked to them. Facebook founder Zuckerberg assured the New York Times that there are no anonymous ads. The site shows the exact path, so can assess whether a person is trustworthy. The combination of social networking sites and advertisements is in vogue: MySpace and Friendster also offer similar services. The German equivalent of Facebook, StudiVZ, is also considering this approach, as confirmed by Pressetext.

 The Zurich-based advertising agency Walker was nominated for five awards at the globally renowned American One Show Awards. Yesterday, the advertising agency, which claims to be the smallest in the world, won two silver awards for its work for Anmesty International. According to the project manager of the One Show Awards, Tiffany Edwards, the Walker advertising agency has already been nicknamed the "Swiss Pocket Agency" on the international advertising scene - in reference to the Swiss Army Knife. As this new award shows, the Swiss miniature agency has the advertising world in the bag with its creative ideas. It has won two awards for its campaign for Amnesty International. By way of (size) comparison: a total of four Pencils went to England this year and a total of two to Germany.

  Basler Zeitung Medien (BZM) is going it alone: from January 1, 2008, advertising sales for all BZM titles will no longer be handled by Publicitas, but by the media company itself, which is setting up its own department for this purpose. BZM and PubliGroupe are thus reacting to the changed market conditions in north-western Switzerland. The change will clarify the relationship between the leading newspaper publishers in the greater Basel area, as BZM announced on Friday. Publicitas had previously been responsible for advertising sales for all three competing titles in the region, Basler Zeitung (BaZ), Basellandschaftliche Zeitung and Mittelland Zeitung. This has led to conflicts of interest, as confirmed by Matthias Hagemann, Chairman of the Board of Directors of BZM, at the request of SDA.
market processing, there would have been fundamental differences of opinion.  
From 2008, advertising sales for BZM titles will therefore be handled by a new in-house department. It is hoped that this step will increase sales. The Basel newspaper market is highly competitive: the Basellandschaftliche Zeitung has been published in association with the Mittelland Zeitung since September 2006, but is journalistically independent. BaZ, which would have liked to integrate its only regional competitor itself, countered with an expanded regional section.
 
PubliGroupe, which holds a 37 percent stake in BZM, will remain a partner of Basler Zeitung Medien. Hans-Peter Rohner, CEO of PubliGroupe, said that it was "not a routine procedure" for a newspaper to withdraw from the magazine in terms of advertising sales. However, Publicitas will continue to place advertisements with BZM. Rohner estimates that in this role it could contribute around 50 percent of BaZ's advertising sales. Due to the new concept for market cultivation in Basel, Publicitas is gradually cutting around 20 jobs there. Some of the affected employees will be taken on by BZM.