In a new campaign, Contexta presents Graubünden's Calanda beer with unexpected challenges. At the center of the campaign is a freshly tapped Calanda, whose mountain suitability is demonstrated in surprising subjects. According to Contexta's press release, the campaign is intended to evoke associations with Graubünden and come across as fresh as the mountain spring water from which Calanda is brewed. The images can be seen as special formats in Blick, in various magazines and on posters.

P strategy Not only media agencies, but also publishers are grappling with PubliGroupe's new strategy. "All players in the value chain between advertising clients and media providers, i.e. advertising agencies, media agencies, intermediaries and marketers, must fundamentally rethink their roles." With these words, PubliGroupe CEO Hanspeter Rohner explained his new strategy on March 28. Publishers are also affected by this, as PubliGroupe has so far been clearly on their side in the value chain. This could change, but Christof Nietlispach, publisher of the Wohler Anzeiger (with a P lease), is hardly worried about this. "The new cross-media strategy won't change much for us, because print will continue to be the main source of sales in the local area," he says. Small businesses hardly have cross-media budgets. The only danger is that P will drift away more and more and neglect small publishers because of its own interests. "That's why we would prefer it to stay with print," says Nietlispach, who is one of the representatives of small publishers on the board of the Swiss Press Association.
It sounds a little different in Basel. Matthias Hagemann, publisher of Basler Zeitung, welcomes PubliGroupe's "new approach". Not so much because it is now focusing on cross-media, but "because the PubliPresse division, which is important for publishers, is in need of reform, which is now being tackled." On the other hand, he finds it "normal" that P wants to occupy new fields in the changing value chain. The "Alinghi effect" is just one example of the major changes: Large companies are relying on sponsorship commitments, which bring a lot of media presence but cause advertising budgets to shrink. The fact that PubliGroupe is trying to get into the consulting business, for example, suits his publishing house in that it is also looking for new areas of business.
"As a publisher, I expect PubliGroupe to position itself in such a way that it can optimally fulfill my marketing needs," says Daniel Hofer, Publishing Director of NZZ. He therefore sees the reorganization of P as an opportunity that could trigger a new dynamic and lead to an expansion of the range of services for all market partners.
The cautious attitude of the small publishers and the rather positive opinions of the large publishers seem to reflect the mood in the Swiss Press Association. This is confirmed by publisher president Hanspeter Lebrument: "The local, mostly print-based publishers regret that the P is no longer purely print-oriented, while the large multimedia media houses are in favor of at least parts of the new strategy." In addition, not only the P, but also the larger publishers, even those with P leases, are increasingly pushing into the consulting business, such as Basler Zeitung Medien, AZ Medien or his Südostschweiz media group. "There is currently a certain amount of disorder in this market, and we don't yet know what the new order will look like," he says. This will depend not least on the advertising clients.
Markus Knöpfli

 WEF President Klaus Schwab and Swiss tennis pro Roger Federer have been named by US news magazine Time to its list of the 100 most influential people.  
Side by side with Al Gore, Angela Merkel, Nobel Prize winner John Mather, Microsoft founder Paul Allen, but also Osama Bin Laden, there are also two Swiss on the list of those 100 men and women whose power, talent or moral example changes the world. The list is compiled annually by the U.S. news magazine Tim in cooperation with CNN. Each winner is honored by an equally, if not more, prominent writer in a short tribute.
 
About Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that they were actually in the same business: "We are people who organize global meetings. And yours were usually livelier than mine ... after all, you throw much the better parties than I do." The only tennis player ever to win all the Grand Slam titles in one year is Rod Laver. The latter praises our King Roger for his modesty, camaraderie and, of course, his tennis: "You can only marvel at that.

 
The world has been waiting for this: The future president of Zurich's municipal council, the Green Party's Christoph Hug, is launching his own blog. He is inviting citizens to engage in dialog, as he told SDA on Thursday. The website contains personal details of the council president, whose one-year term of office begins next Wednesday. He also talks about events that he has attended ex officio and provides regular outlooks and reviews of the upcoming and past council meetings. Now that's fun!

Creativity Coupon ads used to be the red rag for creative copywriters. In the meantime, many people have become aware of the purpose of such off-network yet interactive ads. The creatives therefore had to create a new enemy - and have apparently found it in the automotive market. Sometimes you really enjoy sitting on the streetcar when you have to see the latest posters for new cars from there. The latest creative work for Opel is an advertisement that immediately strikes a chord with car buyers because it simply stands out. Someone has just missed the piste and whizzes straight into a showroom on his snowboard. "Take the quickest route to the Opel dealer ...", reads the text. Anyone who then buys a car "with a flourish" immediately receives a free GPS. Presumably so that they can find their way back to the showroom the next time they are on the move. Because if you're clever, you'll realize that this idea with the fast snowboard can of course be used for any offer. Not everything has to be so hotly branded. Andreas Panzeri

Training On May 30, the application deadline for the 14th course of study at the Hamburger Texterschmiede ends. The course starts on October 1, 2007 and a total of 40 places are open to talented applicants. More information can be found at www.texterschmiede.de.

Pharma SFLB turns the veterans of FC Münchwilen into stars for a generics advertisement. Novartis, headed by Vasella, sponsors FC Basel. The chemical multinational Bayer also sponsors a soccer team with Leverkusen. Both Basel and Leverkusen play in the top league - and thus also convey a high-class image for their backers, who obviously have to earn a lot if they can afford such an expensive passion as a top team. But what does a pharmaceutical company do if it doesn't want to rip off as much money from its customers as Novartis or Bayer do?Helvepharm is a pharmaceutical company that specializes in the production of generic drugs. And it is in the nature of generic companies to copy things. So it stands to reason that the generic drug company from Frauenfeld would do the same as most other pharmaceutical companies and also sponsor a soccer team. But since Helvepharm wants to be economical for its customers, it does not support a prominent soccer club from the Superleague, but the veterans of FC Münchwilen.
This idea for the modest sponsorship comes from the Spillmann Felser Leo Burnett agency. SFLB has been tasked with creating the overall image and raising the profile of Helvepharm. A multi-stage campaign with various advertising media has now been developed for this purpose.
Since April 28, 2007, the veterans of FC Münchwilen have been playing the main role in four TV commercials created in collaboration with Michael Steiner ("Mein Name ist Eugen", "Grounding"). In the main spot, the sponsorship is announced. In three shorter spots, the veterans are wished good luck for the upcoming match, congratulated on their victory or supported in difficult times, depending on the current events. The spots are resolved with the claim: "Helvepharm, the modest pharmaceutical company." 
The kick-off of the campaign took place last week at the championship match of the veterans of FC Münchwilen against the veterans of FC Aadorf. Doctors, the press and residents of Münchwilen and the surrounding area were invited to this match, at which the world premiere of the commercials also took place on the pitch. In keeping with the style, sausage and free beer were served at the match, accompanied by the Harmonie band.
Doctors and the press were prepared for the story in advance of the launch event with 12,000 mailings. One package contained explanatory information as well as a picture card with the entire team. The title: "Get to know these men before they are TV stars. This should indeed soon be the case when the eye-catching commercials are shown on television every week before and after every FC Münchwilen game. The package therefore also included a set of fan items ranging from the obligatory sash to the trumpet and 23 panini pictures featuring the veterans. 
To invite the residents of Münchwilen and people from the region to the championship game, a small poster was realized. With pictures from the commercials and also the title: "Get to know these men before they are TV stars." The poster was hung in bakeries, clubhouses and restaurants in the region.
Since the end of April, everything worth knowing about the players can be read, seen and heard on the website www.veteranen-fcmuenchwilen.ch. The sponsorship agreement has been concluded for three years.
Helvepharm has already won gold for its packaging at the Swiss Marketing Trophy 07. The design of these packs was also adopted for the football team's shirts. Helvepharm in Frauenfeld sells around 220 articles. Many doctors are shareholders of the SME.   
Andreas Panzeri

Car The agency erdmannpeisker advertises genuine Smart spare parts. The aim is to make life more difficult for the copycats from Asia. The erdmannpeisker agency, which emerged from the former Smart marketing department in Biel, created a spare parts campaign for DaimlerChrysler for the nippy Smart city runabout. erdmannpeisker's creatives dramatize with humour what can happen when an original is replaced with a copy that doesn't fit perfectly. The campaign claim "So that it really fits" is intended to raise the quality awareness of Smart drivers throughout Europe. After all, counterfeit parts are a growing problem in Europe. Chinese copies of spare parts in particular are flooding the market. They are many times cheaper than the originals.
The motifs were photographed by Belgian photographer Kurt Stallaert in Seville and Marbella. DaimlerChrysler's national representatives can individually select and implement the appropriate media for their country from a creative package consisting of posters, mailings, advertisements and PoS materials.    
 
Christian Lüscher

The Selection vfg showcases the 18 best Swiss works from the past year The Selection vfg documents the best Swiss professional photography for the ninth time. 18 works with 123 pictures are exhibited in the atmosphere of a photo studio in the ewz Unterwerk Selnau in Zurich. A jury of experts selected Peter Hebeisen, Elisabeth Real and Nathalie Bireima as finalists in the advertising category.Peter Hebeisen was born in Bern in 1956 and commutes as a photographer between Zurich and Paris. His first career aspiration was to be a violin maker. However, after an internship in London, he decided to train as a photographer. Hebeisen has been working as a freelance photographer since 1986. Many Swiss advertising campaigns are based on his pictures. Internationally renowned artists have realized commissions for Bank Leu, Post Logistics, Swiss Lotto and the Multiple Sclerosis Society, among others.
Right after graduating from the University of Art and Design Zurich (HGKZ), 28-year-old Elisabeth Real went freelance and now works for clients such as PET Recycling Switzerland and as a reportage photographer. For the young photographer from Aargau, good photos have to tell stories. She herself is interested in war photography.
Nathalie Bireima is one of the few photo artists from French-speaking Switzerland. What bothers the native of Lausanne. She has the feeling that many artists are being lost due to Zurich's dominance. Which is understandable: nine of the 18 photographers come from Zurich, five from the rest of German-speaking Switzerland and only four from French-speaking Switzerland.
Christian Lüscher
From May 5 to 28, the Vereinigung fotografischer GestalterInnen (vfg) is presenting the exhibition The Selection vfg. 123 images in the categories Advertising Photography, Editorial Photography, Fine Arts and Free can be seen at the EWZ Unterwerk Selnau in Zurich. The Night of Swiss Photography will take place on May 4. The Magazine Photo Prize, the SonntagsZeitung Photo Prize and the ewz Audience Prize will be awarded there.

 The Swiss online job market Medienjobs.ch now presents its latest vacancies for specialists and managers in the communications industry daily and exclusively on Pressetext Switzerland.  
In addition, the Pressetext Schweiz news agency sends a weekly summary of job vacancies to around 15,000 subscribers in Switzerland via its mailing list. Medienjobs.ch specializes in media, corporate and marketing communications, advertising, PR, print/packaging, graphics and web publishing and continuously lists over 200 vacancies. The Pressetext news agency, based in Vienna and with offices in Switzerland and Germany, claims to have the widest reach in the DACH region. The agency supplies over 110,000 subscribers directly with the latest news and press releases every day, including around 20,000 journalists.

Internet Wirz mercilessly pins second-hand cars, tradesmen and more for the internet search service local.ch. "Search and find" doesn't always have to mean Google. If local data is required, the local search engine local.ch can also help. Users can quickly access relevant information free of charge. Wirz Werbung now wants to make the young portal more prominent throughout Switzerland and is launching a fun poster campaign to do so. Pins are used to pin things down or to mark locations on maps. Wirz Werbung takes up the idea of the pin and illustrates in a surreal way how easy it is to pin down a pizza courier, a tradesman or a used car with local.ch. Although they are not impaled on the motifs, they are staged almost like insects in a bug collection. The almost ironic addition "Found on www.local.ch" captures the situation in a humorous way. The campaign is currently being launched with three motifs.
The still young search engine local.ch was launched by PubliGroupe. The portal, which was set up last year together with joint venture partner Swisscom Directories, aims to support searches in local markets in Switzerland. The local service makes it easier for users to search for restaurants, hotels or service providers of all kinds, for example. The content is prepared with maps and additional information and made available free of charge. local.ch works closely with LTV Gelbe Seiten AG, the publisher of 97 local telephone and business directories and 7 regional Yellow Pages directories.
Christian Lüscher

Mediapulse Marco De Stoppani, President of the new Mediapulse Foundation, has a lot of work and many a balancing act ahead of him. The expectations of Marco De Stoppani, the former publishing director of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, are high. By law, the Mediapulse Foundation he heads must be "independent and committed to scientific research". Transparent accounting, separated according to activities, is also required. However, De Stoppani is setting the bar even higher: at the press conference on the occasion of the foundation's establishment on April 24, he pleaded for the broadest possible understanding of transparency and equal treatment of all Mediapulse clients. "The values of independence, transparency and equal treatment were already fully practised at the SRG research service," emphasized De Stoppani, but now they could be practised "even more efficiently." De Stoppani was careful not to make any overly concrete programmatic statements. However, he did hint that he wants to introduce more transparency into the various cooperation agreements with suppliers and contractors (such as Swisscom, Telecontrol, IHA-GfK and Conso) that are to be drawn up by the end of the year, for example. It also wants to at least put up for discussion a more open approach to the annual reports of the Media Science Control Commission (MWKK). Until now, these have only been accessible to a small circle of people determined by the SRG.
De Stoppani is aware that he has to play his new role "in the field of tension between research and commerce". Independence is easier to declare than to live, as it is about "not succumbing to the pressure of special interests", he said. Thanks to the equal representation of SRG, private broadcasters and the advertising industry on the Foundation Board (see box), the foundation is politically well balanced, but this is only one side of the coin. "Financially, there is no independence," said De Stoppani, pointing out that the research operation is not financed by the foundation's capital, but with two million francs a year from the reception fees and the sale of the collected data. And there is obviously a cluster risk here. "We have a few major customers and currently have liquid assets of just 50,000 francs," he pointed out. In other words: Research operations can only be maintained if all customers, especially SRG, remain loyal to the foundation.
In addition to adjusting the various contracts, two things are at the top of De Stoppani's list of priorities. Firstly, the Board of Directors of Mediapulse AG (the former SRG research service) must be filled with six new members of the Foundation Board. Furthermore, it is still unclear how the marketing of research data should be organized. Until now, this was the task of SRG subsidiary Publica Data AG, which only sold the data to the private sector and the advertising industry. SRG obtained its data directly from the Research Service. It is clear that this unequal treatment is no longer acceptable. However, turning away from this means that SRG, as the previous owner of the research, will now become a customer itself. "A big step for SRG," said De Stoppani, who described finding a good solution as "tricky" - "also because it involves a lot of money".
Various momentous decisions are already pending in the area of research, which the SRG no longer wanted to decide (alone) in the last two transitional years. For example, advertising clients are waiting for the release of PIN data, the cinema industry would like the multifunctional Mediawatch, a further developed version of the Radiocontrol clock, to be used for cinema measurement. And finally, there needs to be close cooperation between the new internet research company Net-Metrix and Mediapulse in the future. Even a later integration of Net-Metrix into the foundation is not ruled out. This would also bring the publishers on board. But that is still a long way off.
The members of the Foundation BoardThe following 18 stakeholders are members of the Foundation Board: Stephanie Weiss (Radio DRS), Dino Balestra (RTSI), Marc Savary (SRG), Rainer Keller (SRG), Martin Schneider (Publisuisse), Walter Rüegg (Radio DRS), Nathalie Rochat-Wehrli (Western Switzerland Radio Association), Martin Muerner and Martin Freiburghaus (both Swiss Private Radio Association), Filippo Lombardi, Claude Alain Stettler and Andreas Meili (all Telesuisse), Klaus Kappeler (Goldbach Media), Christian Gartmann (PubliGroupe), Stephan Küng (IGEM), Jürg Siegrist (SWA), Urs Schneider (BSW), Gérald le Meur (Fédération Romande de publicité). The Council is chaired by Marco de Stoppani.
Markus Knöpfli