Insurance For Swiss Life, Spillmann Felser Leo Burnett demonstrates how you can still afford to be young in old age.Life doesn't always play out according to plan. Often something develops in a negative sense - and the person concerned suddenly needs money. Sometimes there are also positive surprises. A graying gentleman discovers the great love once again. This can also happen with a mature lady of the heart, as the latest spot by SFLB for its client Swiss Life shows. In the film, a romantic marriage is staged in a church. The guests are moved. In a close-up, the couple puts on their rings. Elegant as the lady is, she wears white gloves. Only later, in the dissolving final shot, does the viewer realize that this is also meant to hide the hands that have grown older. The couple is well over 70.
"Ready for the future": Swiss Life has been using this brand promise in regular campaigns from the Spillmann Felser Leo Burnett agency for three years now. This brand promise was implemented with the idea of "Being ready - even for those moments when life doesn't stick to the plans".
With a new implementation, Swiss Life is now showing another facet of the already existing brand promise. The campaign is built on the insight "that many more mature people today often behave like young people," as copywriter Peter Brönnimann knows.
Life continues to be funThe "new olds" are biologically younger, more active and more capable than ever. This performance capability opens up new opportunities: Mature people not only stay spry longer - they also want to keep up their old loves and habits. They dress fashionably, travel even more than before and like to treat themselves to something good. If there's enough money in the budget ...
Being active, going out and realizing dreams costs money. Future retirees and early retirees should make provisions for this in good time.
This financial tip is dramatized with a visual idea where, at first glance, supposedly young people surprisingly turn out to be young-at-heart older people. Like the wedding couple, so do the guitarist who tries out an electric guitar in a music store with surprisingly nimble fingers, a traveler and an old rocker who obviously continue to pursue their hobby.
Parallel to two spots realized by Pumpkin and Kaspar Wedendahl, four more ads will be placed, each resolving its punchlines on two consecutive pages. And all according to the current motto: "So you can stay young longer: Retirement and Financial Planning with Swiss Life."
Andreas Panzeri

Sporting goods In its first campaign for Ochsner Sport, the Wirz agency shows how to defeat even the toughest of opponents. It's the one inside - and it often wins. No one has ever seen him in the flesh. Nevertheless, everyone knows him. The inner bastard is that guy who whispers to us early in the morning to stay in bed - instead of going jogging. It spurs us on to enjoy our third bratwurst at the Grümpelturnier instead of achieving top performance. The "inner pigdog" also advises us to stop the New York Marathon at the flashing Budweiser sign on the next corner, and now Wirz Werbung is declaring war on this flabby Heimer. "We'll introduce him, we'll show him off - and we'll defeat him, this inner pigdog that looks amazingly like us and, on closer inspection, is even identical to ourselves," is the motto.
 
The campaign shows that our toughest opponent is ourselves by using the same person to portray two sporting opponents in each of the subjects. The agency did not cast models for this visualization, but photographed real Ochsner Sport employees. 
The idea is simple and is "understood by top athletes as well as softer athletes or in the lifestyle sports sector", CD Hanspeter Schweizer is convinced. "For example, when someone carries a crate of beer up the stairs in Adidas sneakers." The somewhat quieter sportsman should know - Schweizer was a tennis instructor and ski racer in his younger years. Today, he is still fit enough to expand the "Schweinehund" campaign with the same imagery into a long-distance race across various items from posters and brochures to POS campaigns. So far there are nine motifs. Further seasonal motifs are planned.
The campaign also includes a promotion in which 250 sponsorship contracts for equipment can be won with Ochsner Sport. There is also the chance to qualify for the Berlin Marathon.
The campaign is being launched to coincide with the opening of Ochsner Sport's newest and largest store to date. It will be open to customers from March 22 in the new Sihlcity center in Zurich.
   
Andreas Panzeri

On the occasion of International Women's Day on March 8, Reporters Without Borders recalls the fate of all those women who are threatened, intimidated, arrested or even murdered because of their work as journalists. In 2006 alone, eleven female reporters lost their lives in the exercise of their profession, and seven female journalists have to spend March 8 behind bars. The organization cites the murder of Anna Polikovskaya last October as the most prominent example of the danger to investigative journalists. The mother of two paid for her critical stance on the Russian government's Chechnya policy with her life.
Of the 82 reporters killed in the line of duty in 2006, eleven were women, which equates to nine percent. In 2005, the figure was almost 13 percent. In 2004 it was 7.5 percent, in 2003 it was 2.5 percent.
Central Asia proved to be a particularly dangerous place for female journalists in 2006. Ogulsapar Muradova, Radio Free Europe correspondent in Turkmenistan, died in prison in September. She had been arrested in June after publishing reports critical of the authorities and helping a French journalist with her TV documentary about Turkmenistan. In neighboring Uzbekistan, journalist and human rights activist Umida Niyazova has been behind bars since 22 January. She is facing between five and ten years in prison for circulating witness statements about the massacre in Andijan in 2005.
Female reporters have also been victims of the violence perpetrated by armed groups in Iraq. Atwar Bahjat from the television station Al-Arabiya was kidnapped with her team and later murdered after reporting on the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February 2006.
Reporters Without Borders particularly welcomes the commitment of all those courageous women who stand up for freedom of the press and freedom of expression worldwide. And finally, some good news: so far this year, no female journalists have lost their lives.

Luxury The first quarterly Swiss watch and lifestyle magazine Tourbillon remains true to itself and continues to cause "unrest". Issue number 9, which will be published on April 11, 2007 in time for the opening of Baselworld and the SIHH luxury watch show in Geneva in a special edition of 80,000 copies, will relentlessly uncover scandals, "always in the interest of the consumer". In a "mystery shopping" survey carried out by Nuance Advisory in six Swiss cities, for example, many stores that had previously always received awards for image reasons no longer received any praise, but instead the awards went to stores whose services were genuinely and surprisingly convincing.

Volker Straube has restructured Mediaedge:cia Switzerland, expects double-digit growth and is delighted that his network has now also been voted the best globally. This is a rare achievement: Mediaedge:cia has been named "Global Media Agency of the Year 2006" by trade journals Advertising Age and Adweek at the same time. With global growth of 20 percent, the year was also the best in the history of the network in economic terms. For Volker Straube, CEO of MEC Switzerland, this shows that his agency has chosen the right strategy. "Our global development strategy, from a traditional media agency to a modern communications agency, has also been confirmed by the market." The MEC network is now represented in 79 countries and is "in a top position in each of these markets", Straube is proud to say.what is the basis for such success? For the majority of branded products, communication and therefore media is the second largest investment after manufacturing costs. "Communication must therefore also deliver a return on investment," says Straube. The consultants at his agency therefore ask the following questions for every task: Who do I want to say what to, when and where? What situation is the consumer in in order to absorb which messages? And how do I measure the result at the end?
Over the last five years, MEC has continuously expanded its consulting services and thus its holistic project management with such approaches and has long since become more than "just" media planning and purchasing. "We have changed the business model," says Straube. In addition to Consumer Insights, Communications Planning and Digital Interaction, the company also offers the communication channels Event and Sponsorship. However, the traditional media business at MEC "remains the core business and will continue to account for more than 50 percent of the business in the medium term". But new approaches such as direct search - "if you can still call it new, because the Internet and its communication possibilities have been around for over ten years" - will have a significant impact on the future development of the entire media landscape.
"Growth will primarily be driven by digitalization, which corresponds to social individualization on the one hand and leads to further media fragmentation on the other," says Straube. "We are restructuring our business model accordingly, step by step." For MEC, the areas of digital/direct/search and entertainment/sports/sponsorship/events will therefore play a much greater role in communication in the future. Straube also sees the topics of content and trading as being closely linked. MEC therefore also sees editorial content as an important form of communication. "But not clumsy product placement, but intelligent placement concepts. Because only a credible and harmonious integration into editorial content is accepted by the consumer and is therefore also effective." Another area is retail. Communication at the point of sale is extremely important. MEC wants to extend traditional communication there, "because the act of buying ultimately takes place at the POS".
However, Straube believes that the fastest-growing area in the near future will be online. MEC is therefore consistently preparing for the challenges of tomorrow's digital world. The entire online sector is now also very well developed in Europe and can already account for a good ten percent of advertising expenditure in the media mix. In Switzerland, however, the figure is still less than two percent, although penetration rates and usage intensities are in some cases higher than in the USA. "Mr. and Mrs. Swiss are very interactive. But the problem is that the advertising industry has not yet recognized these new communication opportunities," concludes Straube.
The CEO of MEC analyzed the Swiss market carefully when he started in July 2004. He then merged five companies, three locations in Lausanne, Bern and Zurich and at least two cultures, both functionally and operationally, to form today's Mediaedge:cia Switzerland. "Make one strong agency" was his objective. "You can merge the figures quickly on paper, but in practice it takes more effort until you have a common philosophy and organization as well as processes that work together."
Straube realized that "the headquarters in this country had to be in Zurich". So he moved the back office from Bern to Zurich, restructured MEC here, and in March 2005 everything moved to a new building in Wollishofen with WPP's sister agency MindShare. The new GroupM back office with finance, IT and trading was set up here on the basis of the former MEC back office in Bern. In October 2005, Kinetic, the first outdoor media agency in Switzerland, was founded on this basis. And in December 2005, the MEC front office in Lausanne was relocated from the suburbs directly to the city center.
In January 2006, MediaCom, also a WPP sister agency, was integrated into the existing GroupM organization as a third media agency as a logical development of this plan.
The next step was to found MEC Global Solutions in April 2006 with offices in Zurich and Lausanne. "Clients such as Novartis or ABB no longer have to be coordinated worldwide from London, but instead directly on site, such as Novartis International, based in Nyon." As the first Swiss agency, MEC can now use its international network to support a globally active client around the world in Switzerland.
With the founding of MEC Interaction in the fall of 2006, the next step was to strengthen MEC customer consulting with special online expertise. MEC now also offers full online services in Switzerland.
Straube is currently in the process of founding MEC MediaLab as a further unit. The aim is to further expand the MEC offering in the areas of consumer insights, return on investment and communications planning.
With so much action, it sounds convincing that MEC will once again achieve "significant double-digit growth this year", as Straube indicates, who has been responsible for the further development of all WPP media agencies in Switzerland as CEO of GroupM in addition to his role as CEO of MEC since April 2006.
Before Straube was appointed to Switzerland, he worked for three years as Managing Director of Mediaedge:cia Frankfurt. From 1993 to 2001, he worked as a member of the management board of the media agency MindShare Frankfurt, formerly Ogilvy & Mather. He began his media career in 1990 at Young & Rubicam Frankfurt.
Andreas Panzeri

TV program guides Rüdiger Hahn, publisher of Schweizer Fernsehwoche, is in financial difficulties Rüdiger Hahn, who founded the publishing house Printmedien Schweiz AG in Zug last autumn and launched the Schweizer Fernsehwoche program guide in October, applied for a private debt restructuring moratorium in mid-February - initially for four months. This was confirmed by his administrator Armin Budliger in Hochdorf on request. Budliger was not yet able to say to what extent Hahn's private situation also has an influence on Print Media Switzerland and Hahn's other companies Vierwaldstätter Verlags GmbH (former publisher of the TV program guide TVvier) and RH Media (sponsorship of FC Lucerne). This would depend on whether Hahn has assets in these companies. Unfortunately, Hahn himself could not be reached.
What is certain, however, is that Schweizer Fernsehwoche will continue to be published and the latest issue was delivered to newsstands on March 6, as confirmed by Stefania Misteli, spokeswoman for Valora AG.
In this context, it is interesting to note that Hahn was the only member of the Board of Directors to leave Printmedien Schweiz at the beginning of February. In his place, Sabine Schreiber is now entered in the commercial register. It remains to be seen whether the change has anything to do with Hahn's debt restructuring moratorium. Schreiber, who according to the Printmedien Schweiz website is responsible for administration, was also unavailable by telephone.
Incidentally, Hahn had already applied for a debt restructuring moratorium in 2003, at that time for Vierwaldstätter Verlags GmbH. However, TVvier continued to appear and the company was restructured within four months. Hahn then sold TVvier to Ringier the following year. After that, things remained relatively quiet until he founded Printmedien Schweiz in 2006.
Markus Knöpfli

The internet communications agency New Impact has launched the new image database of the city of Biel/Bienne. The images are available for unaltered, non-commercial use in various categories, from leisure to business and tourism to housing, and illustrate the diversity, beauty and economic attractiveness of Biel/Bienne. New Impact, based in Bern, offers comprehensive solutions in the areas of interactive portals, usability & accessibility, online sales management and online editing.

Column Integrated communication is required everywhere. But without new ways of thinking and working, the focus remains fixed on a fixed idea. The buzzwords multimedia, cross-media and integrated communication are on everyone's lips. However, if you look at the projects that are presented under these labels, the claim is rarely consistently fulfilled. In most cases, one medium dominates and the others are only used as garnish. The reason for this is the need for simplicity. One of these fixed ideas is that newspapers have no future. At a recent conference in Zurich, Irishman Gavin O'Reilly, President of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), warned the media industry not to talk print itself to death. O'Reilly is seeing growth in his internationally active media company and is observing numerous new launches worldwide.
In fact, both newspaper fans and digital freaks in the media houses are dominated by an idea of media in which the other genres are neglected: Convinced newspaper makers use the Internet as a secondary exploitation dump. Blogger fans don't care about elementary journalistic rules such as transparency, fairness and credibility. Cross-media advertising acrobats sell everything that makes money until there is nothing left of the editorial team. Editors have to fill agency reports into the respective platforms on a piecework basis at the newsdesk. And in the excitement of multimedia, traditional brands are watered down beyond recognition or brand management is forgotten altogether.
The industry is risking huge damage to the image of its media products with this behavior. It is therefore high time to get out of the tunnels and start by gaining an overview from a summit. Of course, this requires some agility, concentration and perseverance.
This outlook first conveys the insight that the individual media forms have special features that are invaluable. The Internet provides up-to-the-minute information practically in real time and enables infinite links and connections. Radio has always been an instant medium. Technically uncomplicated for listeners, it has been providing access to information and music anytime and anywhere for decades. Television, on the other hand, is more cumbersome. Until recently, it required a presence in a room and a spellbound gaze. Now the only question is how small a moving image can be in order to remain of interest. In the case of newspapers, publishers spare no effort in production and distribution to ensure that they are on subscribers' desks early in the morning or on sale at newsstands.
In addition to the material characteristics, there are the communicative ones. The media experience is very different when reading a newspaper than when surfing the net, listening to the radio or watching television. The task of media professionals is to recognize what media can do best and to focus on this. Thanks to a finely tuned aggregation of special features, both editorial and commercial content gains a quality that is more than the sum of its individual parts. This provides the audience with an information and entertainment offering that respects different needs and sensitivities. With consistent multimedia user and brand management, the established media can integrate their offerings on the various platforms. Credibility and trust are key factors here.
It's easy to lose your self-confidence in the tunnel. On the way to the heights, it is also important to recognize your own strengths and communicate them proudly. Only a newspaper brand can do that!
Josefa Haas is head of the Media Institute.

Agencies Swiss creatives are successful abroad. Walker is twice the industry winner in the 2007 Advertising Yearbook. Spillmann Felser Leo Burnett wins gold in the ADC Europe book. 
2000 Germans want to work in Switzerland every month. In return, two Swiss have now made it to Germany in just one week. Not individual masks, however, but agencies with their creative work. At the Econ Awards and the presentation of the 2007 Advertising Yearbook, the Walker agency from Zurich was not only voted "Newcomer of the Year" for Switzerland and Austria (Werbewoche reported). At the awards party last weekend with 700 guests at the "Postfuhramt" in Berlin, Pius Walker and his partner Hans Beer were also celebrated twice as industry winners for the entire German-speaking region. Their Mother's Day films for Fleurop won the award for best work in the retail and services sector in the "Other services" category. The campaign for Amnesty International (Switzerland) was the industry winner in the NGO category for society and social marketing. Apart from Walker, there were no Swiss entrants in this competition. For Pius Walker and his team, the success is already bearing fruit. The Amnesty campaign is to be adapted locally for Denmark. Walker is also in advanced negotiations with Amnesty International in the USA with the same idea. It is a very nice feeling, explains Pius Walker, when for once it is not foreign campaigns that can be adapted in Switzerland, but Swiss campaigns abroad. Negotiations for such an adaptation are also underway with Fleurop in Germany. One concrete result of the party in Berlin is also inquiries for new business "with two major brands in Germany", as Pius Walker reveals. "It obviously no longer matters to important customers whether they fly to Hamburg or Zurich for their advertising."
In his acceptance speech for "Newcomer", the old fox Walker only used half of the four minutes allowed in Berlin. Instead, he had his Fleurop film Wedding Day, directed by Anthony Minghella and not yet judged by the jury, shown outside the program. This led to a few tears in the auditorium, and not just from Walker's wife Patricia ...
Swiss also in the ADC EuropeAs in the advertising yearbook published by Econ, three Swiss companies were among the top three in the Best of European Design and Advertising: The Annual of Annuals. Gold was awarded to Spillmann Felser Leo Burnett in the New/Mixed Media category in the "Others" section. The prize was awarded for a fictitious announcement over public address systems, in which, for example, a humorous appeal is made to recycle PET in a swimming pool.
SFLB was also shortlisted for the film "Cliff" for National Insurance.
The third Swiss award in the ADC Yearbook Europe goes to Euro RSCG with a shortlist entry for "Love Lips" on behalf of the Federal Office of Public Health and Stop Aids.
Andreas Panzeri

Graphics Thirty Ukrainian graphics students are currently spending a week in Zurich as part of a vocational training exchange program. The guests from the East are gaining a practical insight into Swiss graphic design culture and will be designing a series of postcards for the city on the Limmat. The visit is organized by the Zurich Vocational School of Design and co-financed by the SDC.

Insurance company Grendene, Ogilvy & Mather shows for Allianz Suisse why you should insure yourself properly. What good is half a playpen? "Nothing," say the creatives at Grendene, Ogilvy & Mather. Although the child in the playpen is protected on one side, on the other side it is completely unsecured and at the mercy of life's impending adversities. Half a playpen is a simple but striking realization of the problem of "safety". Things get a little more complicated when it comes to unit-linked life insurance, participation in the capital markets, tax optimization with the 3rd pillar and risk insurance. "That sounds complex and complicated," says Thomas Bolliger. However, the new CD at Ogilvy is convinced that even complex things should be explained clearly in advertising. The four subjects for an Allianz Suisse campaign therefore aim to "communicate the advantages of an insurance product simply and quickly".
Reduced to the essentials, the advantage of the product is that you no longer have to choose between security and return when investing money. Instead, it is a clever combination of classic life insurance and flexible investment. In plain language: no compromises, no half measures.
The campaign translates this message into a direct, striking visual language. Objects cut in half, such as detached houses, grand pianos, deckchairs and playpens, dramatize the worthlessness of other, one-sided solutions. The headline supports the pictorial symbolism, specifically tailored to the different motivations of the target groups. The four different advertisements support a sales campaign and are linked to mailings and internet banners.
Andreas Panzeri

The Zurich agency Jung von Matt/Limmat has qualified for finalist status at the Interactive & Alternative Awards of the New York Festivals with the following works: the "Paparazzi Campaign" for SI Style in the "Alternative & Innovative Media" category and the "Sushi Hay Rolls" campaign for the restaurant Yoojis in the "Alternative & Innovative Media" and "Best Use of Alternative Media" categories. The creative minds are also represented three times in the final with the "Size" campaign for MINI in the categories "Guerilla Marketing", "Alternative & Innovative Media" and "Best Use of Alternative Media". The final award results will be announced on April 27, 2007.