Tanja Kocher will take over as Head of Communications at the Federal Department of Finance FDF on May 1, 2007. Her predecessor, Elisabeth Meyerhans Sarasin, will take up her new position as FDF Secretary General as early as April 1. Until Tanja Kocher takes up her post, Dieter Leutwyler, Deputy Head of Information, will be in charge of Communications. The new head of communications will be responsible for media relations, public relations, the website and internal information. According to the media release, 43-year-old Tanja Kocher has a wealth of experience in the field of communications: she has been head of communications at the Swiss Federal Banking Commission (SFBC) since October 2001. Before that, she worked for Swiss Radio DRS for nine years.
The new press officer in the FDF's communications service is 28-year-old Delphine Jaccard. A native of French-speaking Switzerland, she received her basic training at the Geneva Institute of Advanced International Studies. After graduating, she completed an internship at the United Nations in Geneva and then worked on behalf of the FDFA at the Swiss Mission to the European Communities in Brussels.

Since the beginning of the week, a variant of the Storm Worm email worm has also been wreaking havoc on various blog and forum sites. While it used to spread by sending emails to the listed contacts of the infected computer, the worm is now taking a more sophisticated approach.  
The worm now recognizes when the affected user posts a text in public blogs or forums. If the text goes online, the malware automatically inserts a link into the text that leads to infected content when visited. "In the past, malware links were forwarded via the address books of those affected, thus deceiving potential victims. However, the current approach involving web platforms is new," explained a security expert at Secure Computing to Pressetext.
 
Storm Worm is one of the frontrunners in the malware sector this year. Experts also attribute the worm's danger to its rapid mutation cycles. By continuously adapting the malicious code to the virus scanners, the worm always remains undetected for a while. The analysis and fast reaction time of the virus writers point to their professional background.

For the new Sunrise campaign, the creatives at AY&R have come up with surprising twists and new approaches to continue the previous themes. The campaign, which according to the agency's statement consists of film, advertisements and POS advertising media, is aimed at people for whom switching to ADSL was previously too complicated. Sunrise is now offering them a solution: with the new ADSL offer, all you have to do is plug it into the modem and the rest takes care of itself. Not only is the installation automatic, but security and maintenance are also taken care of.  
To communicate this, the campaign introduces two new protagonists. The two stand at a bus stop and look at a Sunrise advertising poster featuring Hans and Luis, the old actors. The friends wonder why the guys on the Sunrise ad can't look better. In a surprising twist, this wish leads directly to the idea for the new ADSL offer.

Juan Isidro Casilla, the new celebrity counterfeit beauty, recently snuck into an issue of Schweizer Illustrierte Style with one of his fake Gucci ads for Gucci. Almost a gift for the advertisers at JvM and SI Style.  
The Zurich agency Jung von Matt/Limmat gratefully accepts the impostor's steep pass and passes it on to advertisers for Schweizer Illustrierte Style. A double-page spread with a portrait of Casillas recommends that advertisers book their own ads early before he does.

SRG closes the 2006 financial year with a deficit. The loss amounted to CHF 25 million (previous year: CHF 1 million). According to SRG, the negative annual result is mainly due to high rights and production costs for the major sporting events, the Winter Olympics in Turin and the Football World Cup in Germany, as well as expenses for the digitization of programme distribution (DAB, DVB-T).  
Revenue is slightly higher
than in the previous year. According to SRG, operating income rose slightly by 0.6% in the past financial year and amounted to CHF 1.5 billion. An increase is mainly noticeable in commercial income. With an increase of 2.5 percent, operating expenses rose more sharply than revenue. There was a significant increase in programming and production costs in particular - due to the major sporting events and the digitization of programme distribution.  
The net financial result amounted to CHF 6 million (previous year: CHF 0.7 million). SRG SSR's 2006 Annual Report will be published at the end of April 2007.

Fisch.Meier.Direkt made it onto the shortlist for the German Direct Marketing Award with two pieces of work for car manufacturer Saab. It is still unclear whether the only remaining Swiss entries in the race will even win any precious metal.  
As the agency reports, only 14 percent of the entries reached the final round of the German Direct Marketing Award. These included the Fisch.Meier.Direkt campaigns entitled "Pilots Wanted", with which the Saab advertisers successfully sought to generate test drives in the Swedish classics. In the "Submissions from abroad" category, the agency is therefore flying the flag of Swiss advertising honor with two campaigns - all alone, as all the other finalists come from Austria.
 
Although the decision has already been made as to whether there will be enough podium places beyond the shortlist, the result will not be announced until March 23, 2007.

Even if they don't like to admit it, language professionals often come up against limits in their everyday work: Is it now called the, the or the clientele? Was that the author's or the writer's opinion? How are international telephone numbers structured? In such cases, the Duden language advice service can help. The Duden language experts are in great demand: the phone rings around 200 times a day. The majority of those seeking advice have to deal with the German language professionally and therefore want to avoid mistakes. These include copywriters, journalists, editors, proofreaders and translators.
The Duden editorial team receives information on where writers' shoes are pinching via the consultation. Volume 9 of the Duden series "Correct and Good German", which was published in February in a completely revised 6th edition, was created from an evaluation of the inquiries. The German experts are currently presenting the top 30 current questions, including the correct answers, on the Duden homepage.

The two new Tele Züri news presenters are Oliver Steffen and Patrizia Zuber. However, the 32-year-old and the 23-year-old are no strangers to loyal Tele Züri viewers. Steffen and Zuber used to work as video journalists for the news desk. They will now present Züri News in the event of bottlenecks and longer absences in the presenting team, as the broadcaster announced on Thursday. However, the two will continue to be on the road as reporters.
Oliver Steffen presented the news for the first time at the end of February, Patrizia Zuber will make her presenting debut on March 17.

Cablecom is making a record-breaking number of negative headlines: A customer service that doesn't deserve the name, private broadcasters that almost run amok or administrative failures that fill half a cash register show. Cablecom, however, is not responsible for the latest major glitch. Or is it?  
Around 15,000 Cablecom customers in the Bern area were without radio, TV, Internet and telephone for hours on Thursday. The reason: construction workers had severed a Cablecom fiber optic cable near Bern railroad station at around nine o'clock. The construction workers then worked flat out to re-weld the fiber optic cable, as Cablecom media spokesman Martin Wüthrich - who is really not to be envied - told SDA on request. It is not known exactly how the incident occurred. One possible explanation would be that one of the construction workers had seen Tuesday's cash register crash broadcast and now knows that he has ended up in a debt database due to a Cablecom misregistration and has therefore been unable to rent a new apartment for years.

The new campaign for Parisienne, designed by Sulzer, Sutter, combines the theme of "Love and Sex" with a quintessentially Swiss tradition. Partly hidden behind German-Swiss and French playing cards, well-known Jass figures indulge in their colorful hustle and bustle.  
Sulzer, Sutter has created five subjects for the first wave: one-night stand, table dance, strip poker, dominatrix and sex movie shoot. The posters and advertisements hint at stories,
but they are not told to the end. This leaves a lot to the imagination of the viewer.

As part of the current financing round, Marquard Media AG has acquired a 25.1% stake in Hamburg-based Sqoops, an e-commerce company for games, family entertainment and edutainment. According to the press portal, the company justifies its entry into e-commerce with the high turnover in the sector. Worldwide, the sector is experiencing double-digit growth. The German Computer Media AG, based in Fürth, in which Marquard Media holds 88 percent of the shares as majority shareholder, had already acquired 15 percent of Sqoops last September and is now increasing its stake to 25.1 percent.

Following the withdrawal of an advertisement at the expense of solar energy featuring national football coach Köbi Kuhn, the energy company Axpo has now decided not to run another commercial. This would have mocked wind energy.  
The retracted spot showed another round of Jass, with one of the participants struggling to sleep. A yoga exercise is supposed to provide him with new power via wind energy, which fails miserably. Axop spokeswoman Daniela Biedermann told SDA on Thursday that the withdrawal was due to the fact that the commercial would probably have triggered just as much heated debate as the nuclear Köbi commercial (see
). This means that only three of the original five commercials by Grounding director Michael Steiner, which were created for the Energiedialog.ch website as well as for cinema and TV advertising, are still in use.