The Board of Directors of Radio Liechtenstein is overstaffed. At the beginning of October, the State Court ruled that procedural errors had occurred in the dismissal of former Chairman of the Board of Directors Norbert Seeger and former Board member Alexander Batliner (see ). However, the State Court did not issue a clear instruction, but rather passed the ball to parliament. The state parliament then decided at the end of October to set up a commission to iron out the procedural errors.  
In the meantime, however, the Council now has nine members instead of the usual seven - and to make matters worse, two presidents. These two, Seeger and the new Clemens Laternser, decided to convene a meeting at the same time on Tuesday, according to the SDA news agency. Laternser and the new board member Stefanie von Grünigen subsequently resigned. Seeger and Batliner then announced on Wednesday that they were prepared to step down from the Board of Directors. However, under one condition: The Patriotic Union parliamentary group and the Free List must publicly retract the accusations of breach of duty and thus rehabilitate the two.

Research The concept of the new research foundation has been widely accepted. Discussions on details and representation are now beginning.Walter Rüegg, Director of Rado DRS, is relieved. After the presentation of the concept for the new foundation for radio and TV research on October 27 in Biel, the initiator of the first hour expressed an "absolutely positive" mood. And Jürg Bachmann, who as President of the Association of Swiss Private Radio Stations (VSP) is also involved at the forefront, also stated that the foundation is "well on its way". This impression is shared by third parties, such as Jürg Siegrist, Director of the Swiss Advertising Association (SWA), but the positive echoes do not mean that the discussions about the foundation are over. Proposals for changes to the regulations and concept can still be submitted until November 24, 2006. However, the basic outline is likely to remain as presented in Biel by Rüegg, Bachmann and Filippo Lombardi, President of the private TV association Telesuisse. According to this, SRG, VSP and Telesuisse will establish the foundation after the
new RTVG (spring 2007). The proposed name is "Mediapulse Foundation for Utilization Research".
The existing company Mediapulse AG (ex-SRG research service) will be transferred from SRG to the foundation, as will the two million Swiss francs worth of shares that SRG holds in Mediapulse. Publica Data AG, which currently sells radio and TV research data to private individuals, is also to be integrated into the foundation as a second subsidiary. In future, however, it will also supply SRG with data.
It is also stipulated that the Foundation Board will consist of six representatives each from SRG, private broadcasters and the advertising industry and will be chaired by a further, independent person. Although the three groups each elect their own representatives, the general management of SRG, the marketing company Publisuisse and the SRG radio and TV stations must be given seats.
Among the private broadcasters, the VSP can provide two representatives and the French-speaking Swiss radio association RRR one, while Telesuisse will provide a total of three. And the advertising industry is to allocate one seat each to the marketers PubliGroupe and Goldbach Media and to the associations BSW, SWA and GfM. A further seat has not yet been definitively allocated. It is also stipulated that the interests represented by the future members of the Board of Trustees will not overlap or be represented twice.
This means, for example, that VSP President Bachmann is hardly eligible for election because, as Managing Director of Radio Energy Zurich, he belongs to Goldbach Media. However, the latter already has a seat as a marketer. It will also be necessary to ensure that the representatives of private radio and TV stations do not (only) come from publishers in which P has a (minority) stake.
"The new system must be supported by everyone "Preserve radios and TV stations,
that do not belong to an association also have the right to vote or be represented? For example, the Tamedia stations Radio 24 and Radio Basilisk, Radio 105, the TV stations U1, Viva and TV3+ and, last but not least, the foreign stations which, by definition, are not allowed to belong to any of the associations but pay for research data. This point will definitely lead to further discussions. Andreas Meili, Head of Electronic Media at Tamedia, says he has already submitted an amendment.
Accordingly, one of the two seats in the VSP is to be made available to broadcasters that are not organized in the VSP. Meili's reasoning: "It is important for future usage research that the new system is developed and supported by all relevant industry representatives and broadcasters."
The same question also arises in relation to Telesuisse or the seats that are to go to Goldbach Media and P. "There are other marketers who hardly feel represented by these two," says Meili.
Markus Knöpfli

New business ideas from Google flutter into editorial offices every day. The latest plan: the company wants to sell radio advertising via the Internet. It was only announced on Monday that the Internet search engine operator is selling ads in US newspapers on a trial basis (see ). Google has also presented two new offers based on its map service. As the news agency SDA reports, Google wants to start selling radio ads this year. Customers will be able to use the same system that they already use to book advertising on Google websites with search results. According to industry experts, Google is currently looking for advertisers in the radio sector. Rumor has it that the company is planning to pay them around 50 percent more than is customary in the industry. In the long term, up to 1000 employees could be employed in this sector, Google CEO Eric Schmidt once stated.
The source of the advertising to be sold is not yet known. Insiders speculate that Google could take over an advertising contingent from the largest US radio operator Clear Channel Communications for one billion dollars or even acquire a stake in the operator. The internet company had already bought the radio advertising company dMarc Broadcasting at the beginning of the year. Google has also already approached a number of broadcasters to take over advertising space from them.
But enough dreams of the future: Google AdWords has just introduced two new offers based on its map service. Both services are primarily aimed at companies, reports Heise Online. With the industry center, companies can post information about themselves and their products online, which Google embeds in the search. With local ads on the Google Maps products, companies can now also advertise their products and services in a targeted manner. These appear in the Google advertising network both in Google Maps and in the full-text search - with an image if desired.
 
 

Ruf Lanz is a winner at the prestigious London International Advertising Awards (LIAA). The Swiss creative agency won the radio category with its "George W. Bush" radio spot for the Sport Factory Outlet in the Bally-Areal in Schönenwerd, after reaching four final places (see ). The jury was won over by the idea that George W. Bush has often crashed his bike and doesn't make the smartest impression in his speeches. The message of the cheeky radio spot: It pays to protect your head with a bicycle helmet.

So far, only 18% of Swiss companies have taken concrete sponsorship measures in connection with Euro 08. However, 61 percent still reserve the right to communicate about football. Is the importance of the event being underestimated? The figures were collected in the Sponsoring Barometer 2006/2007, a study conducted by the Cologne-based consultancy agency Sport und Markt in cooperation with the European Sponsorship Exchange. The study does not reveal why Swiss companies have so far remained rather cautious. In Switzerland, the main focus is on sponsorship when it comes to improving the image and raising awareness. According to the study, every tenth franc spent on advertising, PR and marketing in Switzerland is spent on sponsorship. Employees are also becoming an increasingly important target group for sports sponsorship. In 2006, this target group already accounted for 16 percent. 122 Swiss sponsorship decision-makers at top companies, mainly from German-speaking Switzerland, were surveyed for the study.
There is still a degree of planning uncertainty, as contracts between Uefa and the host cities have not yet been signed. However, the impression prevails that the importance of the event is being underestimated and that time is running out.

Podcasting Most podcasters podcast out of passion. Almost all advertisers want to advertise with it and in it.podcasts are hot. Everyone is talking about them, many think they understand what they are about, few know what they are - and hardly anyone has any idea how to earn money with them. When the Goldbach Media Group hosted the first Swiss Pocast Day at the beginning of October (see Werbewoche from October 12, 2006), only a few guests had much more than a clue. And some of them apparently had no trouble having no idea. "I just want a checklist," my neighbor confided, "and I want to know how we can earn money with it. "If you want to reap, you have to sowThere's nothing wrong with earning money. I don't just write because I'm passionate about writing. But if you want to earn money with something, you should at least understand what you want to earn money with. For me, that means going back to basics and doing your homework first. For example, subscribing to a few podcasts, thinking about why podcasters podcast or why complete strangers listen to them and are as eager for each new episode as others are for the next episode of "Gute Zeiten, schlechte Zeiten".
If you want, you can of course also read books on the subject. Unfortunately, there are only a few. For example, "Podcasting", the book on audio blogging by Annik Rubens. Annik Rubens is the pseudonym of Larissa Vassilian, a freelance journalist. She went on air with "Schlaflos in München" on March 21, 2005 and is one of the first podcasters - women are a minority in the scene - in the German-speaking world. She published a three to five-minute column every day, which was regularly downloaded by up to 6,000 listeners.
Target group-oriented advertisingAfter 400 episodes, she took a creative break. Before this break, she wrote the only German-language book on the subject to date. She shares the knowledge she has gathered over the past year and a half with anyone who wants to produce a podcast themselves. And this is anything but difficult, at least technically. That's why the chapter "Producing podcasts" only takes up a third of the 101 pages. Larissa Vassilian devotes more space to her seven golden rules and how she promotes her podcast and even earns money with it.
If you produce a podcast, you can generate a few centimes with every click with affiliate programs such as Google AdSense. And that's just the beginning: a podcast is the ideal platform to advertise to a target group across the board or in a targeted manner without major wastage. For example, Adam Curry reaches hundreds of thousands of listeners with "The Daily Source Code", while a podcast aimed at rose growers only has a few, but very interested subscribers.
Every little bit helpsThis is, my dear seatmate, the chance to advertise to your target group and earn money. AD ON Media, which networks and markets podcasters on Audioads.de, is one of the companies looking to take advantage of this opportunity. The principle is simple: AD ON downloads the registered podcast as an MP3 file, inserts advertising and forwards the podcast to subscribers. In the USA, Fruitcast promises podcasters that they can earn up to ten cents per listener and episode.
Roger Hausmann
Podcasting
by Annik Rubens; O'Reilly Verlag, Cologne 2006, 102 pages, 24.90 francs.

The seven regional journals of Radio DRS are to undergo a conceptual realignment by the end of the year. As the radio magazine writes in its latest issue, the lunchtime editions of "Regis" will be slightly shortened, while the evening reports will be more detailed and formally more attractive. Iso Rechsteiner, head of the regional journals department at Radio DRS, is responding to a study by the University of Bern with the realignment, as he told Radiomagazin. Among other things, the study showed a change in media consumption and the need for more diverse journalistic forms in regional journals.

Television Jung von Matt/Limmat promises "always something good" with the launch campaign for Bluewin TV. With Bluewin TV, a completely new television experience is conquering Swiss living rooms. There was correspondingly great interest in the media and, of course, among the competition when Bluewin wanted to present the long-awaited baby - the birth was postponed several times - to the public for the first time last week.The new television via the telephone connection was launched at the beginning of November and, thanks to Jung von Matt/Limmat, is already in everyone's sights. The agency has been looking after Bluewin since 2001 and has been "working very intensively" on the television campaign in recent months, as CD Tom Seinige reveals. So we can expect a flood of information about Bluewin TV.
The most elaborate means of communication is a 74-second cinema spot. The TV version has 60 seconds. The general spot was shot by Rosas'n'Co with Cannes winner and new directing shooting star Nicolas Caicoya. There are also four themed spots focusing on individual content on Bluewin TV, such as sporting events like the UEFA Champions League or video on demand with 500 films around the clock.
The basic offer now includes more than 100 TV channels, including of course all the usual national, international and regional TV stations, which reach the TV sets in Swiss living rooms directly via the telephone line. "So you can now cancel your conventional TV connection with confidence, subscribe to Bluewin TV instead and receive the TV program via your normal telephone connection," says Marc Werner, Head of Marketing & Sales at Swisscom Fixnet.
In addition to the program offerings, Bluewin TV also impresses with all the functions that make watching television more comfortable. Starting with over 100 hours of recording capacity and the option to pause current programs and resume them later at the same point, through to remote programming via the Internet or cell phone.
The launch campaign for Bluewin TV is based on the overarching motto "There's always something good coming here". As a key image, the creative team chose a light panel, like the ones you would find above the entrance to a Broadway movie theater. "We see this as a symbolic realization of a great experience," explains Seinige. The key visual also appears in advertisements. The highly recognizable symbol can be used in a variety of ways and should accompany the campaign for a long time to come. There are also below-the-line measures, Internet applications, direct mails and a roadshow organized by Bluewin.
Andreas Panzeri

The Board of Directors of Basler Verkehrs-Betriebe (BVB) has elected Dagmar Jenny as its new press officer. She succeeds Pius Marrer, who is retiring at the end of March 2007 at the age of 63. Jenny currently works as head of marketing and communications at Spitex Basel. She is expected to take up her new post in mid-March 2007, according to the SDA news agency.

At the beginning of 2007, Philipp Petersson will become Head of the Commercials department at Condor Films and a member of the company's management. The 36-year-old has been working in the advertising business for ten years and has many years of experience in the production of cinema and TV commercials. He has been working exclusively for Condor Films in Switzerland since 2005. The previous Head of Commercials, Kristian Widmer, will continue to actively support the department in his role as Managing Director. Commercial film producer and director Martin A. Fueter will also continue to work for the department. Fueter.

The advertising revenues of newspapers in German-speaking countries will increase by 2010, but their reach will continue to fall, according to Mediareport's Prognos. However, the rising advertising revenues would mask the core problem of newspapers - the creeping decline in circulation. The two newly published market studies for the German-speaking countries with regard to newspapers and online media illustrate the trends with figures: In Switzerland, Prognos expects growth of around 13 percent to CHF 1.8 billion. At the same time, however, newsstand newspapers in German-speaking Switzerland are continuing to lose circulation. The number of daily newspapers sold in 2010 will fall from 1.86 million (2005) to 1.76 million (2010). This corresponds to a loss of around five percent.
By contrast, Mediareport sees success models in online media. The rapid growth is expected to continue until 2010, as a large proportion of online users will belong to the group of experienced Internet users by then. For this group, the Internet is already indispensable as an information medium, which in turn attracts advertising money. The average annual growth rate in Switzerland is 12.8 percent.
However, online media are not benefiting equally from the gains in sales and market share. In fact, according to the Prognos strategy report "Online Media 2010", innovation competition is increasingly turning into cut-throat competition. With Internet experience, users' usage habits are becoming more established. The number of regularly used websites is as small as the average number of radio and television programs consumed. The online market leaders benefit disproportionately, while the medium-sized and smaller online media lose out. In order to be part of this "relevant set" with their websites in the future, medium-sized and smaller newspaper publishers in particular will have to make a huge effort.
The Prognos media reports are based on extensive and continuous research and market observations in the media and communications markets. Every year, each report forecasts the sector-specific development for one segment in the three countries Germany, Austria and Switzerland over a five-year period. The following thematic reports with a forecast period up to 2010 are available: Broadband Access, Mobile Communication, Television, Radio, Online Media, Newspapers and the Premium Report: Strategies in Networked Markets.

Column Press spokespeople are like advertisers, only more dangerous: at conventions, they nurse their profile neuroses and produce plenty of hot air. Recently, I was shocked to discover that my annual subscription to the Migros fitness center, which I had taken out with the usual good intentions, was about to expire. So I had to go there to pay off the stupid non-budget thing at least to some extent. Then, on the torture bench, where I and a dozen other cripples of civilization transferred their daytime frustration and testosterone surplus into monstrous machines, the following question formed in my mind: Why doesn't the otherwise oh-so-environmentally conscious orange giant set a good example and use all this energy to heat the sauna area one floor up? A similar fantasy plagued me at the end of September at the annual congress of the Federal Association of German Press Spokespersons (sic!) in Berlin. Despite my professional double skepticism - as an ex-journo and current non-profit worker - the two-day event initially aroused my curiosity. After all, someone had recognized and occupied a market niche here, which is bizarre, but certainly lucrative in such a vain industry. I still know from my time as editor of Werbewoche what communicators with a structural self-presentation deficit are for a profit-making audience.
In fact, more than 1,500 paying company spokespersons and lobbyists (from ABB to the energy industry association to Wuppertal's city marketing) gathered at the new Congress Centrum on Alexanderplatz. And were taught about the latest in reputation management, corporate identity building and power networking. The resulting mixture of warm words, hectic brainlessness and honest sweat made me speculate about how many kilowatt hours, which could have been elegantly transferred to the various hot buffets, the Berlin electricity companies might have missed out on here.
The real scandal of the congress, however, was the fact that here - in contrast to the hip but harmless advertisers' parties - it did not remain with self-congratulation rituals. The official laudatory speeches for the PR industry came not from the "grasshopper" David Montgomery (Mecom boss and new publisher of the Berliner Zeitung), ZDF editor-in-chief Nikolaus Brender and Michael Ringier, but from journalistic heavyweights. Representatives of the interests of business, politics and also civil society organizations today act more professionally than most editorial offices, said Roger Köppel, for example, who moderated one of the many panels.
Such expressions of respect from a competent source would still be tolerable. What is intolerable, however, is when PR people presume to award "golden apples" to honorable journalists - and don't utter a (self-)critical word about deliberate border blurring or the ever more fragile Chinese wall. This is what happened at the "Speaker's Night" in Berlin's Philharmonie, where the congress danced and ex-Bertelsmann CEO Thomas Middelhoff seriously asked his press spokesman for permission before he serenaded the gala guests live with the Moonlight Sonata.
In his keynote speech, the current Karstadt CEO then accused the media of "reluctance to investigate" and "lack of skepticism toward informants. The fact that it was precisely such informants who filled the hall in front of him escaped the irony-free manager. Otherwise, he might have made amends to the assembled guild with a few push-ups and used the energy thus gained to ... But wait, enough rambling and off to the next Migros machine.
Oliver Classen is press spokesman for the Berne Declaration, a development policy organization. Before that, he worked as a media journalist for Werbewoche, among others.