Sven Oeschger joined the team at Zurich-based advertising agency Sulzer Sutter as Planning Director and new partner at the beginning of the year. Oeschger most recently worked as a freelance strategist for agencies and advertising clients. Prior to this, he worked for around five years as a strategist and member of the extended management team at the Wirz Werbung agency.

The leading internet search engine has removed BMW's German website - www.bmw.de - from its index. An attempt had been made to manipulate Google results in favor of BMW. As reported by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, BMW must now submit an application to be reinstated in the index and give assurances that there will be no more attempts at manipulation in future. BMW must also name those responsible. Google search results are sorted according to relevance, and there are various ways to manipulate the results. Some of these are regarded by Google as a breach of the rules and punished with a temporary exclusion from the search index. In the case of BMW, the users who clicked on the link displayed on Google were shown a different page than the Google indexing robot. The user was redirected to a page with new car offers, while the Google robot was shown a text page on which the word "new car" appeared very frequently. The generation of "keyword pages" for robots is a trick that is used relatively frequently to achieve better rankings in the list of search results. Google had previously limited itself to blocking English-language pages. As reported by heise.de, this year the company plans to start excluding all other websites with undesirable manipulations from the search results. In addition to Bmw.de, Automobile.de was also affected by the measure. The problem there was that Automobile.de only provided searchers with an excerpt from the database containing word clusters. Although the words were the ones actually searched for, Google also considered this to be an attempt at manipulation.

Works from Germany, Austria and Switzerland can currently be submitted for the Berliner Type creative competition. Berliner Type is the international type competition organized by the German Communication Association. All printed matter created for advertising, sales promotion, public or investor relations, external or internal communication tasks can be submitted. Entries can be submitted online until February 28, 2006 and the deadline for entries is March 30.

Erich Singer has taken over the editorial management of
Lucerne Festival to Basil Rogger. Rogger has already been
1999 on the editorial team of the festival and also works as a
independent consultant, editor, copywriter and project manager at the
interface of culture and business. Singer has also worked on his own
Desire his functions within the artistic office and as a
Early Music Project Manager resigned. He will, however, continue to manage the
musicological areas of the program editions, as is the case with the
says in a press release.

The Winter Olympics in Turin
will be welcomed in around 200 countries this year. Four years ago
the competitions in Salt Lake City were broadcast to 160 countries, reports the Netzzeitung. According to the International
Olympic Committee (IOC), more than 3.2 billion people have thus
The opportunity to follow the competitions on TV from February 11 to 26.
Compared to the previous year, this is an increase of five percent. Furthermore, the total transmission time of TV broadcasters will increase by a third this year.
increase.

The real estate search is now online after extensive testing. The map-based real estate search of Swiss Post subsidiary Search.ch has been given an RSS feed, e-mail notification and PDF list functions. Users can now be notified of new offers on an ongoing basis and create lists of their preferences. The data is generated from 20 websites with around 80,000 rental and purchase properties and plots of land without the use of a doublet and is updated every 3 hours at the latest.

The German Federal Cartel Office has
against the planned complete takeover of the news channel N-TV
by the RTL Group. Complete control over the
channel, which was previously 50 percent owned by RTL and 50 percent by CNN/Time Warner.
was held, would strengthen the dominant position of the
RTL Group (RTL, Vox, Super RTL and N-TV). The takeover of the
CNN shares would also lead to a narrowing of the existing duopoly.
between the RTL Group and the ProSiebenSat.1 Group. According to
Cartel Office has served Cologne-based broadcaster RTL with a warning letter
has been issued. The parties have until February 16, 2006 to respond,
to comment on this.

With the purchase of five regional newspapers in eastern France, Est Républicain has become France's largest regional newspaper group with eleven titles and a total circulation of 1.1 million copies. Trade union representatives are now warning of a quasi-monopoly and a threat to pluralism in eastern France. In the west of France, the Ouest-France group already dominates the newspaper market. And mergers are also on the horizon in the south, where the Paris-based Le Monde group and industrialist Arnaud Lagardère want to group their regional titles from Montpellier, Perpignan, Marseille and Nice into a joint company.

After the first round of judging
There are still 49 campaigns in the running for a Swiss-Effie 06.
by Walter Merz, Managing Director of the advertising and
Association of Communication Agencies BSW, originally 99
applications were received, from which the advisory board selected 68
had. The final judging will take place on March 2, at which Effies
in bronze, silver and gold.
There are still varying numbers of campaigns in the running in the nine categories:
- Services: 5
- Financial services: 13
- Consumer durables: 6
- Trade: 2
- Media: 3
- Non-profit organizations: 7
- Consumer goods Food: 9
- Non-food consumer goods: 4
- Capital goods: 0
The jury can award gold, silver and bronze in each category. It
however, there is no obligation to award prizes. This year
the "Sappi Print Media Efficiency Award" will be presented for the first time at the Swiss Effie.
awarded. The official paper supplier of Effie, presents the award
to the campaign that wins an Effie and has the highest media mix.
print content. The Swiss Effie 06 awards ceremony will take place on
March 23, 2006 in the hardening shop of the Maag-Halle in Zurich.

The TV station ABC censored two of three songs by the British veteran rockers on Sunday evening. It was a live broadcast during halftime of Super Bowl XL. As reported by SDA with reference to the NY Times, the station broadcast the intermission program with a delay of five seconds in order to be able to cut inappropriate passages. Such delays in live broadcasts have been common since an incident on CBS two years ago. Back then, Justin Timberlake had ripped open Janet Jackson's top, revealing parts of her breast. At the time, the media regulator ordered CBS to pay 55,000 dollars. In the current censorship incident, the text passages that were blanked out were each an explicit word from sexual language.

German IT journalists believe that telephoning via the Internet (VoIP) is the most important trend. Almost every third IT journalist is of this opinion. This was the result of a flash survey conducted by DPA subsidiary News Aktuell in the run-up to the CeBIT digital trade fair. The second and third most important trends were IT security with 28.7 percent and consumer electronics with 26.3 percent. Responses from over 400 editors were evaluated for this survey.

The Swiss watch manufacturer Swatch is advertising on the Yahoo portals in France, Spain, Italy, Mexico, India and Germany for Valentine's Day on February 14. The campaign is intended to accompany the market launch of the new "Shake The Heart" watch model, as reported by the German magazine Werben & Verkaufen. From February 8, the new model will be presented with Roadblock advertisements as a Valentine's Day gift. The highlight of the campaign will be an interactive website event on Valentine's Day. Swatch and Yahoo Europe are cooperating for the first time.