Agencies The car manufacturer General Motors (GM) is pitching for its 3.5 billion dollar US media buying budget, the second largest client in the USA, which was previously handled by agencies of the advertising holding company Interpublic, which now has to compete against Publicis. Interpublic is threatened with the loss of almost one percent of its global income. The announcement caused Interpublic's share price to plummet by almost five percent.

Column It is well known that we live in an envious society. What remains a mystery, however, is why the SRG boss has so criminally ignored this fact. Care for a little test? Albert Einstein: The image with the outstretched tongue immediately pops up. Vietnam War: Remember that terrible scene when the South Vietnamese police officer puts a gun to the Vietcong's temple? the same thing happens in our heads with brands and status symbols. Rolex - well, you know: expensive, but a bit flashy. St. Moritz - right, but do you have to go there if you don't want to show off? Porsche - which brings us to the subject.
There's a reason why Christoph Blocher drove around in a Volvo station wagon and Martin Ebner in an old BMW 5 Series when he was a CEO. I know a billionaire who has a chauffeur and bodyguard, but they only drive around in an Audi. The Mercedes stays at home in the heated garage, reserved for guests.
And I know a successful lawyer who has wanted a Jaguar for a long time. But he won't buy one until he's retired at the earliest, he says. "If I parked the Jaguar at a client's, my hourly rate would immediately be an issue." When he's not driving his wife's Polo, the man is on the road in a streetcar or cab.
Successful people, even if they are not accountable to anyone but themselves for their private efforts, have it in their genes: Just don't stand out unnecessarily! Just don't give any cause for envy. People tick differently than we would like them to - especially those who can't afford Porsches and Jaguars, but are sometimes in a position to make decisions about the projects of others, the more successful ones: about their hourly rates or fee requests. This regularly happens at the level of those who wash their Opels themselves on Saturday mornings.
And Armin Walpen bursts into the middle of this envious society with his Porsche Cayenne, which is a comfortable and sensible car - especially for someone who owns a vacation home in Goms (and not in St. Moritz). But "Porsche" calls up images that are counterproductive in the context of fee increases. At least for those who - for whatever reason - bring them up.
No headline writer could have done anything with "Volvo-Walpen". But this was an opportunity to put one of Switzerland's most capable media managers in a corner where he definitely doesn't belong. Someone who successfully runs a business with a turnover of 1.5 billion is very well paid with an annual income of around 500,000 francs (including a contribution to the aforementioned Porsche Cayenne), but by no means overpaid, let alone in the "rip-off" category.
But how is it that a clever man like Armin Walpen either ignores or misjudges these envious reflexes and their practical consequences? Has he too often driven up in his BMW and chauffeur, leaving room for the other antlers-bearers hurrying on foot from the parking lot to the meeting point? Or does such behavior have to do with the frequently observed tendency of top managers to partially lose touch with reality?
That would indeed be strange for the leading light of an industry that lives from and with emotions. It's not just since the "Walpen case", which obviously isn't one, that we know this: If you want to take someone down, always look for their weak points in their personal environment, in their relationship offenses, in their expense receipts. Every small controller who wants or needs to get rid of a manager in a hurry knows this. And the headline writers in those publishing houses, in whose underground garages a Porsche Cayenne has long since ceased to attract attention, know this too.
> Karl Lüönd is a journalist and head of the Media Institute of the Swiss Press Association.

Internet The western Swiss business newspaper L'Agéfi is launching a new cooperation with the news agency SDA, offering access to a fee-based news database at the Internet address agefi.newsandsports.ch. In a first step, it will include over 3.9 million reports from SDA and Sportinformation. Later, 25,000 articles from L'Agéfi will also be added. The cost of three francs per article is paid by SMS.

Guest commentary The television is evolving from a sequential to an interactive medium - and thus to a universal advertising space, says Stephan Howeg.
Mr. and Mrs. Swiss watch around 150 minutes of television every day. In quantitative terms, this will hardly change in the coming years. In terms of quality, however, epochal changes are underway. What is meant by this is not the audiovisual content or formats themselves, but how viewers interact with the existing TV offering.Today, television is still a sequential medium and therefore inefficient: if you want to watch the "Tagesschau" but the evening movie is already on, all you can do today is wait. This is because the "Tagesschau" is only "delivered" again later on SF info. In contrast, the Internet content you want is always available. Well, almost always. And if you don't like one site, you google another. Television is gradually taking over this permanent availability of content from the Internet. In other words, instead of following the clock and the TV guide, viewers access what interests them - when and where they want.
The increasing fusion of the advantages of computers and TV means the end of program dictation. With a digital video recorder, finding, recording, playing and archiving the individual TV menu is child's play. Viewers no longer have to wait for "Lüthi & Blanc", they simply call up the last episode or record all upcoming episodes at the touch of a button.
Such applications are made possible by targeted investments in the television cable: today, it no longer only transmits TV signals, but also acts as a multimedia interface for television and radio, broadband Internet and telephony. Cablecom has been cultivating this "triple play" in Switzerland for a long time. It has been so successful that the former monopolist Swisscom is currently trying to adopt the recipe. For some time now, it has been running tests to transport television over the conventional telephone wire. Apparently with little success, as it was recently decided to fall back on the tried and tested television cable. And this with the help of an analog recording device, while the real innovations are happening in the digital sector.
Advertising will also face new challenges in the future. Television will soon no longer be the mass medium through which commercial messages reach the general public: New technologies make it very easy to skip spots in recordings. Conversely, digital television also offers the advertising industry new opportunities. The viewer intervenes in the action, obtains additional information or books the dreamboat passage directly on the screen. In other words: with the digital television experience, the entire broadcast content becomes a potential advertising space. If that's not a prospect.
> Stephan Howeg is Head of Corporate Communications and a member of Cablecom's Executive Board.

Car If there's one question that's currently giving the average Swiss sleepless nights, it's probably where they can get the fruitier yogurt, the bigger potatoes and the cuddlier toilet paper for their Fränkli and Räppli. Is it the Turkish or the Tamil shop just around the corner, the trusted retailer with the green budget packs or the francophile price crunchers? It's best to postpone shopping for a few months until Aldi and Lidl bring their answer to this question of life and survival to Switzerland.
Peugeot dealers already offer a real alternative to this. There you can now get a lot of horsepower and even more chrome for a little bit of savings and without having to test your patience. Perhaps too much of a good thing for some road users. If the businessman pictured and owner of the colossal Peugeot 206 still has problems with the huge clutch and brake pedals that take some getting used to, all that will remain of the other cars - coincidentally also Peugeots, but still at the conventional price-performance ratio - is a heap of scrap on four wheels. So let's hope for the best for the car parked behind it with the license plate ZH 654701, and let's pray for the street cleaner at exhaust level and for the mother and child by the front bumper.
(la)

Magazines Under the name Tourbillon, business journalist Karl Heinz Nuber is launching a German-language watch magazine and has entrusted the St. Gallen CI agency Küng Identity Group with the publishing mandate. Tourbillon takes a look behind the scenes of the industry and also presents "Men's Toys", including luxury watches, cars, fashion, boats and electronics. The magazine will be published quarterly from the end of March with 40,000 copies. They are sent to members of the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry (FHS) and the Association of Swiss Goldsmiths and Watchmakers (VSGU). Newsstand and subscription sales are also planned for a later phase.

TV The Aargau regional broadcaster Tele M1 is content with its current broadcasting area and is foregoing an extension over the Hauenstein to the Rhine and west to Biel, confirms Florenz Schaffner, Head of Electronic Media at AZ Medien. In autumn, Schaffner had applied to the Federal Office of Communications (Bakom) for a license renewal including the expansion of the area. He justified his decision with the RTVA: according to Bakom, it makes no sense to create new facts with regard to territorial expansion before the RTVA comes into force. "We could not ignore this argument," says Schaffner. This is why Tele M1 also decided not to take over Intro-TV, even though it could have covered the desired area in the west. But postponed is not canceled in Aargau. "Tele M1 sees itself as a television station for the Mittelland, which is why we will submit our request again in due course," says Schaffner.
(mk)

Uhren Wirz Werbung has had to hand over the budget of watch manufacturer IWC to Jung von Matt/Alster in Hamburg, the Zurich agency that has been advertising for the brand for ten years, and for the past five years with a campaign that positions IWC as a watch for (real) men only. According to a report in Cash, a global market study revealed that this machismo was not so well received in the USA and Japan, which is why IWC is now relying on a new advertising agency.

Fast food McDonald's has launched a new campaign to promote a healthy lifestyle to families and children, including TV commercials, sponsorship from media and non-profit organizations and testimonials from athletes such as tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams and other celebrities. The TV commercials also include mascot Ronald McDonald, who now wears gym gear and climbs skyscrapers, for example. The spots were created by Leo Burnett Chicago and are to be adapted worldwide by local McDonald's regular agencies from the TBWA and DDB networks. The tagline will also be incorporated into the campaign, expanded to "It's what I eat and what I do ... I'm lovin' it".

The real estate platform Immostreet.ch now also publishes its advertisements in French-speaking Switzerland in printed form.the magazine, which is also called Immostreet.ch, is published monthly and is distributed free of charge via post offices, real estate agencies and Credit Suisse branches. The March issue contains a total of around 1000 advertisements with color photos. The circulation is 60,000 copies. Gérard Paratte, Managing Director of the Lausanne-based web platform, is confident about the future of print media: "We believe that the traditional classifieds market will continue to exist, complementing the Internet," he comments on his expectations.

Competition law In the case of the small advertising broker AdX against PubliGroupe, a hearing of the P will take place "shortly" before the Competition Commission (ComCo), after which it will decide on the application of its secretariat. This was stated by Patrik Ducrey, Deputy Director of the Competition Commission, on request. He did not give any dates, nor did he provide any information about the content of the application. One thing is certain: In the last three months, both P and AdX have commented on the application once again.Unlike the ComCo, P itself already let it be known in December that the application was to its disadvantage and required it to also commission small intermediaries such as AdX. In its report, the ComCo Secretariat saw confirmation of what it had already suspected two years ago - that the P was "unlawfully restricting competition and abusing its dominant market position" by "discriminating" against some competitors and blocking their market access through unjustified guidelines.
(mk)

Marketer Euro RSCG Zurich has created an eye-catching image campaign for IP Multimedia with English wit. This sentence does not only apply to advertising. The wisdom can also be found in the daily wilds of life, always and everywhere. The Euro RSCG agency has therefore used this banal insight for a more far-reaching message within its image campaign for IP Multimedia, which was launched three years ago. The three new subjects of the 2005 campaign work with wittily exaggerated - and thus sympathetically striking - situations around various rather absurd-looking "scenes from an advertisement". They show people who want to advertise - but are unsuccessful.
Frank Bodin and his team are thus following on stylistically from their campaign back in 2002, which used similarly off-target reversals to awaken a sense of genuinely resonant messages. In between, Euro RSCG "explained the business of IP Multimedia" with a product campaign last year. Now, the desire for the services of the leading private marketer of electronic media in Switzerland is to be refreshed once again.
Penetratingly charmingThe continuing image campaign is again based on the IP multimedia claim "Messages that get through" and shows three ads that do not. A man tries to sweet-talk a woman at a party. He does this in such a penetratingly charming way that the woman he is courting doesn't even get around to discovering a tiger skin on the floor. This hunted animal also wants to attract attention. A creative advertiser has placed a plaque in the maw of the cat of prey, which is draped to scream. A company that wants to attract attention with a car trade-in bonus of 5,000 francs.
It could all be much easier. But how?
"Efficient advertising requires a relevant message, a fresh idea and, last but not least, media planning that ensures that this surprisingly staged message is in the right place at the right time," is the message in the new campaign for IP Multimedia. For its designers, the target group is reached when it pays the most attention to the message.
This is exactly what IP Multimedia does. Behind the advertisements are the arguments that IP Multimedia operates a competent research department to create the statistical basis for targeted advertising. Thanks to specialists for planning, processing and controlling. And exciting broadcasting channels on all Swiss private radio stations as well as the TV stations Kabel 1, M6, MTV, ProSieben, RTL, RTL II, Super RTL, TVM3 and Vox. IP Multimedia's stations are "young and leading among 15 to 34-year-olds", says consultant Petra Gayko at Euro RSCG.
British humor in mindIn order to create an affinity with this audience, CD Text Dominik Imseng and CD Jürg Aemmer wanted to realize the subjects in the style of slapstick scenes and "entertaining, like the broadcasting vessels managed by IP Multimedia". The scenes were photographed in London because they wanted to capture the English humor of the well-known London photographer Paul Thompson. Thompson has also photographed the current campaigns for Mastercard and the English newspaper The Guardian.
In addition to the tiger with the chatterbox at the party, another subject features someone who has climbed up the glass façade of a company using suction cups to advertise wellness vacations by sticking to an office window. Yet no one is looking. The laconic headline, on the other hand, should be looked at: "It's easier to stand out. On television, for example."
In the third subject, a helpless advertiser snorkels in the pond of a golf course, holding a poster out of the water advertising perfumes. However: This message also goes unnoticed. Hence the headline: "It's easier to stand out. On the radio, for example."
It's easy to guess that in the context of this visual language, the subject with the cocktail party is symbolic of advertising at the POS and is therefore underpinned by the claim: "It's easier to stand out. At the POS, for example."
The "It's easier to stand out" campaign is advertised in the national trade press throughout the year.
Euro RSCG for IP MultimediaBack in 2002, Euro RSCG for IP Multimedia was already working on reversing the problem.
The idea "And yet another message that doesn't get through" was illustrated with a carrier pigeon carrying a much too heavy parcel, a message in a bottle or an alpine farmer with his prayer funnel in front of the vast sea. The corrective headline: "Your advertising message gets through with IP Multimedia."
In 2003, Euro RSCG continued its advertising for IP Multimedia with a product campaign. "Radio messages that arrive" were illustrated with the visualization of acoustic waves. An ad screen was created with the attraction of fresh fish on the market.
and POS respectively. (pan)
Quite striking: Euro RSCG Zurich makes it clear that IP Multimedia places messages in a targeted manner.
Not quite arrived: Even earlier, IP advertising played with the inverse of the problem.
Andreas Panzeri