Erotic publisher The German erotic group Beate Uhse has offered 62 million dollars for the US erotic publisher General Media. General Media publishes the men's magazine Penthouse and is under creditor protection, but intends to emerge from insolvency proceedings by the end of February.

Agency founder Peter Fenkart is withdrawing from AG für Public Relations (APR). Senior consultants Walter Thomas Lutz, Pascale Lehmann and Thomas Balmer have taken over all shares in the agency from Fenkart. The three of them now form the Board of Directors and Executive Board. ...
The PR and media consulting agency Interpublicum in Ostermundigen, Bern, is expanding its consulting activities. Since mid-January
Melchior Buchs is joining the communications team. He is co-owner of the Impulsa agency and will work for both companies.
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Priska Dietziker has joined the PubliGroup subsidiaries Publimedia Webadvertising (PWA) and Publicitas Webservices (PWS). She is now responsible for customer acquisition and support as well as all areas of online marketing at both companies.
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The Zurich-based media agency Mediaschneider has expanded and restructured its management team. Carla Fuhlrott-Capello (photo) is now Vice Director of Planning and Purchasing. She is also the deputy to agency boss Urs Schneider. Manuela Merz-Sigrist is the new authorized signatory responsible for finance and controlling.
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René Bortolani is the new media officer at the University of Applied Sciences (FH) Aargau. He replaces Renata Battaglia, who passed away in December. Most recently, Bortolani was head of the Media Forum, the training center for journalists at the Tamedia publishing house.
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At the beginning of March, Ueli Walther will take over from Christoph Grenacher at SonntagsZeitung. He will become a member of the editorial board and editor-in-chief.
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Susanne Rohmund is moving to Schweizer Illustrierte (SI) as Head of Business at the end of March. She is currently Head of Business at Blick. Edi Estermann has also been appointed Head of News at SI.

Self-marketing Necessity is the mother of invention: the blossoming of this popular saying could be seen at the entrance to the ADC Festival, where David Hugentobler, a young copywriter who was recently laid off from a large agency, stood to put his own personal stamp on guests and potential employers. In the hope that he would not soon have to go stamping himself. The preliminary result of this witty guerrilla campaign: numerous clicks on his website, "various amused to interested calls" and an appointment with an agency boss who, however, has no job to offer.

Theater The Grand Casino Baden is now advertising with Weber Harbeke. The last account holder was Weber Hodel Schmid, which already supported the casino in its fight for a license and created the launch campaign in summer 2002. In order to further distinguish itself in the competitive market and confirm its market leadership, the casino was looking for a new agency partner for 2004, according to a report by Persoenlich.com. In a multi-stage evaluation, Weber Harbeke prevailed over well-known competitors. The first works by the Zurich agency are expected to be seen in spring 2004.

Outdoor advertising The Allgemeine Plakatgesellschaft (APG) is conducting ten survey waves of its Poster Performance Index (PPI) in 2004. The PPI is a free service tool for national poster campaigns and measures advertising impact according to the criteria of recall, brand recognition and appeal. The interviews are conducted alternately in the agglomerations of Lausanne and Bern.

Agencies The advertising industry has been dragging on for three years now. Despite this, there are still optimists who have founded their own company, and the special edition "Agenturmacher - jung & hungrig" of the German information service New Business Report is dedicated to them. In it, the agencies present themselves with their own advertising. Among the examples is the media agency Allthatmedia with its ad. "Anyone can offer standard media strategies. Except us", reads the headline for a shoe - with the abnormal size 43 3/8.

Arne Völker came to Zurich just for love. Now he is a CD and a member of the management team at Blue Spirit.a poster with the sloggy graces hangs outside his office. The much-discussed eye-catcher was created before Arne Völker joined Blue Spirit. Nevertheless, he is happy to enter into a discussion about this type of advertising right away. Of course he likes the girls: "That's the kind of advertising I like," explains the new CD at Blue Spirit. And specifies: "Advertising does not have to please everyone. The main thing is that it has an extremely strong effect on many for it." The fact that the Sloggy posters "polarized a lot" in this sense has just been confirmed to Blue Spirit by APG in a study. Since Sloggy comes from Triumph, Blue Spirit is now to conjure up another campaign "with a similarly large PR impact" for this label. A tempting challenge for Arne Völker. They are already well on the way with proposals and are waiting for feedback, he says and reveals: "We are again working with key stimuli, extremely consistently implemented and not very artificial.
The allure of the new
However, advertising with key incentives has so far been the exception rather than the rule in the career of the career changer from Berlin. "I like working for clients who are not very risk-averse." Above all, he says, the conservative tasks offer him a great opportunity for satisfaction, "for example, when you have to find a creative solution for a bank despite a lot of restrictive specifications." Arne Völker conceived such intelligent advertising, which "can also stage a message without suckiness," at Publicis in Zurich, for example, before joining Blue Spirit. "I had the pleasure of working for clients like UBS or Nestlé, where many people say: there's really not much you can do here."
He was entrusted with these tasks because Völker once studied economics in his younger years and is therefore quick to find the right words when briefing demanding customers from the business world.
"My only talent is curiosity," he says modestly. After graduating from high school, this openness, almost greed for new things, first led the Berliner to the School of Journalism in Munich. Later, he attended a writing course at the Cologne Film School. Back in Berlin, he then "immediately dreamed of entering the top tier." The freshly trained screenwriter immediately wanted to sell his own sitcom, but with his "typical impatience" he earned nothing, instead "just paying a pile of apprenticeship money".
More concrete opportunities opened up for him as a journalist for a local newspaper, as well as in television as a reporter for the Abendschau and finally as an editor for the talk show "Doppelpunkt" on ZDF. Later, he spent two years writing scripts for soaps, for example "Verbotene Liebe" or "Mallorca - Suche nach dem Paradies" on Pro 7.
"It was a bread-and-butter job," he comments on this phase as a freelance dialog author today. You get the story outline with the plot on Friday evening, and a week later you have to deliver a dialogized book. "That's when I missed the exchange with life and real problems," Völker says. You have to make up stories about the lives of characters "and you don't really participate in their lives.
Love story with moving date
That was the point where something new was called for again. Völker traveled to the Locarno Film Festival. There, however, he did not meet a producer who saved him from the soaps, but his future wife. The "Forbidden Love" became real, as Völker moved from Berlin to Zurich. "We had been tugging at each other for half a year about who would get whom in whose city." Since wife Katja Richard had better job opportunities as a lifestyle editor at Blick in Zurich, Völker finally looked for a job in Zurich as well. A new direction and a new start in the field of communication lured him: as a copywriter at the Pucci Sulzer agency.
Völker's search for paradise was over. In advertising, he has since been able to live out his "love-hate relationship with marketing strategies" in addition to his enjoyment of copywriting. A love-hate relationship because the subject was taught in textbook form at university back then in a way that was so simplistic that it has long since been impossible to approach it in reality. Today, he loves dealing with complex marketing issues. "I'm not the wild-eyed creative, but the one who weighs things up and thinks analytically."
Arne Völker is convinced that at Blue Spirit, together with Gerry Flückiger, he can implement his idea of advertising in the best possible way: "Here, they cultivate a campaign mindset." For him as a CD, this means that many things that would make a nice individual subject or a nice film are not done "because they can't be declined down to the last detail at the point of sale." Völker, in other words, loves tasks "that are a round more difficult."
His creative goal is "small things that have a big impact". On the one hand, he is challenged to do so by the framework conditions of the assignments at Blue Spirit. On the other hand, he enjoys the freedom "that the management is open to allocating more personnel budget in order to be able to realize the necessary quality". With 25 employees, the agency in Schlieren, which was founded in 1999 and admitted to the BSW in 2003, is now one of the big players for the first time.
Arne Völker likes conservative clients and constricting specifications: "My creative goal is small things with big impact."
Andreas Panzeri

Small ads BaZ meets the needs of flea market advertisers with prepaid ad cards Although the Basler Zeitung (BaZ) suffered painful losses in the number of ads last year, it was able to maintain around 250 ads per week in the niche area of flea markets and leisure. That's a good two of the 84 pages of advertisements that were placed on average per week in the BaZ last year. The idea launched in August to offer prepaid cards for these small advertisements at CHF 10 (three lines) and CHF 20 (six lines) at the newsstand also contributed slightly to this niche volume consistency.
"We have sold around 2,000 such cards since August, 90 percent of which were 10-franc cards," says publishing director Daniel Sommer on request. In the meantime, 10 to 15 percent of the weekly flea market and leisure advertisements come in via prepaid cards, and the trend is rising. The cards are even bought in stock. Sommer: "Three quarters of the cards are not redeemed immediately."
The prepaid advertisement cards are designed as business reply cards and are available at every K kiosk in north-western Switzerland. Once the three or six lines on the back have been filled in, the card is dropped into the nearest letterbox and the text appears in the next possible Friday market or at a later date if desired. Sommer is of the opinion that the project could definitely be expanded, but under three conditions: Classifieds with prepaid cards would have to remain in the private market and be rather inexpensive. They should also be as easy to use as the flea market section. Partnership, apartment or job search ads would be conceivable, for example.
Incidentally, BaZ, Publicitas and Kiosk AG initially tested the advertising cards at 30 kiosks for four weeks last August, accompanied by advertisements in the BaZ. 243 cards were sold during this time. This was successful enough to extend card sales to all 130 K kiosks in north-western Switzerland. BaZ now wants to advertise ticket sales again with new advertisements. "It's a very interesting project for us," says Sommer.
Kiosk AG, a member of the Valora Group, takes a similar view. "Although the sale of these cards will not significantly change Valora's business results, Kiosk AG is nevertheless trying to actively present the cards at the points of sale," says Christof Biedermann, Managing Director of Kiosk. He will soon be reviewing the situation with BaZ. In his view, both an expansion with BaZ and an extension of the idea to other newspapers are possible. However, he has not yet received any inquiries from other publishing houses, says Biedermann.
Available at the kiosk: Prepaid insert cards just need to be filled in and sent off.

Markus Knöpfli

Internet The online advertising service provider Doubleclick can report a profit for a full financial year for the first time, achieving sales of 271.3 million dollars and a net profit of 16.9 million dollars in 2003. In the previous year, the company posted a loss of 117.9 million dollars

becomes Publishing Director of Media-Daten AGbecomes Publishing Director of Media-Daten AGThe Springer Science + Business Media Switzerland publishing group has
Samuel Helbling has been appointed Publishing Director of Media-Daten AG - publisher of Werbewoche.
Samuel Helbling has worked at Media-Daten AG since 1994 and has been Editor-in-Chief of Werbewoche for five years. Until a new editor-in-chief takes office, Samuel Helbling will perform both functions simultaneously. (WW)

Tourism Instead of a new catalog, Fisch Meier Direkt creates a stylish travel magazine for Kuoni.
Do people forget the economic crisis on their Kuoni vacations? Hardly the travel industry itself. According to estimates by the Swiss Travel Agency Association, it has suffered a drop in sales of almost 30 percent over the past two years due to the demand killers of terror, war, SARS and the global recession. In addition, the structural changes - low-cost brands squeezing margins and falling commission income - have robbed some tour operators of their sleep. Swiss industry leader Kuoni is in the process of radically sprucing itself up for the expected recovery: Following the divestment of its problematic business travel division, the branches that are struggling with profitability problems - a good one in ten - and TUI Suisse are now to follow suit, according to the latest speculation from Schweizer Touristik.
Focus on quality of advice
The new orientation is primarily taking place in retail, which is aiming to increase the value of advice. This is the only way to bind buyers of upmarket travel arrangements to the brand. It can therefore not be ruled out that the catalog of invoiced services will be expanded in the future.
In contrast, the four new Kuoni catalogs, which act as the linchpins of the new advertising campaign, are already available. The striking thing about them is that they feature an impressive conceptual change in the nature of the travel catalogs.
Lifestyle sells travel
The new in-house agency Fisch Meier Direkt enriched the offer section of the Kuoni travel catalogs in an innovative and attractive way: The editorially prepared background information, reports and portraits were spiced up with a visual potpourri of suggestive vacation worlds - from the Villa Kunterbunt to Nordic design and from the Hollywood desert to the spicy chicken "Frango Piri Piri" to bring the dream destinations even closer to the readership.
With the mixture of infotainment and lifestyle, the catalogs allow unusual insights even into supposedly well-known destinations. The clear graphic categorization of the target groups - with children, wellness or sports-oriented - enhances clarity.
The magazine-like concept of the new catalog line has its solid reasons in the results of market research. According to Elvia's travel behavior tracking, 46 percent of respondents still prefer the travel catalog when deciding on a travel arrangement. One and a half years ago, this was one of the reasons why four agencies were asked to redesign the catalogs. The aim was to give consumers added value, to communicate the offers attractively and clearly and to offer retailers a clear working tool.
Fisch Meier Direkt emerged as the winner of the pitch with a revised catalog structure, simple navigation and a very emotional image tonality and produced the first four editions: Beach vacations, city breaks, boat trips and Canada/Alaska.
From catalog to image
The four catalogs are also at the heart of the image campaign that was launched last week in German- and French-speaking Switzerland. An F12 display in the nine largest cities shows how connoisseur globetrotters can be whisked away to vacation worlds at home, on the streetcar, in the bathtub or in the office using Kuoni catalogs.
At the same time, readers are encouraged to order the catalogs by means of gate folders in magazines. The gate folders are supported by a broad-based advertising campaign that conveys the new image tonality and makes direct reference to the catalog page. The presentation will also be integrated into shop windows in stores, sales promotion and customer loyalty measures, cinema slides and online measures. "We are convinced that we can revalue travel in a sensual and emotional way and move away from turning vacations into a quick, short-term, low-involvement product," says Gianni Moccetti, Head of Marketing at Kuoni.
Another aim of the new catalog concept is to open up new channels for distribution and offer advertisers an attractive environment. "We haven't yet been able to actively acquire advertisers, as the project was supposed to remain secret, but we are already in the starting blocks and are very confident about the upcoming editions," says Denise Azzini, Head of Advertising and Sponsoring.
A mix of infotainment, lifestyle and offers: Kuoni's new catalog concept appeals to upscale buyers.

The ads for the new catalogs: Get in the mood for Indian summer and beach vacations.
Tourism Kuoni appeals to upmarket customers with a mix of lifestyle, infotainment and offers >> Page 7
Luca Aloisi

Ambient advertising The marketer Masani's Ambient Media is launching a new special form of advertising: companies can place their slogans and logos on private photos, in return for which consumers receive prints of their digital photos free of charge. The photos are sent via the Internet; the prints with the sponsorship imprint are sent to the photographers by post. Postfinance is the first company to make use of the offer. According to Masani's, this form of advertising benefits from a sympathy bonus, as "photo for free" is free of charge and can be taken up by consumers on a completely voluntary basis. Masani's sells the offer in two packages of 20,000 and 60,000 photos