Apprenticeships The apprenticeship situation is precarious and there is almost no solution. "That's not true," says Monica Jäggi, co-owner of the Konnex media agency in Winterthur. Since the agency, founded in 2001 with Peter Döbeli and Ronny Schmid, has the financial but not the human resources to guarantee apprenticeship training, Konnex will take over the costs of an apprenticeship at Publicitas Winterthur from fall 2004. This will create three additional apprenticeships there by 2006. To ensure that the agency also benefits from this, the apprentices will each work at Konnex for six months as an intern.

Anti-Marketing One of these cloned pop princesses of all people is calling for this year's Buy Nothing Day (BND).Anti-Marketing One of these cloned pop princesses of all people is calling for this year's Buy Nothing Day (BND). What seems prima vista paradoxical works according to the same principle that has turned the fundamental(istic) consumer criticism of the "Adbusters" into an aesthetic and - speaking of BND - social art form: to double-cross the opponent with their very own brand power, as in judo. The self-confessed fashion victim Christina Aguilera is obviously particularly well suited to this.
attractive targets. The lascivious Latina is usually associated with luscious "body branding" due to her hair extensions and breast augmentation. However, with their own ad for the twelfth pre-Christmas buying moratorium, the anti-advertisers from Vancouver show us that even, no: especially the purest breeds of the
entertainment industry have some protest potential. And that a raised middle finger is still enough to convert a consumer icon into a punk icon.
(oc)

Germany The state media authorities are calling on private TV stations to restrict their telephone sex advertising, stating in a press release that some stations have reduced their sex commercials somewhat since the end of 2002. However, a large number of offers remain which, although not objectionable under media law, are nevertheless "worthy of criticism".

Creative ranking Publicis is the most creative agency in Switzerland by a huge margin. Ruf Lanz storms up the rankings and takes second place ahead of last year's title holder AY&R.
Necessity is the mother of invention, they say. The anonymous author of this proverb is unlikely to have been an advertiser. For him, creativity is cyclical. He is not only proven right by the fact that the proportion of highly creative work decreased in the poor order year 2002 as the volume of advertising fell. It was often the clients themselves who held back with daring image presentations. After all, they do not want to give the impression that they are throwing consumers' money out of the window on advertising during the economic downturn. Agencies are similarly careful and selective when choosing which competitions they want to take part in - if only because of the often expensive entry fees, which force them to make an internal pre-selection.
There is another indication of the creative dry spell caused by the economic situation: the number of works submitted to practically all creative competitions fell significantly this year. Although their organizers tried to limit the decline by extending submission deadlines, offering earlybird discounts or introducing new categories. In Cannes, five percent fewer entries were submitted. At the ADC of Europe competition, the jurors evaluated fewer entries than in 2002 - just like at the Swiss counterpart. At the last Eurobest, the number of entries submitted fell by ten percent.
A spokeswoman attributes the fact that the participation curve in the latter competition for the upcoming event is once again showing a marked upward trend not to the long-awaited upturn, but to the increased chances of winning: instead of the Trophy and Grand Prix, the winners will in future receive bronze, silver and gold awards - in addition to the Grand Prix. However, very few people are dazzled by these additional prizes. Just being there counts for nothing these days. After all, only the trophies in the company showcase fulfill the asset function for the agency.
More international honors
So how is the creativity of Swiss advertising agencies faring? According to the strict judgment of the juries, it has decreased - also in relation to the number of entries. While the ten most creative Swiss agencies collected well over 3300 points at the 14 competitions recorded in 2001, a year later the figure was just over 2900, leaving just 2575 points this year (-22% in two years). Of course, Swiss creativity is always better received at international festivals. Measured against the total award cake of the top ten agencies, the proportion of foreign points rose from 16 (2001) to a respectable 23.5 percent in the current year. Bean counters would concede that the positive development is not due to the trophy haul, but to the increase in shortlist and finalist nominations. This performance at international competitions is particularly important for network agencies, as there is fierce competition between the agencies themselves. The most creative Swiss agency Publicis, for example, experienced this when its Managing Director Creation Markus Gut was invited to the prestigious international Creative Meeting. David Droga, Worldwide Creative Director of the Publicis Group, only invites strategically important agencies to the creative meeting.
However, the biggest contribution to improving the image of Made in Switzerland advertising was not made by the frontrunner, but by Euro RSCG, which was also the only Swiss agency to win a Lion in Cannes. However, this was not enough to defend its fourth place from the previous year. Jung von Matt/Limmat secured this place with a tremendous performance. CD Alexander Jaggy on the exploit: "The investments in manpower seem to be bearing fruit. Unlike in the past, we are now also winning awards for major clients." There is also a jubilant mood at Eidmattstrasse in Zurich, where Ruf Lanz has more than doubled its award points, putting it ahead of Advico Young &Rubicam (AY&R). "I didn't expect us to come second in the creative ranking of the important national and international awards with just nine noses. What I'm particularly pleased about is that we didn't score points with handicraft work for small customers, but almost always for our 'real' customers. And more often than average with our films," says agency co-owner Markus Ruf. Danielle Lanz is elegantly cautious: "Second place will be difficult to defend when the large agencies are fit again. In the long term, we see ourselves among the top six in Switzerland. We are not planning any offshoots such as Ruf Lanz Direct, Ruf Lanz Editorial or Ruf Lanz Anyway that will count."
AY&R only dropped two places in the table, but the appearance of a wadded-up fall is deceptive. The agency had to accept an enormous drop in points. CD Daniel Comte puts this down to the brain drain that the Gockhausen agency experienced in 2001. "When the former management left, many projects had been completed. We have been working on new ones since 2002, but they are only gradually going on air," he says, making it clear that his agency will soon be a force to be reckoned with again.
McCann-Erickson CEO David Honegger reacts with disillusionment to the ranking of his agency, which was in fourth place last year and is no longer among the ten most creative in this year's list. He freely admits that he is "speechless at the pitiful result, even though we still see ourselves as very creative". Making the McCann-Erickson brand sexy for customers and employees was Honegger's turnaround target a year ago when he took up the position. He assures us that we are now working even harder towards this goal.
Swiss agencies applied for fewer awards in 2003.
Luca Aloisi

Congress technology The Swiss media technology company Decatron is expanding its range of display applications with FlyingScreen.congress technology The Swiss media technology company Decatron is expanding its range of display applications with FlyingScreen. FlyingScreen enables high-quality large-screen projections in locations that were previously difficult to reach - both indoors and outdoors. Thanks to the safe helium filling, the sphere can float freely in space up to 50 meters high. Inside is a high-performance projector that reproduces signals. The manufacturer is convinced that "screens on which entire city districts can watch television" will soon no longer be science fiction.

Research SRG's audience research, which Matthias Steinmann founded 35 years ago and headed up, is getting a new boss: Manuel Dähler, Head of Radio Research, will reportedly take over Steinmann's position next spring. A contract to this effect is to be signed in the next few days.

Market research The Mediawatch is in demand. Matthias Steinmann, Telecontrol CEO and head of the SRG research service, has booked two large orders for the watch that can measure TV, radio, print, posters and cinema (WW 31/03). Ex-TV-3 shareholder Scandinavian Broadcasting System (SBS) wants 1500 Mediawatch (formerly Mediacontrol) units. SBS initially wants to measure the media behavior of certain target groups in Holland and Scandinavia. A second order for Mediawatches comes from the market research company Nielsen, which has concluded an option contract for Australia and other Asia-Pacific countries. A test is currently underway in Tokyo; Steinmann has also submitted an offer in China. But Telecontrol, the device for TV research, is also in demand: the Indian company DecisionCraft Analytics (DC) - a partner company of the McCann-Erickson Group in the field of data processing - has ordered 1000 boxes for a panel in Bombay. According to Steinmann, DC intends to purchase a further 6000 units for other Indian cities in 2004.
(mk)

Germany Two years after the discontinuation of 20 Minuten Köln, the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) has declared free newspapers to be legal, dismissing in the last instance a lawsuit brought by the Cologne-based publisher Dumont Schauberg, which wanted to stop the free distribution of daily newspapers.
considered to be anti-competitive.
It is true that it is fundamentally anti-competitive if a service that is usually offered for a fee is given away on a large scale, the BGH states. On the other hand, however, no one is entitled to the
unchanged retention of its customer base. The distribution of a newspaper that is financed solely by advertisements is not impermissible from the outset. Not only traditional daily newspapers, but also free newspapers could invoke the protection of press freedom.

Television Télévision Suisse Romande (TSR) has filed a lawsuit against the French broadcaster M6 with the Civil Court of Fribourg.TSR accuses its competitor's Swiss advertising window of unfair competition and infringement of its broadcasting rights. M6's rates are 20 percent lower than those of TSR, which the latter describes as dumping. The SRG
Sender had already tried in vain in 2002 to have the Freiburg court
to obtain a provisional ban on the advertising window. For its part, M6 does not see itself as a competitor to public television.

Essay People merge differently than companies: more emotionally, more effectively in the media, and therefore - with the appropriate prominence - sometimes much more profitably. What global corporations like DaimlerChrysler can and should learn from ego corporations like the Beckhams.The media society is redefining values. Jürgen Schrempp knows that, too. Nevertheless, the Chairman and CEO of DaimlerChrysler - recently named the second most handsome manager by Wirtschaftswoche - has yet to learn some of the new rules of the game.The value of his company today, after the merger of Daimler Benz and Chrysler Corporation, is lower than it was prior to the widely advertised "partnership among equals" in 1998.His theory that the industrial culture of car production can be saved for the future with larger volume scaffolding has not yet been confirmed by practice. On the contrary, plant closures in the USA and the lower stock market price support suspicions that size alone is no longer a suitable recipe for success.
If you believe economist Georg Franck, the economy of attention will determine value creation in the future. Check out this thesis for yourself and just imagine for a moment that Schrempp would be wearing a teasing ponytail tomorrow. Do you think it would be worthwhile for the hair styling company Brylcreem to sponsor the Swabian as a testimonial? Can he, together with his partner from Chrysler, Dieter Zetsche, free the DaimlerChrysler brand from its car body image and raise it to the popularity level of a lifestyle brand with a single promotional tour through Asia? Does he have the gift (i.e. the charisma) to become a role model for an entire generation of Japanese consumers within twenty-four hours? Inspire them to adopt his hairstyle? To send them into buying frenzies of delight that will benefit the world's DaimlerChrysler?
The wedding as a promo event
There is one company for which one can, indeed must, answer these questions in the affirmative: "Beckham". In June of this year, they showed how it's done: after their tour of Asia, the "Beckham" brand was estimated by the London Observer to have reached a new high of 200 million pounds. As a reminder: in 1999, the two first-person brands Victoria Caroline Adams and David Beckham merged to form the human-power brand "Beckham." Vodafone's head of communications, Mike Caldwell, put it succinctly: "The center-forward David Beckham is admired across cultures and generations. He is as popular with grandmothers as with their grandchildren. And a lifestyle hero with football fans and sports fans alike."
David Beckham embodies a new gender image, that of the metrosexual; a new species of man, a self-absorbed, feminine macho who thrives in the world's metropolises. In 2002, for example, he became the first male cover star of the international fashion magazine Marie Claire. That year, he promoted hairstyles, black-painted fingernails and his naked torso dipped in baby oil in a special edition of the lifestyle title GQ. His three autobiographies published to date rank right behind Harry Potter on the British bestseller list. His wife Victoria, in turn, is, according to the Penguin Books publishing spokesman, the "Queen of Pop Culture." He should know: His publisher offered the previous record sum of
$1.5 million for the rights to the autobiography of the former member of England's most successful female pop band, the Spice Girls.
While advertising and PR budgets usually have to be invested to inform the public about a merger, "England's new Princess Diana" (The Times) and her David managed to capitalize even on the consummation of their civil union of convenience. After all, the people's newspaper OK shelled out a million pounds to be allowed to report exclusively on this mother of all weddings.
Wa(h)re attention
But what does the human brand "Beckham" actually sell? Quite simply: Talking Value, in other words: Talking value for people and markets, worldwide. The marriage of Victoria and David shows the deeper meaning of mergers under the new conditions of the media society.
re numbers of units in car production). The more must be different today. Arousing, focusing and directing attention is the goal - which is also a game. It is about new forms for the eternally same content, about the contemporary reduction of complexities.
In the case of "Beckham," the two stories of a woman and a man become the single theme of love. Under media conditions, the myth of eternal, romantic love can be transformed into the resource of a highly profitable "attention firm. This offers emotional services that ensure social connectivity. People talking about people reduces the complexity of everyday life and also creates social added value. That does not know
only Dieter Bohlen. Half-knowledge in the media about intimate details of stars welds entire nations together. It creates common identification figures and, what's more, human closeness.
You can despise or idolize the British dream team, but in any case they have a common theme. "Beckham" therefore not only functions as a projection surface for individual dreams and desires, the "brand" also creates a marketplace for collective interests. "Linking values are created and aggressively marketed. Other service providers can only dream of the added value achieved in this way. That personalities themselves clearly
The recent Arnie elections in California have impressively confirmed that political parties and their programs are more effective in the media (and thus more likely to win a majority) than parties and their programs that require a lot of advertising.
The managers have to get on
With the 2002 World Cup, David Beckham pushed tennis starlet Anna Kurnikova to second place in Google's sports top 10. Is there any better testament to the power of this global human power brand? In tomorrow's economy, attention is the name of the game; athletes and other media stars have the best starting chances.
Captains of industry, on the other hand, are neither athletes nor pop celebrities. They have goods manufactured and organize their marketing. Their business is the production of utility value. Symbol producers create the respective marketing strategy according to their specifications, but otherwise managers can do little to increase the value of their company. Wrong! And disastrous! Because what is not negotiated in the media does not exist. This absolutist formula already determines value creation in the media society. Whoever procures and secures attention also gets the money. This is exactly what Jürgen Schrempp could and should learn from the Beckhams.
The media society is a meritocracy. Success is decided by castings and rankings. Winning at all costs, that's the name of the game. Whether in sports or in business, runners-up become losers more and more quickly. This is the premise on which the marriage of Victoria and David and the merger of equals between Daimler and Chrysler must be viewed - and compared. Not least under the question of who makes more profit and why? In other words, who has understood the rules of the media society, and who is trying to carry over the successful strategies of industrial culture into the future? In short: Who is doing the better job? The mergers to form the "Beckham" ego corporation have cost less investment and brought more profit than the merger of the car production of a DaimlerChrysler global corporation, is the interim assessment. Because there's no business without showbusiness...
> Peter Wippermann is a book author, founder of the Hamburg Trendbüro
and professor of communication design at the University of Essen.

Fitness Even with the newly renovated club in Regensdorf and the meeting places for the fit and fat in Stockerhof and Münstergasse in Zurich, the desire for more power beauty does not seem to have been satisfied. Puls 5 is the name of a park that is due to open in August 2004 at Escher-Wyss-Platz in Zurich. Grey Worldwide is already advertising it on posters, carrier bags, flyers and banners. If you look closely at the subject, you will discover more than just a huggable washboard in the flawless six-pack. Thanks to sophisticated training, the unknown model has had a muscular M built in Photoshop.

The online marketer Active Agent is combining the portals Bluewin.ch, MSN.ch and Sunrise.ch into one pool. According to Active Agent, the Online Super Pool reaches up to 1.5 million users in German-speaking Switzerland and 0.5 million in French-speaking Switzerland. This corresponds to 75 percent of all Swiss Internet users. The Online Super Pool is therefore suitable for
Support for overall national campaigns that have a large
The aim is to spread advertising across the population. With the introduction of the Online Super Pool, Active Agent has also developed a new booking and billing model that is intended to make online advertising comparable with TV and radio.