For example, today's print and online edition of 20 Minuten assures: "We don't want to harp on it, but: Hero Ravioli - Guaranteed with Swiss Beef." With this, Hero wants to remind people that they can always rely on the quality of Hero egg ravioli, the agency said in a statement on Friday.

Responsible at Hero: Christian Schenk (Business Unit Manager Consumer), Manuel Benz (Product Manager). Responsible at Streuplan: Thomas Back (overall responsibility), Stefanie Fink (AD), David Roth (text), Dalibor Tihi (online).

The centerpiece is a flexible communication platform. Its information offering automatically adapts to the needs of users in terms of form and content, the agency said in a press release on Friday. The English-language magazine, which is distributed worldwide, helps its readers to deepen and complete their knowledge on the subject of taxes.

In T Magazine, managers and experts have their say and explain their findings, while decision-makers from the world of politics and academics also contribute articles on key business topics. The first issue of AKB's newly conceived T Magazine is expected to be published in mid-2013, with four issues planned per year.

At the heart of the simplified app are the "Speech in noise" and "Questionnaire" hearing tests. Through the simplification, the user is now guided directly through the tests and thus made aware of the core problem of hearing impairment.

Responsible at Sonova: Renato DiRubbo (Retail Marketing Director), Dario Bernardi (Senior Marketing Manager). Responsible at Futurecom: Sandro Kümin (Art Director), Katie Salmon (Screen Design), Marcel Berberich, Marcel Lüscher, Rigobert Mihle (Programming), Jürgen Vanicek, Carlo Schenker (Consulting).

Komet was able to assert itself thanks to an image concept with a strong branding focus. The first implementations in the new appearance will be seen from the second half of 2013.

 

Activities are being reorganized, job cuts are being examined and a consultation phase is being initiated, according to Orange. During the initial phase in the coming weeks, a potential reduction of around 70 jobs in management and administration is planned. Further adjustments will then be examined in a further phase during the course of the year on the basis of modernized and simplified customer processes, Orange said in the press release.

In addition, at least 60 new jobs are to be created and 18 new Orange Centers are to be opened. This is intended to supplement the current investments of 700 million Swiss francs in the mobile network.

Syndicom sees downsizing as a consequence of the price war

For the Syndicom trade union, this further wave of redundancies within the telecommunications industry comes as no surprise; on the contrary, it was foreseeable, as the union wrote in a press release on Friday. The ruinous and ongoing price cuts in the mobile telephony market and the merger between Orange and Sunrise, which was prevented by the Competition Commission, are among the main reasons for the worrying developments in mobile telephony.

Syndicom welcomes Orange's willingness to involve the union in the consultation process and to subsequently participate in the social plan. The union concludes by saying that it hopes to be able to work with the employee representatives during the consultation process to come up with proposals and solutions relevant to the labor market that will open up new and sustainable career prospects for the affected employees both within and outside Orange.

 

For young professionals in particular, winning offers a wide range of opportunities. In addition to a student discount on registration fees and, in the event of an award, on further costs, the Red Dot: Junior Prize, endowed with 10,000 euros, will be awarded to the best work among the participating entries. The prize money is intended to facilitate career entry and provide scope for further creative achievements.

In order to better reflect the wide range of communication services submitted in the past, the various categories of the Red Dot Award: Communication Design have been revised and defined even more precisely: Those who want to make brands tangible rely on bold and distinctive communication strategies. In the Red Dot Award: Communication Design 2013, these works can be submitted in the new category "Brand Design & Identity".

You will find the dates below:

Call for entries: March 25 - May 24, 2013
Early Bird: March 25 - April 15, 2013
Regular: April 16 - May 7, 2013
Latecomers: May 8 - May 24, 2013
 

The sectors that recorded the largest year-on-year decline were "IT + office" and "food". In both sectors, a minus of more than CHF 4.6 million was measured in January 2013. This was announced by the market research company Media Focus on Friday. For the food industry, this is less significant due to the larger total volume. There, a minus of 14.6 percent became apparent. The situation in the "IT + Office" sector, on the other hand, is quite different. The decline of 4.8 million Swiss francs resulted in a minus of 52.4 percent.

Compared with the same month last year, the advertising volume for laptops decreased by CHF 3.3 million. Accordingly, advertising pressure in this submarket fell from 4.4 to 1.1 million Swiss francs in January. Almost all brands were advertised less intensively. However, it is particularly striking that an HP laptop promotional offer was not advertised this January and therefore advertising print amounting to around CHF 1.5 million was "missing".

Online as a growth platform

However, there were also positive developments to report in January 2013. An increase of almost 4.8 million Swiss francs over the previous year was measured in the "services" sector. Overall, this industry is developing encouragingly from an advertising perspective. Since 2003, advertising pressure has increased annually, with the exception of the economic crisis year 2009.

In January 2013, the advertising of "Online services" was pushed the most compared to the advertising of the other service areas "Education" and "Commercial services + consulting". Advertising pressure for "Online services" amounted to over 10.1 million Swiss francs in January 2013 (+63.9percent; +4.0 million Swiss francs). Within "Online services," the largest share of around 3.7 million Swiss francs (+475.4 percent; +3.1 million Swiss francs) went to "Online marketplaces," followed by advertising for "Dating portals" (2.9 million Swiss francs) and "Couponing" (1.1 million Swiss francs).

 

As a first step, Coundco built the four-language Adecco Blog as the social content center. It serves as the heart and pacemaker for the Adecco social network, which will connect all departments and branches on various social platforms. Parallel to the blog, presences have been established on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. With the blog, Adecco is striving for digital leadership in the HR sector and is further expanding its position as an expert for the Swiss labor market, the agency said in a press release on Friday.

In order to fully exploit Adecco's social potential, the agency is now introducing all branches and specialist departments to the world of social media with workshops. "Creating the conditions for employees in over 100 branches spread across Switzerland to use social media in a targeted and efficient manner is a great and exciting challenge," says Coundco Chief Strategist Florian Wieser.

Responsible at Adecco Switzerland: José M. San José (CMO), Fabienne Wildbolz (Media Relations Specialist), Rosangela Thomaz (Communications Manager), Olivier Gossweiler (Digital Marketing Manager). Responsible at Coundco: Florian Wieser (strategy), Tobias Stahel (content strategy, concept, project management), Léonie de Montmollin (project assistance), Jaromir Fuoli (art direction), Pascal Howald (programming, social engineering).

It’s the hottest topic in online advertising—automated real-time auctions of advertising space and website inventory—known as real-time bidding (RTB) for short. In Switzerland, this is often referred to as Real-Time Advertising (RTA). In the U.S., revenue from display advertising via RTA already stood at around two billion dollars in 2012. Market researchers at IDC are even forecasting nine billion for 2016. Switzerland and Germany are lagging far behind. Here, website operators and their marketers—especially those in the premium segment—tend to be rather cautious when it comes to RTA.

Low-quality display inventory via RTA

In Switzerland, it is currently nearly impossible to transparently purchase «top-of-the-fold» display inventory on premium websites through RTA. The reason: There are hardly any offers. As long as not all publishers participate, making their inventory available for RTA would cannibalize their traditional premium business overnight. Under the current conditions of RTA in Switzerland, the few participants on the advertiser side could cherry-pick the best spots from the inventory pie for very little advertising spend. And this despite the fact that the pie would be baked with more data and more targeting than before. Publishers therefore fear that real-time trading will drive prices down. They assume that ad spaces would yield less than they would earn by marketing them themselves. From their perspective, satisfactorily monetizing website inventory through RTA would thus become considerably more difficult. Unless, that is, they worked with minimum price thresholds. However, this would then render the goal of automated and fair pricing between advertising media on the one hand and inventory and user contacts on the other via real-time trading completely meaningless.

No automated real-time trading without transparency

Transparency is important to advertisers. They want to know on which websites and in which contexts their ads are being served. They want certainty—especially when it comes to CPM or CPC billing—regarding the actual advertising performance delivered. Time and again in the past, ads have been served on websites or in contexts where advertisers did not want their products or services to appear. For many advertisers, this makes RTA unattractive today. What exactly are they supposed to bid on? It’s a chicken-and-egg problem that needs to be solved. After all, the advantages of RTA are obvious: significantly reduced transaction costs and the ability to display the right ad to the right user at the right time in the right place. It is a fallacy to assume that RTA prioritizes price over quality. The opposite is true: when properly implemented, RTA can improve quality and thereby justify higher prices. All market participants could benefit from this.

The Solution: The Image-Text Display

Bidding—that’s real-time performance in its purest form. Consequently, the solution to the chicken-and-egg problem could lie in an ad format that is already performance-oriented and, above all, traded transparently: the image-text ad. If publishers, in clear distinction from their display inventory, approve only image-text ads for transparent real-time advertising, the risk of a price decline in their premium business no longer exists. The ad format would be positioned well below the fold and clearly distinct from branding-oriented budgets. Within the image-text ad ecosystem, corresponding demand from advertisers could quickly build up. Furthermore, this approach would allow both sides—publishers and advertisers—to gain experience in the RTA business, take their first steps together, and learn how to navigate the new business model.

Once image-text ads have reached a critical mass of advertisers using RTA, competition can drive prices to realistic levels. In the next step, additional inventory could then be made available for RTA that would otherwise be marketed directly by publishers. The major advantage of this step-by-step approach is that the new system would be well-established and sufficient volume would be available. The path would be clear for real-time auctioned display inventory, as the obstacles for publishers—cannibalization of premium inventory and cherry-picking by a small number of advertisers—would thus be eliminated. In the process, website operators and marketers could even generate more revenue: Because RTA delivers ads in a smarter, more performance-oriented way—thanks to the availability of more data and the system’s transparency—advertisers will be more than happy to spend their money. This also makes a shift in budgets from text-only ads to image-text formats based on RTA likely. This, in turn, would benefit marketers.

The image-text format would once again prove to be a driver of an innovative business model, just as it has been—in clear distinction from branding—in the cases of CPC and performance advertising as a whole. This ad format is effective because it is integrated into the internet user’s reading flow without being disruptive. The basis for ad exchange via RTA would be the creation of a uniform standard for image-text ads. However, since all Swiss players offering these ads—including Facebook—differ only very slightly from one another, this should not pose an obstacle to simple and rapid integration into the IAB standard or the Open RTB 2.0 image-text standard.

Conclusion:

If publishers made their display inventory available transparently via RTA, the currently low demand on the advertiser side would undermine fair pricing. When it comes to RTA, Switzerland is a black box. RTA currently operates exclusively through display inventory on non-premium and, above all, cross-border platforms. For advertisers, there is a lack of transparency and any incentive to rely on RTA. Real-time trading is purely performance-oriented. Therefore, a sensible first step would be to agree to introduce RTA for image-text ads. These are already traded in a purely performance-oriented and transparent manner. This would allow the new technology to be adopted for the benefit of all market participants and help build sufficient demand-side volume. In a subsequent step, it would be possible to expand RTA to display inventory, as the barriers to meaningful competition would have been removed. In this way, image-text ads could become a real catalyst for RTA in Switzerland.

Alexander Beyer
Contributed by Henning Lange, CEO of Adcloud

ADCLOUD: As Country Manager, Alexander Beyer and his team oversee all of Adcloud GmbH’s activities in the Swiss market. The company maintains close relationships with Swiss agencies and direct clients, as well as publishers and marketers. A native of Cologne with close ties to Switzerland through the Swiss side of his family, his goal is to continuously improve the quality of online advertising delivery for advertisers and websites. He sees the introduction of real-time advertising as a major opportunity, as it enables the determination of a «fair share» for all parties.
 

Firstly, you need the right mix of long-term and short-term measures. Secondly, it pays to address the entire market, not just individual segments. Thirdly, it pays to make advertising emotional. And fourthly, campaigns that rely on TV advertising are significantly more effective than other campaigns.

For several years now, the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) and the British TV industry organization Thinkbox have been investigating what distinguishes successful from less successful advertising campaigns. In a new study, 996 campaigns from the IPA database have now been scrutinized. The campaigns were analyzed in terms of various impact parameters. For example, the number of "business effects" was examined, i.e. the question of how many areas (such as sales, revenue, market share, price elasticity) a campaign achieves strong positive effects. Another measure of success considered in the study is "Annualized ESOV efficiency". This efficiency indicator shows the percentage by which the market share grows per year if the share of voice is 10 percent higher than the market share.
 
So what are the findings of this study? An initial key finding is that companies should strive for the right mix of long-term brand building activities and short-term measures to increase sales. Short-term, activating advertising activities lead to an average of 0.7 positive "business effects". Brand-building measures have stronger effects; on average, they have an impact in 1.3 areas. However, a combination of activating and brand-oriented measures works best: on average, it leads to positive business effects in 1.5 areas. From an efficiency point of view, it is also advisable to combine brand-building and sales-promoting activities. Compared to the isolated use of brand-building measures, ESOV efficiency can be doubled (0.6 vs. 0.3). A second finding is that campaigns that address the entire market are more effective than those that only focus on existing or new customers. Advertising measures that are aimed solely at existing customers achieve positive business effects in 2.2 areas on average, while pure new customer campaigns achieve positive effects in 5.6 areas. Campaigns that target both existing and new customers generate an average of 6.7 positive business effects.
 
Clemens Koob

Key facts
- Campaigns should be short-term, sales-boosting and long-term oriented.
Combine branding activities.

- Compared to purely brand-building activities, this leads to more
positive business effects (1.5 vs. 1.3) and higher ESO efficiency
(0.6 vs. 0.3).

- Campaigns that appeal to the entire market generate more business.
effects (6.7) than campaigns only for existing (2.2) or new customers
(5,6).

- Emotions work better: 29% of the emotional, but only 16% of the
rational campaigns lead to strong revenue growth. Emotional
Campaigns are also more efficient (ESOV efficiency 0.8 vs. 0.3).

- Campaigns that use TV achieve 41% more positive business effects.
They are also significantly more efficient (ESOV efficiency 0.6 vs. 0.1).

New additions:

The Ticino Viviana Chiosi has developed from a graphic assistant to an art director within 14 years at Publicis. During that time, she gained valuable experience on major accounts, winning many creative awards, including gold for Emmentaler. Along the way, she built a reputation as a charismatic artist, the agency said in a statement Thursday.

Senior Copywriter Jan Krohn has already worked with Viviana Chiosi at Publicis for over four years in the team of CD Sacha Moser. This included campaigns for Maggi, Charles Vögele, Frisco / Findus and Orange, each of which ranked in the top 2 of the

"Campaigns of the Year" were placed. Krohn was once lured into advertising from the literary scene by bestselling author Martin Suter and has since worked on campaigns for various agencies and clients.

Almost a kind of return celebrates Christian summerwho already has Serviceplan experience as AD at the parent agency in Munich. There, as well as in other positions as AD and CD, he has collected over 100 national and international prizes and awards in creative competitions, including several Lions in Cannes. He has been a member of the British art director and designer club D&AD since 2009 and is expected to play his part in making Serviceplan Suisse one of the country's leading creative agencies, according to the statement.

Copywriter Ulrike Schumann has realized her potential in recent years, especially away from advertising: she worked for the TV station Viva, wrote for her own as well as for the fashion blog Lesmads.de, set up a boutique/webshop in Zurich and most recently worked for the online store of the PKZ Group. Today, Ulrike Schumann is once again designing and writing copy for the Serviceplan Group, for which she has already worked in Hamburg and Munich - following engagements at the agencies Jung von Matt, Heimat, DDB and McCann Erickson, as well as completing her business communication studies in Berlin.

Andrea Zanzerl, who was creative for Bernina and Charles Vögele at Red Lion and Publicis in particular, has joined Serviceplan Suisse as a Junior AD.

(from left to right: Andrea Zanzerl, Ulrike Schumann, Viviana Chiosi, Christian Sommer, Jan Krohn)

 

Legal disputes over trademarks and patents are more present in the media than ever before. This makes non-lawyers curious, but they are also somehow weary of the matter. The protection of intellectual property is not natural and has only existed in its current form since the end of the 19th century. There are entire continents that still believe that creations and innovations belong to everyone and should not be monopolized. It was only through concessions in agricultural trade that these countries were persuaded to protect or better protect intellectual property on their territory. Intellectual property rights are not an invention of lawyers, but of economists and politicians. Whenever patent protection is to be restricted in Switzerland, it is not the companies' lawyers who stand up against it, but their managers. Because protecting innovation is protecting investment. This is confirmed by someone who has become enormously wealthy through innovation, but for whom the focus has always been on innovation, not money. Steve Jobs is convinced that the economic basis of Apple is intellectual property and that there would have been no incentive for Apple to develop products if they had not been protected. As soon as the protection of intellectual property was no longer guaranteed, creative companies would disappear or not be founded in the first place*.

Intellectual property rights give a company the opportunity to amortize its investments in creations and innovations without interruption for a certain period of time. In general, patents are protected for 20 years, designs for 25 years from the date of filing and copyrights for 70 years after the death of the author. The trademark can even enjoy perpetual protection if it is renewed every 10 years; this is why the question of the validity of the design trademark, rather than the patents, is particularly hot in the dispute over the Nespresso coffee capsule.

No one is forced to register a trademark, patent or design. Copyright protection arises even without registration, i.e. completely free of charge, at the moment the work is created, worldwide. With trademarks, patents and designs, however, you run the risk that someone else who registers will restrict you in the commercial use of your innovation. You can continue to use an unregistered trademark, but only to the same extent as before. With patents, there are no problems if you were on the relevant market earlier than the person who applied for a patent for the same innovation, as this is then invalid because it is prior art. The same applies analogously to the design.

Intellectual property rights are instruments for the protection of creations and innovations. Whether you make use of them depends in particular on how much you invest in them or will invest in them in the future. On the one hand, intellectual property rights allow you to prohibit others from using your creations and innovations commercially without your consent; on the other hand, they protect you from others with better rights prohibiting the use of your own innovations. It is an entrepreneurial and not a legal decision whether to make use of innovation protection.

*Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, New York 2011

Ueli GrüterLL.M., attorney at law, Grüter Schneider & Partner AG, Zurich, is a lecturer in communications law and co-editor of the book Kommunikationsrecht.ch. He comments on practical legal issues in advertising once a month in Werbewoche. Questions for the Werbewoche legal expert at [email protected].