In the last days of the old year and the first days of the new year, the specialists of the Iundf agency family - consisting of Inhalt und Form, Iundf Marketing Techology and Iundf Media Impact - put in a great effort in the pitch for the EKZ's climate power budget. A joint effort that was rewarded. Since the end of January, the agency family has had EKZ, one of Switzerland's largest energy providers, in its client portfolio and will soon be launching interdisciplinary campaigns for it.

The industry leader still has a total of 16,048 full-time jobs in this country. This is 3.5 percent fewer than a year ago. Swisscom has, however, created jobs abroad. Almost 250 additional jobs were created at the Milan-based broadband subsidiary Fastweb as a result of company takeovers and the hiring of external employees, as Swisscom writes in its annual report published on Thursday. At the end of December, the Group as a whole had 19,062 full-time positions, a decrease of 255 jobs (-1.3 percent).

In Switzerland, the downsizing of the workforce continues. Swisscom is also expecting slightly fewer jobs in its home market this year. "With prudent planning, Swisscom intends to absorb a decline as far as possible through natural fluctuation and retirements or find alternative solutions," the "blue giant" wrote in the communiqué. (SDA)

The first "DAB Display Ad" was played out on the displays in cars throughout Switzerland at the end of August 2020 (Werbewoche.ch reported). "Since then, many customers have booked the new mass medium and have been more than satisfied with the new way to reach their target audience. The new medium passed the test phase with flying colors," DAB Network wrote in a statement. According to DAB Network, there were no technical problems and all campaigns were delivered smoothly.

Nevertheless, DAB Network has continued to work on the offer, develop it further and optimize it, it continues. The offer was extended to all DAB home radios with displays, which corresponds to an additional reach of over 280,000 contacts. In addition, the broadcast time of the advertising subject was increased from two to three minutes. Advertisers also receive detailed reporting of the booked campaign, similar to banner advertising. In addition, it should soon be possible to integrate DAB display ads programmatically.

The DAB Network was created from the company TheIndustry. The division, which is headed by Sandro Proietto, develops the DAB display ads and holds the contracts with the individual radio stations. TheIndustry markets the DAB Network offer.

With the event and networking platform Swissbau Focus and the platform for digital transformation Swissbau Innovation Lab, Swiss Exhibition initiated the transformation of the classic trade fair model into a networking and knowledge platform in 2012 and 2018 respectively. For the next step towards a hybrid experience platform, those responsible at Swissbau have brought the Basel-based agency Yellow on board.

In close collaboration, the Swissbau management team and the agency developed an overarching Purpose, which now forms the basis for the further development of offerings and the common thread for future communication. The first work reflecting the Purpose was the visual appearance and promotion of the Swissbau Innovation Lab on Tour, which was held as a hybrid event due to the pandemic. Further implementations of the strategic alignment of communication with the Purpose are the currently ongoing exhibitor acquisition and in the coming months the public visitor promotion. Yellow will also support Swissbau in designing the user interface of the new community platform.

Smart Intralogistics Solutions: As a global supplier, Kardex stands for automated storage solutions and material handling systems and industry innovations. It sets the highest quality benchmarks for long-term partnerships with customers. The new CI/CD is designed to consistently convey the brand's sharpened core values across all communication tools.

Self-confident and reduced to the essentials in visual appearance, messaging and content - the comprehensive redesign is intended to reflect the high-end solutions and market leadership for which the company stands worldwide. In a technically elegant look, with stories from the world of Kardex and aligned with the vision and mission.

The Group consists of two entrepreneurially managed divisions, Kardex Remstar and Kardex Mlog. Around 1900 employees work for the Group companies and their international customers in over 30 countries.

According to calculations by financial agency Bloomberg, that's more than any other tech IPO since that of ride-hailing service Uber in May 2019, giving Kuaishou a market value of around $60 billion before the start of trading.

Kuaishou, which literally means "quick hand," is the biggest competitor in China to Chinese video app Douyin, which goes by the name Tiktok in the West.

The app, which claims to have more than 300 million active users, allows users to create their own short videos and share them with other users. However, live streaming is more important for the app's success. Users can be seen giving make-up tips, cooking or dancing.

Business model gifts and online store

Kuaishou's biggest revenue generator is digital gifts that viewers can send to the makers of the live videos. An animated flower costs the equivalent of just a few cents. More expensive gifts can sometimes cost several hundred euros. Kuaishou and the providers of the videos split the revenue.

In addition to advertising, Kuaishou also relies on its own online store, where products that live streamers promote in their videos can be purchased.

Starting problems and further competition

Although Kuaishou's business has grown rapidly in recent years, the startup is struggling with a number of problems. Tighter rules for streaming services in China, for example, could become a burden. Just days before the IPO, the Chinese copyright organization CAVCA also came on the scene, accusing Kuaishou of having numerous users violating music copyrights in their videos.

At the same time, Kuaishou is fighting bitterly for market share with market leader Douyin and other players. The company was profitable in 2019, but posted a loss of 6.3 billion yuan (about 875 million francs) in the first half of 2020, according to its stock market filing. (SDA)

Since the beginning of the year, all platforms of the German-language edition of Forbes, Forbes DACH, have been part of Goldbach Publishing's portfolio. As a result, Swiss and Liechtenstein advertisers now have access to various titles of the world-famous business medium. These include the print editions of Forbes in Switzerland and Austria, the free newspaper Forbes Dailythe e-papers on the online newsstand Readly, in the digital area Forbes.at and Forbes-ch.com, and the weekly newsletter. In addition, there are sponsorship opportunities for Forbes events, such as the Forbes Women's Summit, the Forbes Under 30 Summit, and the Forbes CMO Conference.

"With Forbes, we are expanding our offering for our customers with one of the most successful and well-known media brands in the world," says Philipp Mankowski, Managing Director Goldbach Publishing, delighted about the collaboration.

Buying instinct

Using a simple model of consumer behavior to create targeted marketing strategies. 

• Author: Ingo Hamm
• Publisher: Schäffer-Poeschel, 2019
• Pages: 226
• ISBN: 9783791045399

Consumers seem to make purchasing decisions largely based on instinct, following an inner compass. Ingo Hamm has deciphered its function. He identifies three motives that guide all decisions in different forms. This model is explained in detail in the book. Among the many theories on the subject of brand management, the one by Ingo Hamm makes do with very few universally valid principles. Brand experts looking for a stringent, simple and clear positioning model for the B2C sector will find what they are looking for here.

Strategic marketing

• Author: Klaus Backhaus and Helmut Schneider
• Publisher: Schäffer-Poeschel, 2019
• Pages: 340
• ISBN: 9783791046945

As a standard academic work, Strategic Marketing is not an easy read. The authors provide a well-founded and systematic explanation of the challenges that companies must overcome in order to survive in a competitive market. They define and explain the most important technical terms, present methods and outline various strategies that companies can use to maintain and improve their market position. If you want to gain a comprehensive insight into the topic and examine your marketing strategy from the ground up, this is the book for you.

Future-proof in the job

Recognize opportunities and start the new working world calmly. 

• Author: Katrin Busch-Holfelder
• Publisher: GABAL Verlag, 2020
• Pages: 176
• ISBN: 9783967390049

A career is all well and good - a more realistic goal in many cases may be to avoid being left behind professionally in the first instance. Katrin Busch-Holfelder makes it clear that everyone should strive to be future-proof. If you only ever stay within your comfort zone, you run the risk of being unemployed one day. Those who are flexible and willing to learn are fit for the future, and those who see meaning in their work are satisfied in the long term. The author explains how to achieve this in a lively and practical way. Checklists with a wide range of questions invite you to get started straight away and actively shape your own future.

Smart Factory

Application factors - technology - products. 

• Author: Marion Steven and Jan Niklas Dörseln (eds.)
• Publisher: Kohlhammer, 2019
• Pages: 259
• ISBN: 9783170364684

The smart factory is currently a hot topic in the field of production. As a central element of Industry 4.0, it pursues the vision of profitable batch size one production, i.e. individual production at the price of mass production. However, there are still a number of challenges to overcome before this can happen. This anthology contains ten articles that examine the smart factory from the perspectives of digitalization, input factors, technology, processes and logistics. Anyone looking for a varied, thorough and comprehensive introduction to the topic will be well served by this book.

The ad, which aired on television in December and January and featured 20- to 30-year-olds on summer vacation, had provoked more than 2,300 complaints - making it the third most complaints about an ad ever, according to the agency. Several viewers had called the clip "tasteless." Others had criticized Ryanair for downplaying the pandemic or implying that everyone could travel carefree on summer vacation.

However, how quickly vaccination programs will continue to progress and how long travel restrictions will have to be maintained to contain the pandemic is completely unclear - and so is the outlook for tourism. Young adults, as shown in advertisements, are also at the bottom of most vaccination program priority lists, as they are the least likely to become severely ill with Covid-19.

Ryanair said it had not made any specific claims about vaccinations and had wanted to give an optimistic view of the future. "Important contextual factors" must be considered when looking at advertising, he said. (SDA)

In her career, Heller has worked both on the agency side, among others at Publicis and Wirz, and on the client side, for example at Estée Lauder or Bucherer in Lucerne. Together with her several years in London and Cape Town, Andrea Heller's wealth of experience and her personal leadership qualities would provide the perfect combination to start the future with KSP, the agency writes in a statement.

KSP's management team now consists of Daniel Krieg, Founder and CEO, Uwe Schlupp, Founder and Head of Creation, Andrea Heller, Head of Consulting, and Anita Kummer, Creative Director.

Alphabet's revenue rose by 23.5 percent to 56.9 billion dollars in the past quarter. In terms of profit, there was a jump of almost 43 percent to a good 15.2 billion dollars, as the Internet giant announced after the US stock exchange closed on Tuesday.

Youtube is increasingly becoming an important business in this regard. Advertising revenues on the platform rose by 46 percent year-on-year to around $6.9 billion. However, ads in the Internet search environment are still the central source of money for Google and Alphabet: Revenue from the division grew by around 17 percent to $31.9 billion. Alphabet shares rose by more than five percent at times in after-hours trading.

The other businesses under the Alphabet umbrella, such as robot car company Waymo and delivery drone developer Wing, piled up a loss of about $1.14 billion on revenue of $196 million last quarter. The revenue was generated primarily by network access business Google Fiber and healthcare company Verily, Porat said.

The CFO had repeatedly promised investors more cost discipline in future projects. Just a few days ago, Alphabet shut down Google's sister company Loon, which wanted to build up a business with Internet access via balloons with antennas. (SDA)

Bernafon Alpha leaves behind the old sound processing technology of hearing aids and comes with improved speech understanding and listening comfort. The inspiration for the new campaign comes from the animal world. There are species there that are known for their perfect hearing. Thus, the connection between animals and humans is the focus of Ogilvy's campaign - and the message "Inspired by the best" creates the bridge to the new product in a vivid way.

The product launch takes place with three different key visuals for ads, brochures and POS decoration and a product film that captures the concept idea with cinematic snapshots. The film allows viewers to participate in the listening experience in the forest up close and creates encounters of a special kind - between people, animals and nature.