On Saturday, the best Swiss amateur gamers and semi-professionals of the tactical shooter "Counter-Strike: Global Offensive" (CS:GO) will meet in the final of the e-sports tournament. Out of a total of 128 squads of five players each, seven teams prevailed in two qualification rounds. The eighth place in the final will be awarded to the Digitec employee team by wildcard.

The final will be broadcast live on YouTube from 1 p.m. onwards. Galaxus editor Simon Balissat and CS:GO specialist Remo Blaser will provide live commentary and analysis. The Digitec team will compete in the Zurich eStudios, while the other teams will connect online. There are PC monitors, keyboards, mice and headsets worth over 8,000 Swiss francs to be won - sponsored by Logitech and HP Omen.

"Team Digitec" will be there at least in the first round. "We'll be competing as stark outsiders," says Luis Loureiro, captain of Team Digitec and an employee in the control center of the Digitec-Galaxus warehouse in Wohlen. "But we are looking forward to the challenge."

The finalist teams are in order of points achieved in the qualification:

1. Equinox.CUP
2. Babos Gaming
3. mYinsanity
4. KINGZZZ
5. Scythe of Seraph
6. Swissbulls
7. Flying_Grit
8. Team Digitec

Why e-sports? Why CS:GO?

The three Digitec founders Oliver Herren, Florian Teuteberg and Marcel Dobler were already passionate gamers 18 years ago. The start-up came into being not least because the PC components they wanted were not available in Switzerland or were far too expensive. "We still like to gamble today, as do many Digitec Galaxus employees," says CEO Teuteberg. "That's why we've had a hankering for our own e-sports tournament for a long time."

The game CS:GO was chosen by the customers: In a public vote by the Digitec community, 18 percent of the more than 3,000 participants voted for the tactical shooter. The games "Rainbow Six Siege," "Overwatch" and "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate" also ranked highly.

Continuations are up for debate

Digitec Playground is a pilot project. Whether there will be further tournaments will be decided by the success of this Saturday. "With the Cup, we are looking into long-term participation in the scene," says David Kübler, project manager at Digitec Galaxus. But one thing is already clear: Digitec Playground will continue to belong to the community in the future.

Trophies for all other categories will also be awarded at the Best of Swiss Apps Award Night on November 6, 2019 at Aura, Zurich. You can find the shortlist here. The Advertising Week is media partner of the award. The points from Best of Swiss Apps and Best of Swiss Web count for the creative ranking of the Advertising Week.

According to the study, email marketing is still most effective around Black Friday as opposed to Cyber Monday.

Email marketing campaigns were particularly successful on Black Friday. Over 40 percent of the weekend's campaigns were sent on this day and benefited from an average order value of 9.44. While 30 percent of the campaigns on Cyber Monday took place over the weekend, the average number of orders was only 5.56.

In marketing automation, shopping cart recovery emails performed significantly better in the 2018 Black Friday period than in 2017.

In 2017, the open rate for abandoned cart emails was 37.69%, the click-through rate was 7.5% and the order rate was 1.65%. While the open rate fell to 34% in 2018, the click-through rate rose to 9% and the order rate to 2.13%.

The most surprising thing about this holiday weekend: Marketers switched to SMS marketing to reach their customers. On Black Friday alone, 33 times more SMS messages were sent than on a normal working day. Some Omnisend customers stated that SMS campaigns achieved an ROI of over 2000 percent during the holiday weekend.

Rytis Lauris, CEO of Omnisend: "The figures show that email marketing is still the top channel for the Black Friday period. We know that the success rate of cart abandonment automation is increasing year on year and that SMS campaigns can be used to increase profitability. With the growth of SMS marketing, we're seeing the channel further amplify already high-performing email campaigns, offering our marketers a more effective connection with their customers and an associated higher ROI."

Marketers should therefore start using SMS campaigns and integrate the channel into their email automation workflows to achieve very good results more regularly.

In addition to the media-effective display at Zurich HB, the Roger Köppel called drama queen, PAM has created another 12 posters in recent months.

Already beginning of April the BDP Switzerland launched the campaign "BDP. Boring, but good." with the aim of defending its 8 parliamentary seats (7 National Council seats, 1 Council of States seat) and continuously placed new posters (Werbewoche.ch reported).

The agency also created candidate posters and brochures, as well as merchandise, including a thermos flask and smiley stickers.

Fleck, who joined NZZ in 2014, has headed the NZZ TV division since 2016 with a team in Zurich and an international pool of producers. "Silvia Fleck has been instrumental in establishing the documentary series 'NZZ Format' as a successful quality brand in Switzerland, Germany and Austria and has also further developed the discussion show 'NZZ Standpunkte'," says Eric Gujer, Editor-in-Chief of the New Zurich Newspaper in a statement. "She also served as producer of numerous programs on politics, society, culture and science, consistently focusing on background, depth, differentiation and classification."

The search for a new head of NZZ TV as of the beginning of 2020 has already been initiated, according to the statement.

With Groupe Mutuel's CallDoc, medical advice can be obtained via video. However, medical consultations are still largely held in the traditional way. A video consultation is obviously not yet a substitute for the familiar doctor's consultation. To refute this view, the product must be made tangible. In three videos, the campaign shows the familiar one-to-one conversation between doctor and patient. Simple, practical, confidential - as if you were there "live".

The tone of the campaign should be both familiar and friendly and make people smile. CGI-supported subjects should also ensure a high quality of the videos.

CallDoc's diffusion strategy is - like the product - digital: three short videos, 6, 15 and 25 seconds each, and the key visuals are distributed nationally as OLV, online display, native ads and emailing. From November, the medical video consultation will also be shown via DOOH in Swiss train stations. Radio spots and banners will also highlight CallDoc's premiums. 

The communications agency Berta, based in Zurich's Kreis 3 district, was launched in 2015 and grew to a team of 13 within four years. Berta specializes in online communication - with a focus on issue and voting campaigns. Most recently as part of the Yes campaign for the STAF vote won last May. Berta also counts clients from the energy and environment, health, nutrition, finance and non-profit sectors among its client base. The agency sees itself as a full-service provider, offering strategic consulting, content and IT products.

In the summer, the agency reorganized itself. Co-founder Heike Scholten has left the company and is now working with Berta on a project basis in a cooperative relationship with the agency Sensor Advice, which she manages.

In addition to CEO and co-founder Janick Tagmann, the management team gets two new faces. Berta's long-time project and team leader Joelle Broummana is now a partner and deputy managing director of the company. Andreas Hauri, former editor at Tamedia and project manager at Berta also joins the management team as partner and head of campaigns. The reorganization coincides with a new online presence here.

The new management: Joelle Broummana, Janick Tagmann and Andreas Hauri (f.l.)

Under the Berta Digital label, the Zurich-based communications agency offers online solutions for votes and elections. The service is meeting with demand, particularly in the election year, according to a statement: in 2019, a three-digit number of politicians opted for Berta Digital's campaign software. The software allows candidates to go online in a matter of minutes with the help of a straightforward auto-onboarding wizard. In turn, a user-friendly cockpit is used to manage donation tools, "actualities," testimonials, and the company's own social media channels. Berta now also offers the same tool for voting campaigns.

Success: The Neon founders on the TV24 show "Höhle der Löwen," where startups present their product to investors.

80 percent of the accounts are actively used, 10 percent even very actively as an account for wage or rent payments. Neon benefited strongly from the Participation in the TV show "Höhle der Löwen". At times, customer service had to handle more than 300 account openings per day, which pushed it to the limit, Kirscheneder admits. 

Neon works together with the Hypothekarbank Lenzburg, which manages the accounts and handles the payment transactions, for example. Even there, not everything is going as planned. For example, the collaboration with Google Pay announced at the beginning of the year has not yet been realized. "That is very annoying for us," says Kirscheneder. Implementation is likely to take a few more months. The next step is to launch the e-bill function this year. Pension solutions such as pillar 3a are also high on the list of priorities.  

According to a study by the non-profit organization The Public Good Projects (PGP), more than half of the tweets on this topic do not originate from humans.

"Showdown of the bots"

"More and more people are now on social media, which also means that they are interacting much more with brands. Some companies are therefore reliant on bots. These can address customers directly and analyze their attitude towards a brand. However, they can also be used to target competitors and spread negative messages about them. This is where a showdown of the bots takes place," explains Markus Hübner, social media expert and CEO of Brandflow, in an interview with the Pressetext news agency.

For the study, PGP examined over one million tweets sent between February 2019 and June 2019 on the topic of e-cigarettes. It turned out that almost 80 percent of these messages came from bots. The messages spread by these bots almost exclusively show e-cigarettes in a positive light.

Attacks on scientists

Some of the bots discovered are also spreading misinformation and attacking scientists who warn about the health risks of e-cigarettes. The bots explicitly claim that these researchers are hiding the truth. According to the analysts, the pro-vaping messages are primarily aimed at children and young people.

The PGP experts warn that over 20 percent of high school students in the USA already use e-cigarettes and that this figure is set to rise due to the influence of bots. "To prevent the manipulation of conversations, the operators of social media platforms would have to take rigorous action against bots. However, they simply lack the willingness to do so at the moment," criticizes Hübner. (pte)

Finews.life wants to help put readers in a state of mind that enables them to work efficiently and effectively. The premise here is that rested, healthy people are better able to call on their own potential.

Finews.ch editor Jeffrey Vögeli is responsible for the new website. In addition to his own contributions, he will also publish guest articles and interviews as well as recommend books that illuminate the various topics of Finews.life.

In addition, he and the entire Finews.ch team will also present work and life concepts, report on their own experiences and present relevant studies.

The data relates to the German market. According to the data, demographic target group segments still account for 55 percent of the total revenue generated with data purchases. Far more specific interest segments account for only 28 percent. There is also still a lot of potential in the so-called custom segments. These are segments in which a target group is put together individually for a campaign on the basis of specific characteristics. Even though they are technically very easy to implement, they have not yet played a major role in programmatic advertising (10 percent). For the Programmatic Data Report, Emetriq analyzed the total revenues of all DSPs marketing Emetriq segments in the period from July 2018 to June 2019.

Stephan Jäckel, Managing Director at Emetriq: "Programmatic advertising has grown rapidly in recent years. The industry raves about customer centricity, hypertargeting, and micromoments, but our analysis shows that the opportunities for this are far from being exhausted. The still-popular broad demographic targeting segments have their uses, of course, but it's worthwhile for media planners to test alternatives. As the report shows, there is still an almost untapped playing field here and thus an opportunity to gain competitive advantage." 

Media planners primarily target age and gender

The evaluation shows that a lot of potential is still being wasted in the selection and purchase of targeting data: the targeting repertoire of most media planners is limited primarily to the age and gender of users, i.e. demographic segments, or to occupational or marital status. Targeting on families (with children) is also popular among many planners. However, the diversity of interest segments around hobbies or leisure activities is far from being exploited for campaign management.

Service providers are frontrunners in demographic bookings

For agencies and advertisers, the ratio between demographic and interest bookings is 50 to 30 percent and 46 to 39 percent respectively. For marketers, the gap is even wider: more than three quarters (79 percent) of bookings in the analyzed period were in demographic segments, and only 17 percent in interest segments. Programmatically targeted advertising is aimed almost exclusively at consumers. 93 percent of the data is used for B2C marketing. However, programmatic advertising is also finding its way into B2B communication. Seven percent of the data sales of all buyers were in B2B segments. Agencies and marketers book the lion's share. Only 14 percent of B2B advertisers are active themselves. This outsourcing is due to a lack of resources and specialist know-how.

Overall, agencies in particular are increasingly focusing on programmatic campaigns and driving the topic forward in the market. However, the German programmatic market remains intransparent. "There are only a few valid figures that we can use to clearly assess the status quo. As Germany's largest collaborative data pool, we feel it is our responsibility to counter this and provide orientation," explains Jäckel. "Based on the new findings, we outline current benchmarks. The report is intended to help media planners discover the many as yet untapped opportunities that programmatic and the right data offer."

UPC TV promises a great and intuitive TV experience in combination with new 1 Gbit/s fast Internet, which has recently become available in rural and alpine regions of Switzerland. To generate awareness for this innovation, Wunderman Thompson launched several sponsorships for this year's Zurich Film Festival.

The opening of the ZFF on September 26 also marked the start of communications measures for its main sponsor UPC. "Great cinema for the whole of Switzerland" was the central message and also the claim of the campaign. The print subject shows a Swiss village whose name was erected in large, white Hollywood letters. 

The fact that the voice control of the new UPC TV even understands Swiss German is dramatized by the cinema spot, which shows a young man shouting directions to his TV in dialect.

In addition to advertisements, DOOH, social media measures and an online branding day on Blick.ch, a visual appearance at the ZFF itself was also created.