The company is hopelessly overburdened and also does not have the necessary legal basis. Serafe does record the information of people who have received incorrect invoices. However, the information could not be automatically reconciled with the municipalities. A spokesman told the newspaper that the company is currently working on implementing a solution. (SDA)

By 16 votes to 7 with one abstention, the committee adopted a request from a motion by Councillor of States Filippo Lombardi (CVP/TI), as reported by the parliamentary services on Friday. Lombardi is President of the umbrella organization KS/CS Kommunikation Schweiz.

The Federal Council is to amend the Price Disclosure Ordinance so that the mandatory information no longer has to be communicated on the advertising material itself. In future, it should be permissible to provide the mandatory information by means of digital references such as QR codes or URLs.

The National Council Committee is of the opinion that this is more beneficial to consumer protection than "small print" on advertising material. According to the committee, it is easier for consumers to read the mandatory information electronically.

Opponents fear a loss of transparency. The Federal Council also opposes the motion. It shares the view that price disclosure should be consumer-friendly, it wrote in its statement. In its view, however, the motion is misguided.

For example, it is more than questionable whether consumers would actually be served if they had to go into the immediate vicinity of billboard advertising in order to read a QR code or URL with their smartphone.

The National Council will decide on the motion. The motion originally contained a further demand. However, Lombardi withdrew this. (SDA/hae)

The Greater Zurich Area is made up of nine cantons in German- and Italian-speaking Switzerland. Its task is to identify internationally active technology companies, support them in establishing themselves in the Zurich economic region and network them with relevant companies, universities, associations and authorities. The settlement of these companies not only creates added value for the region, but also for Switzerland in the form of innovative strength, jobs, taxes, stronger international networking and, as a result, increased competitiveness.
 
In recent years, the Greater Zurich Area has further developed its market cultivation and, in parallel, sharpened its brand strategy. In its promotion and acquisition activities, the company is now focusing on the concentrated technology expertise and stable environment available in the economic region, rather than on promoting individual location factors.
 
On this basis, MetaDesign developed a visual concept and the appearance for the Greater Zurich Area brand. Less is more: a striking layout compels the brand to fly its flag and show its colors in a national and international context. The dynamic approach to design and the captivating simplicity give the appearance a popular overall impression. The brand thus conveys clarity, efficiency, competence and reliability.

Sonja Wollkopf Walt, Managing Director Greater Zurich Area, praises the agency's work in a statement: "The challenge is to position a heterogeneous economic area globally and with a clear profile. A clear design language and pointed statements are crucial for this. MetaDesign has understood this requirement and implemented it with a concise appearance."

Alexander Haldemann, CEO MetaDesign, returns the flowers to the client: "Focusing on a few messages and getting them out there with vigor requires courage to take a real stand. The Greater Zurich Area has demonstrated this courage, for which we can only congratulate it."
 

Günter Heuberger (right) hands over the management to Philippe Pfiffner (left).

Since taking over the business of Winterthur-based real estate company Siska Heuberger Holding in 2014, Günter Heuberger has been running the companies in parallel. Now he has decided to hand over responsibility for the two media companies Radio Top and Tele Top to younger hands. The 65-year-old will remain Chairman of the Board of Directors and main shareholder of Top Medien.

The vacant position as Managing Director will be taken over by long-time Top journalist Philippe Pfiffner as of January 2022. He will become Deputy Managing Director with immediate effect and will also take over the position of Program Manager Radio Top from Corinne Wacker in the next few weeks. At her own request, Corinne Wacker is moving to Tele Top as a part-time presenter in order to have more time for her own projects.

During the transition phase until the end of 2021, Philippe Pfiffner will gradually take on more responsibility. The 38-year-old has been working for TOP Medien since spring 2005, initially at Radio Top and since 2009 (with a detour) at Tele Top. The Winterthur native is currently Deputy Editor-in-Chief and responsible for quality assurance.

Günter Heuberger is convinced that he has found an optimal successor with the appointment of Philippe Pfiffner, according to a statement. Thanks to this internal solution, the top media once again underscored that they care a great deal about promoting employees.

Wirz and Swica focus on one answer in their first joint campaign: "Because health is everything." "The claim is not new," says Caspar Heuss, Executive Creative Director at Wirz Communications. "But until now, it hasn't been where it is for most people in their lives: at the center. It succeeds because now it addresses the very questions that lead to that answer."

The campaign subjects work with the concrete advantages that Swica customers enjoy. These are incorporated in the form of various questions and, together with the answer, form the core of the campaign. "Why can you call us even in the middle of the night? Because health is everything" can be read on one ad, for example.

Swica had chosen Wirz as its creative agency in 2018. "Their campaign idea represents a return to what is essential in life: health. I am exceptionally looking forward to working with the Wirz team," said Michael Schneider, Head of Marketing at Swica, on the occasion. The current campaign is the first result of this collaboration.

Customer satisfaction is Swica's top priority. In all its activities, the health insurance company therefore focuses on the real needs of people. This is also where the new campaign fits in. With the creative concept, Swica sends an extremely strong, relevant and self-confident message that it can credibly deliver. Swica has an answer for all questions: Because health is everything.

In order to guarantee high visibility during the important fall phase for health insurers, the campaign consists of an exceptionally large number of different advertising media. These include six TV spots, seven poster sujets, four radio spots and a variety of digital measures. In Winterthur, where Swica is headquartered, a specially designed bus is now making its rounds.

The central theme of the campaign, under the motto "Unlock Life," targets urban optimists and focuses on experiencing individual freedom and connecting communities. So it's not just about getting from A to B in an efficient and environmentally friendly way, but also about the very personal stories of individual users. In a nutshell: Unlock Life = freedom, connection, community, urban design and joy.

No other place hosts as many people as a city. Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt and Cologne are home to millions of residents who experience interesting and inspiring things every day. Why make up stories when we have millions of real, amazing stories to choose from?

Foundry has set itself the goal of utilizing and highlighting the different qualities and characteristics of the respective location. In intensive collaboration with the young Swiss photographer and director Dylan Moore, hyperlocal motifs were created that interact directly with their immediate surroundings and convey a high degree of authenticity and sympathy.

Thousands of wild posters (35,000 in total in Berlin alone), numerous location-based hyperlocals 18/1 show real, open-minded, fun-loving, independent and original people telling their very personal stories and sharing authentic statements. In September, another serve follows with films.

Together with Lime, Foundry Relations was also responsible for brand PR communication. Martin Reichlin, a journalist and media spokesman of many years' standing, is in charge of press relations for Lime in Germany. He has already initiated numerous collaborations for Lime with ARD, Die Zeit, Tagesspiegel and Bento, among others.

Roman Balzan, EMEA Brand Lead at Lime: "The hyperlocal communications approach developed by Foundry will be rolled out in German cities - starting with Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Cologne - in each case in customized implementations for the launch and will also serve as a marketing blueprint for other cities."

Before the campaign started, the first task was to educate people about the product itself. This included how to use the app and, more importantly, how to drive an e-scooter safely. To this end, an e-scooter parade was organized through the German capital. At the beginning, Lime employees explained everything about the product and its safe handling to the participants. Afterwards, the participants went by rally to the main event, the First Ride Festival on the Haubentaucher grounds in Friedrichshain.

In the heart of Berlin, a big party was celebrated afterwards with local DJs, hundreds of e-scooters, lime drinks and frozen yogurts from the restaurant Schwarze Heidi. To cool down, the huge pool was also available to all guests. The festival itself was a successful combination of fun and training. Each participant received a free design helmet, which was customized by graffiti artists on request.

But even beyond the kick-off event, safety is a top priority at Lime. With the "First Ride driving training courses" organized and conducted by Foundry, the company offers its users regular driving safety courses in all major cities. This free offer has not only been very well received, but has also received extremely favorable coverage from local and national media. Thus, coverage ranges from the Hamburger Abendblatt to RTL Nord and Die Welt to WDR, B.Z. and Spiegel.

Duke Stump, CMO of Lime (formerly Lululemon and Nike): "Inspiring people, inspiring ideas, an inspiring campaign. Foundry convinced us from the very beginning."

Swiss Sacha Moser, Founder & Creative Lead at Foundry: "We are incredibly proud and happy to make such a difference with such a sought-after and innovative brand. Our client partner really knows how to unleash successful strategies, creativity and execution."

As of December 1, 2019, Marco Brütsch will succeed Manuela Byland as Head Marketing Hotelplan Suisse. Manuela Byland will leave the company at her own request at the end of September 2019.

After his commercial apprenticeship, Marco Brütsch continued his education in various marketing areas and completed a Master's degree in Brand and Marketing Management at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. Most recently, he was Head of Marketing at Edelweiss Air. Prior to that, he worked in the marketing department of Swiss, among others.

Manuela Byland has decided to leave Hotelplan Suisse after almost ten years with the company. From the end of September until the beginning of December, Christina Blust, Manager Marketing Hotelplan Suisse, will lead the marketing department on an interim basis.

Michèle Hungerbühler is temporarily returning to Hotelplan Group. She will support the communications department from September 9, 2019 until the end of December 2019, as Markus Fässler has decided to leave the company as of mid-October 2019.

Michèle Hungerbühler worked as Specialist Internal Communication & Responsible Sustainability at Hotelplan Group from 2016 to 2018. After her nine-month trip through Latin America, she is now returning to the company on a temporary basis until the end of December 2019.

Markus Fässler, who has decided to return to journalism after working for Hotelplan Group for one year. In addition to her function as Specialist Internal Communications & Sustainability, Hungerbühler will also deputize for Bianca Gähweiler, designated Head of Corporate Communications Hotelplan Group, as media spokesperson. The search for a successor for the position "Internal Communications Specialist & Sustainability Officer" as of December 2019 has been initiated.

Lee Hatt will also be joining the communications team. For one year, she will support the Corporate Communications team in internal and external communications measures as an intern.

The WOZ reported in that issue on a ruling by the Winterthur district court. Kessler had charged a vegan from Winterthur with defamation. This is the result of a ruling by the Federal Supreme Court published on Friday.

The district court came to the conclusion that the woman had not committed a criminal offense by describing the controversial animal rights activist on Facebook in 2015 as a person with a clearly anti-Semitic and xenophobic attitude. She had linked the post to an online publication in which Kessler was described as an anti-Semite.

Kessler demanded that the WOZ publication of a counterstatement, which the newspaper refused. Kessler therefore filed a lawsuit with the district court of Münchwilen TG, but was unsuccessful. He was also unsuccessful before the Supreme Court and now before the Federal Supreme Court.

In its decision, the Federal Supreme Court states that the WOZ was entitled to reject the counterstatement. The allegation made in the counterstatement was false. Furthermore, a mere denial cannot normally be admitted as a counterstatement. (SDA)

Nadine Meier, owner of Meier, integrated communication, will join Ellen Zondler and Andrea Knapp to strengthen the existing OSW team and replace Nadine Siegfried, founder and owner of OSW, as managing director. Nadine Siegfried leaves OSW after fourteen years and goes new ways.

Thanks to the merger, the company will be there for its customers even more comprehensively and continue to help them succeed as a personal and owner-managed agency. The team of strategy expert Nadine Meier and creative head Michael Oswald promises an exciting future, the agencies are convinced in a statement on Friday.

The newly established agency, which will continue to bear the name OSW, has already recorded its first success: its contribution for a well-known Swiss bank on the occasion of a competitive presentation was directly crowned with success. The go-live of the campaign will take place towards the end of this year.

OSW was founded in 2005 and today consists of seven people and one apprentice. The current portfolio includes the University Hospital Basel, the health insurer Sympany, Basel Insurance, the Blood Donation Center of both Basel, the Shopping Center St. Jakob-Park, the Presidential Department of the Canton of Basel-Stadt and many more. Meier, integrated communications primarily serves Coop, including in the area of packaging, TopPharm pharmacies as well as SMEs of all sizes.

Today, Aroma already employs over 90 people and trains ten apprentices. In the process, the agency realized that applicant handling was becoming cumbersome and the process no longer reflected Aroma's culture.

Appreciation and value alignment early in the application process

"The analysis of the terminations showed that the working relationships hardly failed due to a lack of professional qualifications, but much more due to different value concepts," says Sonja Jakob, HR Manager at Aroma. Aligning the applicant's values with those of Aroma at an early stage was therefore the focus of the evaluation of a recruiting software.

Onboarding should already start with the application. The focus is on a candidate experience that is transparent, efficient, and beneficial for both sides - the aroma and the applicant. Although the market offers a variety of software solutions, none of them fully met the requirements.

Aroma has joined the recruiting software developer collective and further strengthened its partnership with Fehr Advice - Behavioral Economics Consulting Group. "Aroma lives feedback culture. This openness enables fruitful cooperation and partnership," says Alexis Johann from Fehr Advice.

The process of getting to know each other is mutual from the first click

Before Aroma enters into a (working) relationship today, the focus is on getting to know each other step by step. Already after entering the personal data and uploading the CV, Aroma invites to the online video interview. The video messages from Aroma employees and the questions asked are derived from the Aroma value drivers. "The special thing about the Aroma video messages is that they give the applicant an unvarnished and authentic insight into the company and the lived culture early in the application process," says Sonja Jakob of Aroma, who is responsible for developing the recruiting tool. What does the applicant think of the Aroma value drivers? He has a short time to think about it before the video recording starts.

In recruiting today, it is not only previous professional stations and training that are decisive, but also the personality and attitude of the applicant. The process should be simple, trust-building and intuitive, put people at the center and promote identity-forming engagement.

The user interface of the recruiting software is easy to use and clear in the backend. Parameters can be defined for specific positions and new video messages can be created easily with the cell phone camera.

Choice Architecture and Artificial Intelligence: the next steps

In the next step, Aroma will implement the Choice Architecture. The Choice Architecture will give the applicant a choice between different application processes. Artificial intelligence will provide objective conclusions about social and emotional skills and help optimize the application process.

"Our language DNA says a lot about our personality and abilities. Language analysis can crystallize talents and attitudes of applicants," explains Alexis Johann. "We will implement language analysis as a choice option in Choice Architecture and communicate the analysis results to the applicant." After all, according to the Behavioral Recruiting approach, the application process should be beneficial for both the company and the applicant.

The developer collective meets semi-annually to exchange experiences and prioritize further development.

To appeal to new fans, football clubs have developed into true content producers in recent years and are increasingly transforming themselves into media companies. With interviews, goal scenes and recreational selfies of the pros, clubs are bringing the sport closer to their fans than ever before. TeraVolt, an agency for digital TV products and consulting, has evaluated how successfully the Bundesliga teams are distributing their content via social media and explains how they can beat the European competition on this playing field with the help of artificial intelligence.

Plenty of content, but only ten percent video If you want to win the hearts of football fans, you need new and high-quality content on a regular basis. A Twitter analysis shows that German clubs are at the forefront of tweeting in Europe with an average of 19 posts per day. However, only every tenth post contains a video and only 16% a link that leads users to further content and thus increases reach. In comparison: English, Spanish and Italian clubs each post twice as much moving image content on average. The outlier is Atletico Bilbao. With around 50 and even 100 posts per day at peak times, the Basque club is the clear content champion.

Teams target young people and get involved in China With a few exceptions in the French Ligue 1, all clubs in the five biggest European leagues are now represented on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. Several clubs are also experimenting with platforms that appeal to younger target groups, such as Snapchat and TikTok. A growing number of teams are also getting involved in the all-important Chinese market. As many as 44% of German clubs use the popular micro-blogging service Weibo, for example. The leader here is the English Premier League with 65%, followed by the Spanish Primera Division (60%).

Premier League speaks twice as many languages as Bundesliga

For a global reach, it is not only important to have a good range of content, but also to speak as many languages as possible. By localizing content, clubs can reach potential new fans in their own language and stand out from the competition. This is a major challenge for German clubs, but also a great opportunity. The challenge: an analysis of the six biggest clubs in each league shows that the Premier League teams distribute their content in almost twice as many languages - 7.2 on average - as the German Kicker teams (3.7). The Spanish Primera Division is also far more multilingual than the Bundesliga, with an average of five language variants.

How AI can help football clubs attract new fans

With artificial intelligence, the Bundesliga clubs could quickly catch up. This is because an AI-supported speech-to-text engine enables football clubs to share their content quickly and easily in 40, 50 or more languages. According to Tobias Fröhlich, Managing Director of TeraVolt, clubs have arrived in an era in which fan and market shares are being redistributed. "Video as the medium of the future plays a central role here. The ability to address fans in their native language, especially if it is not English or Spanish but Chinese, Arabic or Thai, is new and can have a major influence on a fan's choice of club. In this way, the club can quickly multiply its reach and increase the transaction rates of the posts read." 

The clubs of the five biggest leagues in Europe were evaluated in the second half of the last football season. You can find the complete study by TeraVolt here here.

In collaboration with the myclimate foundation, Neo Advertising has conducted a comprehensive study to determine its own CO2 footprint and identify measures to reduce CO2 emissions. These will be implemented over the course of the 2020 financial year with the aim of achieving unprecedented energy efficiency.

Neo Advertising offsets its CO2 emissions through climate protection projects that are supported and implemented by myclimate. These national and international projects are primarily concerned with reducing deforestation, reforestation and the expansion of forest reserves. Other topics include electric and hybrid mobility, biogas production and support for the establishment of production facilities for renewable energies.

Christian Vaglio-Giors, CEO of Neo Advertising, says: "Sustainability issues in general and environmental protection in particular are firmly anchored in Neo Advertising's corporate culture. With our zero-emissions strategy, we are sending a strong signal to all other providers in the market to do the same in future.

Neo Advertising will publish its carbon footprint annually and also disclose which climate protection projects the company is involved in.