With models and content as a "one-stop solution", the Zoomer Agency offer a new approach to modern brand communication: Tailor-made content, created by a team that knows how to stage brands. However, the agency not only provides content, but also the perfect faces to go with it. The targeted combination of content creation and model management should make coherent and convincing brand stories possible.

From vision to digital brand experience

Whether it's developing a campaign from scratch, producing exciting content or finding the perfect cast for a photo or video project: The Zoomer Agency offers a full range of marketing services tailored to the needs of modern brands. Viu Eyewear, PHTG and PostFinance are already among the innovative clients of the St. Gallen agency, which consists of Samira Büchler (production), Dario Heeb (consulting and organization) and Fabio Martin (creation). The creatives with many years of industry experience combine brands with the current zeitgeist, tell multimedia stories and aim to set new standards in digital communication.

The entire company area was filmed extensively over four days in Herisau AR, Switzerland. From the delivery of the raw materials, through development, testing in the laboratory, production of the medicines to packaging and delivery, everything was observed and recorded on film.

Remo Civatti and Nicolas Vonlanthen from Silverspot are satisfied with the result. "As an established advertising agency, we were able to offer the client everything from a single source, from the concept idea to filming and post-production, including sound studio work and music production," they say in a press release.

In addition, the customer was also offered a video footage archive through sustainable production, which can now be used to create videos for various purposes and even updated regularly at Silverspot at low cost.

The Pawi Group consists of three companies specializing in the manufacture of cardboard and paper packaging. With immediate effect, they will operate under the names Pawi Packaging Schweiz AG, Winterthur, Pawi Packaging Deutschland GmbH, Singen, and Pawi Packaging Poland Sp. z o.o., Warsaw.

In addition, Gleis1 Winterthur and Pawi Immobilien, two other companies in the fields of design, communication and real estate, belong to the Pawi Group.

New management structure from January 2024

The operational management of Pawi Packaging Switzerland in Winterthur will be taken over by a Co-CEO team in future. This team consists of Edoardo Finotti, Co-CEO Operations, Urban Ettlin, Co-CEO Sales & Marketing, and Silvan Flury, Co-CEO Management Services. The management team is completed by Tina Gabathuler for HR and Jürg Trachsler for Logistics & Materials Management.

As Chairman of the Board of Directors and Group CEO, 62-year-old Andreas Keller, long-time Managing Director and Delegate of the Board of Directors, will focus on the strategic management and development of the Pawi Group, in particular the integration of the Polish subsidiary into the Group. The composition of the Board of Directors will remain unchanged and Andreas Keller will remain the majority shareholder of the Pawi Group, which should ensure continuity at the highest level. The Pawi Group is a Swiss SME that has been active in the packaging industry for 63 years and is preparing itself for the challenges of the future with these measures.

No new shopping record on Black Friday 2023: For the first time since 2019, Swiss retailers recorded lower sales with credit, debit and mobile payments compared to the previous year.

Customers spent around two percent less money than in 2022, according to an analysis by the news agency AWP based on data from Monitoring Consumption Switzerland.

New record for mobile payments

Nevertheless, the discount battle was once again extremely lucrative for Swiss retailers this year. The numerous price reductions and advertising measures ensured that more than twice as much money was spent on Black Friday than on an average Friday in 2023.

Mobile payments even reached a record high on Friday. On no other day since data collection began at the start of 2019 have the Swiss spent more money via Twint, Apple Pay and co.

Overall, around 15 percent of all cashless payments on this year's Black Friday were made using smartphone payment apps. In 2022, the proportion was 11 percent.

Local shopping on the rise

Customers also increasingly took out their credit cards in stores again. 87% of all credit card payments on Black Friday were made at the point of sale and only 13% online. In 2022, the proportion of e-commerce payments was still 17%.

However, the Black Friday effect was not just limited to Friday: customers' desire to buy was practically unbroken on the following Saturday too. Overall, Swiss retailers recorded an increase in sales of around 20% last week compared to the week before.

Black Friday as an important sales booster

Black Friday is a discount day that originated in America and has long since established itself in Switzerland. It is celebrated on the Friday after the US Thanksgiving holiday and is now the most important sales booster for Swiss retailers alongside the Easter and Christmas sales.

The data from Monitoring Consumption Switzerland includes cashless payments that are processed via the network of the financial services provider Worldline in Switzerland. They are made available to the public for research purposes. Cash payments are not included in the statistics. For data protection reasons, no absolute figures are shown. (AWP/Simon Wolanin)

Ivo Kummer had already announced last January that he would be retiring at the end of January 2024. Until the new director takes up their position on March 1, Laurent Steiert will head the Film Section on an interim basis, the BAK announced on Tuesday.

Steiert has been Deputy Head of the Film Section at the BAK since 2005 and in this role is particularly responsible for international relations. He studied political science at the University of Lausanne and law at the University of Fribourg. He graduated from the University of Bern with an Executive Master of Public Administration. He was born in 1971.

Nadine Adler Spiegel studied German language and literature, film studies and journalism at the University of Zurich. She is currently Co-Head of the Cultural Promotion Department at Migros Culture Percentage. She has been responsible for film promotion there for nine years. Prior to that, she worked in public relations and marketing for film distributors such as Filmcoopi and Frenetic Films. Adler Spiegel was born in 1971. (SDA)

GF develops and manufactures products and solutions for the safe transportation of liquids and gases, lightweight cast components and high-precision manufacturing technologies. The Finnish company Uponor specializes in drinking water installations and heating and cooling systems. GF completed the acquisition in mid-November.

Seed worked closely with GF to create a compact teaser for the internal and external communication of the acquisition. With a wink, it is intended to convey the ambitions with which GF and Uponor are entering the joint future. It was directed by Adrian Wisard.

The teaser is used both internally and in social media as well as at events.

Responsible at GF: Beat Römer, Michael Juste, Jonathan Binder. Responsible at Seed Audio-Visual Communication: Adrian Wisard (director), Torsten Maas (script), Roman Peritz (camera), Milos May (camera assistant), Roman Brändli (lighting), Mourad Keller (sound), Nina Zogg (make-up, styling), Nicolas Bechtel (editing), Roman Linder (color grading), Martin Stäheli (sound design, mixing), Madlaina Courvoisier (production assistant), Bastian Hertel (production/recording manager), Felix Courvoisier (producer).

Ringier announced on Tuesday that the merger announced at the end of September can now be completed with the approval of the Competition Commission. Ladina Heimgartner, the former head of the Blick Group, will become the new head of Ringier Media Switzerland. The company employs around 1000 people.

In addition to the Blick Group, Ringier Media Switzerland owns the 20 magazine and journal titles of RASCH, including the Observer, the Handelszeitung and Lucky mail.

The current RASCH site in Zurich-Altstetten will be retained and no jobs will be cut in the editorial offices, it was announced when the takeover was announced at the end of September. (SDA)

By switching from Magento 2 to Shopware 6, HellyHansen Workwearcenter is saying goodbye to an aging, error-prone and slow webshop. The new platform should impress with its performance, modern design and optimized user interface. This not only results in a better conversion rate, but also gives HellyHansen Workwearcenter the freedom to design its own online marketing campaigns efficiently in the backend. In addition, a clear and concise structure allows product sets and promotions to be conveniently entered via the backend.

The main challenge of this project was the tight time frame of just three months. Thanks to intensive collaboration, the complete relaunch was achieved within this tight time frame. In addition to importing products, images and customer information, the use of Creaitor.ai was particularly crucial. With the support of artificial intelligence, product data was prepared appropriately for Shopware and the corresponding images were correctly assigned to the respective product variants, based on data from the manufacturer Helly Hansen. With the new web store, Helly Hansen Workwearcenter aims to set new standards in e-commerce and is optimally positioned for the requirements of the digital age.

Responsible at Helly Hanson Workwearcenter: Peter Wider (owner), Marc Erb (management). Responsible at Tree Stones: Daniel Hofmann (Project Management), Jason Witter (Project Management), Jennifer Swirta (Online Marketing).

The abbreviation of the word laboratory is quite popular at the moment. Why is that? Two reasons seem obvious: helplessness and a willingness to take risks. The former leads to almost excessive use of language with zero output. The second would actually be the original description of the place that serves as a place of work and research for experimental scientific work in the natural sciences and medicine.

On the former: In our industry, we are used to excessive use of language. We use linguistic trampoline jumps all the time to emphasize a job, a product or a service and make it appear more attractive. Whether as a superlative ("the best offer ever") or as a pleonasm ("benefit now and get a free gift") or a combination ("the most innovative idea").

Places with the names Crea-, Idea-, Innovation-Lab are such pleonasms, because Lab = research site. Creative processes = research work. Okay, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, a superlative so to speak. At least for scientists, but they don't read this column. After all, it's just us here. So: creative work is research work because creativity is associated with the ability to create and understand new things that have never been seen before. But if you look at Swiss advertising today - whether printed, digital, moving or social - the results of the work are diametrically opposed to the use of the word lab. Nothing new versus many word creations with the prefix Lab. And every room and non-room in every company in the industry is referred to as a "lab" or as such.

Like the rabbit before the snake

Regarding the latter: the willingness to take risks. In economically difficult or extremely successful situations, it would be appropriate to take risks instead of freezing in helplessness and fear like advertising bunnies or guinea pigs in front of the crisis snake. Companies that invest in workplaces and work models for experiments in their most successful times, instead of paying out fat salaries or dividends to managers and shareholders, usually remain successful in the long term. However, those who stick to the status quo in times of crisis for fear of loss, or worse still, revert to old patterns, are doomed or, to use the expression, will be eaten. In this helplessness, it is no use rearranging furniture, painting walls and buying Post-it notes in all colors to transform the empty offices of redundant employees into labs.

Because although a lab is a place, it is ultimately more of a mindset. Or where did all the product ideas, marketing concepts, blockbusters or bestsellers come from before everything was a lab? From garages (according to the legends), cubicles (those cramped one-and-a-half-square-metre open-plan office boxes) or from experimental minds.

* Benno Maggi is co-founder and CEO of Partner & Partner. He has been eavesdropping on the industry for over 30 years, discovering words and terms for us that can either be used for small talk, pomposity, excitement, playing Scrabble, or just because.

Werbewoche.ch: Peter Metzinger, your manual guides you step by step through the campaign planning process. How did you come up with the idea of writing such a manual?

Peter Metzinger: The first idea came to me back in 1997, when I had been Campaigns Director of an NGO for three years, which dealt with a wide variety of topics. As a physicist, I was looking for a kind of formula that could be used to plan campaigns regardless of the topic. I had also done some organizational development and realized that it doesn't matter whether I want to sell something, achieve a political goal or change the culture of an organization. It always comes down to changing the understanding, attitudes or behavior of individuals. And because we are all homo sapiens, there are rules of the game that always apply, no matter what the goal is.

And these rules also apply to companies?

I have been working as a management consultant for change, marketing, communication and politics since 1998. During this quarter of a century, I have found that the rules of the game do indeed apply to companies. However, I have also observed that many companies have difficulties in successfully planning and implementing complex campaigns and change processes because they do not recognize the commonalities and have to reinvent the wheel for every new project, goal or topic. That's why I came up with the idea of writing a manual that - like a cookbook - guides you step by step through the entire process.

In your opinion, what are the decisive advantages of such a manual?

The biggest advantage is that all relevant aspects of campaign planning are presented in a systematic and easy-to-understand way. And in an order that minimizes the risk of forgetting or overlooking important aspects. Companies receive clear guidance on how to translate an initial idea or vision into a strategy and measures that will persuade people to participate or not to resist.

What special contents are included in your manual?

The manual covers the entire spectrum of campaign planning. It starts with a structure for formulating the first idea. Many people do not realize how important it is to formulate the first idea correctly. Formulating it correctly means formulating it so comprehensively and precisely that you ask the right questions and get the right answers when analyzing the situation. This also includes checking the extent to which this idea fits in with the company's identity. Once the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats have been identified, the goals are definitively defined and a suitable strategy is developed, as in any project planning model. In addition, concrete instruments for the implementation of campaigns are presented. Evaluation and controlling are also covered in detail.

That sounds like a tried and tested recipe and nothing new.

In fact, you can rely on better-known checklists for many things. But there are a few "spices" in the recipe that you won't find anywhere else. For example, I took the concept of complementors from a book on game theory, knowledge of which can lead to completely new ideas, such as a bookseller advertising an ice cream parlor to increase sales. And in the checklist for good goal formulation, there is a hint that goals should be formulated in such a way that a community of loyal supporters can develop.

How did you ensure that your manual is equally relevant for different industries and companies?

When creating the manual, I attached great importance to a practical approach. I was able to build on my many years of experience in management consulting, which gave me an insight into practically all sectors and at all levels, from start-ups to the World Economic Forum, for which I was able to develop the Open Forum concept. Moreover, it was not always "just" about communication campaigns, but sometimes also about cultural change or political lobbying. Based on this experience, the methods and concepts presented are applicable across all sectors and can be individually adapted to the needs of companies. This is also ensured by formulations that force you to translate the more general principles into concrete applications.

What feedback have you received on the manual so far?

The feedback was consistently positive. But not many people have seen the manual yet. However, the manual is based on the business campaigning model that I first published in the book "Business Campaigning" back in 2003. This book essentially contains the same concepts and checklists, but does not work like a cookbook. And yet many companies have successfully used the model described and report increased effectiveness and efficiency in campaign planning or the development of business plans. They have also used it to develop such plans. The clear structure of the process and the practical orientation were particularly emphasized.

What future prospects do you see for your manual?

I see great potential, as the need for planning campaigns and change processes is constantly growing in an increasingly dynamic world in which it is increasingly difficult to plan. In the future, I plan to further optimize the manual based on feedback in order to meet changing requirements. That's why there are also version designations, just like with software. Perhaps there will also be a digital version at some point to make it easier to access and offer new functionalities. But I would no longer be able to offer this for free. Or there would have to be a sponsor.

Why do you offer the manual free of charge?

With this manual, I would like to make the knowledge I have gained in almost 42 years of campaigning generally accessible - especially for those who cannot afford advice. We also know that 42 is the answer to all questions (laughs).

The manual can be can be downloaded here.

The agency implemented trailers and OOH communication as well as other measures. There are clear signs of wear and tear on some of the OOH posters, as if the zombies from The Walking Dead universe had attacked them.

A "walker countdown" on social media also drew attention to the start of "Dead City" - every day from a different location in Switzerland. And Reto Hanselmann's Halloween party "Season of the Witch" also created a great atmosphere for the series: visitors could have their picture taken in front of a special "Dead City" backdrop, and there was also horror-themed popcorn.

"The Walking Dead: Dead City" has been available on Sky since mid-October. From December 8, "The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon" will also be shown, for which further measures are planned.

Customer: Sky. Responsible agency: New.

Over the past few days, a first teaser film has already caused speculation in the Migros community. Now comes the certainty: Migros and Wirz bring Finn the elf back together. His first two films went viral and touched millions of people around the world. After that, the elf went quiet. Nevertheless, fans are still asking for another Christmas story with Finn. This wish is now being fulfilled.

"At Christmas, we don't just want to tell a nice story, we want to remind people how important it is to be there for each other," says Giovanna Colucci, Senior Project Manager at Migros. "And that's what we're doing this year with the little elf Finn, who does everything he can to fulfill a little girl's dream."

"In the story, the empathetic Finn immediately recognizes that the girl's seemingly small wish means the whole world to her. And immediately shows that anyone really can make a big difference in the lives of their fellow human beings - even a little gnome," explains Lorenz Clormann, Executive Creative Director at Wirz.

The motto of this year's campaign is "Let's make dreams come true". On the Christmas platform - created in collaboration with the agency Mutabor - people from their own environment can be nominated from Sunday, for whom they want to fulfill a dream together with Migros. The dream categories include a long-awaited trip, new furniture for the children's room, cultural events and much more. Migros will review the suggestions and then make as many dreams come true as possible.

Finn not only plays the leading role in the TV and online film, but also appears in other channels. Six short online films with Finn lead into the Christmas world of Migros on the Christmas hub and are intended to whet the appetite for Christmas. Finn underlines Migros' product range expertise in specially produced DOOH activations. With extra content on social media and TikTok, the Migros gnome creates a Christmassy atmosphere and lots of Christmas moments during the Advent season. The elf can also be discovered on POP and on display ads.

The campaign can now be seen throughout Switzerland.

Responsible at the Federation of Migros Cooperatives: Giovanna Colucci, Désirée Strassmann (Umbrella Brand Campaigning), Nuria Grab, Marta Mielcarek, Fabienne Kübler, Corina Edler, Céline Jagisch, Joelle Meier (Sales Promotions Campaigning), Tanja Krause (Digital Campaigning & Promotions), Simone Blaser, Christian Keller, Patrick Blum Dominik von Büren (Media), Nicole di Natale, Marlies Seifert (Migros Engagement), Thomas Blumer (Social Media). Responsible at Wirz Group: Livio Dainese, Lorenz Clormann, Jan Kempter, Marcus Josty, Jannic Mascello, Florian Siegrist, Adrian Busse, Laura Starace, Elena Knecht, Tim Lieberherr, Lana Zumbrunnen, David Offermann, Julia Mutter, Laura Schädler, Michelle Grieder, Julia Ewers, Marleen Diener, Ruwanie Hayoz, Naomi Meran, Giovanni Bucca, Yussef Serrat, Corinne Räber, Sonja Jegen, Oliver Fäs, Rahel Signer. Responsible at Stories (film production): Jake Scott (Director), Garfield Kempton (Producer RSA), Ahmet Hüsseyin (Director of Photography), Michèle Seligmann, Yves Bollag (Executive Producer), Louis von Mallinckrodt (Producer), Edoardo Moruzzi (Head of Post Production), Reto Trösch (Production Designer), Damaris Eigenheer (Costume Deisgner), Katerina Carambellas (Hair & Make-Up Artist). Cast: Neah Hefti - Hero Girl, Jack Wilkonson - Father, LaToya Harding - Store Manager. Responsible at Passion Pictures London (Animation & CGI)Kyra Buschor, Constantin Paeplow (Animation Director), Anna Cunnington (Executive Producer), Juliette Stern (Head of Production), Rick Bland (Line-Producer), Luke Youngman (Line-Producer), Gus Herdman (Editor TRIM), Christina Conradi (Editor), Denny Cooper (Colorist Unit). Responsible at Sizzer (music and composition)Sander van Maarschalkerweerd (Executive Music Supervisor), Michiel Marsman (Executive Creative Director), Peter Jelle Idzenga (Music Producer), Richard Aardenburg (Music Supervisor): Audio Postproduction, Sound Design, Mix & Music: Jingle Jungle Studio. Responsible at Mutabor Technologies: Jennifer Michalla, Anja Reimers, Hoang-Vu Luu, Leonie Lange. Responsible at Apps with love: Eduard Zielke, Andrea Zeller, Heinrik Hakobyan, Kajetan Som, Wojciech Najma, Matthias Tschanz, Deni Terzic, Marko Gracin, Magdalena Nuckowska, Monika Sokol. Media: Dynamo Team, Dentsu Switzerland.