The Best Set the Standard: Philipp Skrabal of Team Farner

When you ask people in the Swiss communications industry what Farner actually is, they usually hesitate to answer. PR? Advertising? Public affairs? All of those are sort of right. And all of them are sort of wrong. For over 10 years, the agency has been growing against the trend—in an industry where traditional advertising agencies are under increasing structural pressure due to in-housing, consolidation, and AI—to become Switzerland’s largest fully integrated communications agency. Creatively, we’ve consistently ranked at the top of the m&k rankings over the past three years: 3rd place in 2023, 1st place in 2024, and 2nd place in 2025. And yet, this myth still clings to us: present, influential, and yet elusive. Perhaps that’s exactly the point.

What makes Farner strong is also the recipe for the future. Not a single discipline, not a single specialization, not a single talent. Rather, it is the synergy: disciplines at a market-leading level that think in an interconnected way across generations, fields of expertise, and technological interfaces, and that seek to work as equals—thereby generating ideas that no single individual could have come up with on their own. The Team Farner platform is the result.

Myth with a System

In the early 1950s, Rudolf Farner founded two agencies at once: one for advertising and one for public relations. It was a distinction he himself undermined from the start, as Farner was, from the very beginning, more than what the market expected. The launch of Coca-Cola in Switzerland is a prime example of this. The powerful farmers« lobby threatened to boycott newspapers if they ran ads for the American beverage. The traditional route was blocked. Farner’s response: Coca-Cola was launched through hair salons—in other words, places where people sit and talk. With an instinct for how and where opinions truly take shape. Influencer marketing before social media. The mix of »paid« and »earned” was standard practice at Farner from the very beginning.

A decade later, Farner produced a spectacular short film for the Swiss Army’s much-discussed appearance at Expo 64 in Lausanne. In 1965, the film received an Oscar nomination in the «Best Live Action Short Film» category. For the Road Safety Fund and the TCS, Farner created MADE VISIBLE, the streetwear label that turned visibility in traffic into a lifestyle movement. Switzerland’s most successful prevention campaign was honored by the FIA with the Road Safety Innovation Award and is now in its ninth year. Everyone is systematically involved, from the textile industry to designers to retailers. Following the same philosophy, new campaigns are constantly being developed, ranging from the Lindt GOLDHASEN to a major bank and from IKEA to the Dolder Grand. Sometimes black-nosed sheep help with the Federal Council election; other times, we help bring the Eurovision Song Contest to Basel or the Women’s World Cup to Switzerland.

Work that works because brand, strategy, creativity, and media expertise are not considered one after the other, but simultaneously and in tandem.

Creativity Loves Technology

In the age of AI, creativity is a survival skill—for brands, for agencies, and for all of us as human beings. Artificial intelligence is a statistical pattern mixer. It selects what’s probable, amplifies what’s typical, and smooths out the rough edges. This leads to homogenization, to a creeping erosion of brand distinctiveness, to the obsolescence of agencies, and to interchangeable output. Anyone who uses the same tools with the same prompts produces convergent results. Creativity must therefore already be embedded in the questions we ask ourselves—or, now, the machine.

And creativity loves technology. For Arosa Tourism, our team at Yoveo developed Switzerland’s first crowd-generated AI advertising campaign: Whatever you dream of for your mountain vacation, we’ll make it a reality in Arosa. Over 43,000 images were generated, and the average time spent on the landing page was over eight minutes. For Islam Alijaj—now a National Council member for the SP—we developed, among other things, an AI avatar for his election campaign that filters out his speech impediment without altering the personality in his voice.

Two examples that show how AI and technology are paving the way for new possibilities. At its core, however, the idea remains the same.

75 years and no gala dinner

Farner is turning 75 this year. But instead of celebrating ourselves during this anniversary year, we’ve decided to invest more heavily in the future of the industry. Not out of complacency, but out of deep concern about current developments. Successful agencies—some of which have shaped our industry for decades—are struggling to remain relevant. Young talent can no longer find entry-level opportunities, sometimes due to budget constraints, sometimes because AI is increasingly taking over routine tasks. Such developments should be cause for alarm even beyond the agency world. After all, these agencies have produced generations of top CMOs, CCOs, CEOs, strategists, and chief creatives who are setting the standard in international companies today.

That is why we are investing our 2026 in-house marketing budget—including the associated personnel resources—in the future of the industry. We’re doing this at the expense of award submissions and the resulting 2026 creative rankings. Not because we want to turn our backs on creative competitions or the creative rankings—on the contrary—but because we want to drive and initiate important changes for a strong industry.

Four days. Dozens of young people

August 2026: They come from the HSG, the ZHAW, the University of Zurich, and the University of Bern. Some have a degree but haven’t quite found their footing yet. Others are about to graduate. They all carry a silent question with them: What awaits me here?

Four days. All disciplines. No theory—real briefings, real contacts, real pressure. Day one: Fundamentals of communication, reputation management, how communication teams work in practice. Day two: Public affairs and creativity—lobbying meets creative sprint. Day three: Brand management, PR, social media, visit to an editorial office. Day four: Craft, video, motion design—and then the «Buenaventura» crisis exercise. A fictional crisis scenario, staged as if it were real. Incomplete information, time pressure, team dynamics. Exactly what our teams experience every day. What these young people experience in four days is the interplay of all disciplines. Not as theory. As an experience. There’s no better way to learn who and what we are. And yes, these insights will also be available to stream later.

That's not nostalgia. That's the idea.