A prince with ambitions for the throne

Things are changing at Serranetga. These days, the Swiss pioneer in online marketing has undergone a complete rebranding. New website, new logo, new staff. "We decided to add a creation department to our group as well," announces Remo Prinz. A CD as well as an AD have already been hired, as well as a consulting group manager and additional web software developers. An additional 300 m² of office space has been rented for the new department. "So that we are prepared for the next few years and can stay in Kreis 4, where we feel at home." The expansion made sense because Prinz is convinced "that in the online sector, creation, media and technology must increasingly come from a single source, so that we can take advantage of all the opportunities offered by new developments." After three years on the market, you can see where the hare is heading. Many ideas are born out of thinking about what is technically possible in the first place. "Because we at Serranetga know the technical stuff inside out, we also know what new possibilities we can use creatively."

He wants to prove this creativity with a clever marketing gag. All visitors to the new website will sooner or later come across a Serranetga banner when they continue surfing the net on one of the major news sites or in the trade media. A demonstration of competence in the form of a surprising retargeting campaign. The idea is typical of Prinz's style, who, for example, was able to generate more than 4,000 unofficial "votes" in last year's vote for "Advertiser of the Year" with a royal online game.

Remo Prinz literally "grew up with advertising". His father worked from home as a freelance graphic designer in eastern Switzerland. Remo was allowed to watch the typesetting and help glue the pictures. "Even as a child, I was asked for my opinion on ideas and layouts." Later, he "played" in his father's studio at Hollenstein & Prinz on the then brand-new Mac 2. The interest was aroused. Remo Prinz studied journalism in Zurich. Besides university, he worked "as a copywriter and all-rounder" at a dialog marketing agency. He came into even closer contact with "new media" at Jippii. The competition to Jamba dealt with cell phone logos and ringtones. After graduation, Remo Prinz added another area to his knowledge, that of corporate at Swisscom. His current core competency, online, really took off in 2007 at Zattoo. Prinz had to define and sell the advertising environments. "Zattoo was already very advanced with the product. But the monetization strategy had yet to be developed." During this pioneering work around the marketing of Zattoo, Remo Prinz also got to know his current partners Raphael Oppenheim and Martin Widmer.

In 2008, the trio decided to found their own agency. They chose Serranetga as the agency name. The Rhaeto-Romanic word means "zipper" and thus describes the business model: media and creation must be interlocked with each other, "so that the advertising franc is optimized in the online area. The exotic-looking Rhaeto-Romanic also seemed fitting for their role as lateral entrants. They didn't want to be just another agency with "Ad" or "Web". Still in the founding year, a "spectacular coup" succeeded with the acquisition of Facebook. "We were the first to ever book and place ads directly with Facebook in the German-speaking world," Prinz recalls. The first ad was for Swiss International Air Lines. But because the American-organized Facebook had never had a German-language ad before, the text in Paolo Alto was automatically recorded with lowercase letters. The customer showed little joy - and Serranetga subsequently "gave the operators of Facebook the necessary lesson in German".

Because Serranetga, with its services as an "innovation lab," quickly moved into the agency track, Prinz and his partners decided to found a dedicated marketer in addition to their agency for media, technology and creation. So the second company to follow was Stailamedia - which in turn means "star" in Rhaeto-Romanic. The portfolios of various websites are managed here in the form of a star. Today, Stailamedia is "the largest independent online marketer in Switzerland" - without a publishing house in the background. Despite this - or precisely because of it - partnerships are also entered into with large media companies, Ringier for example with Blick and Betty Bossi as well as Bild.de or Weltwoche. Since the end of October, Stailamedia has also been exclusively marketing the websites of TF1 and the French media publisher Figaro Medias as well as Le Monde in Switzerland, bundling the websites in an attractive Romandie pool. Stailamedia is now the market leader in online video advertising with the "Swiss Video Network". And moving image advertising on the Internet "is regarded as the Mercedes of online advertising forms," Remo Prinz is convinced.

With the participation in a third company, Adwebster, the Group offers a premium advertising network that generates "hundreds of millions of ad impressions" per month. The company implements a so-called Meta-TAG on the websites, which makes all involved networks such as Google visible. In this way, Adwebster optimizes various campaigns from different networks among themselves for the publishers. In technical jargon, this is called "yield management." "In this way, we create a win-win situation between the advertising industry and the websites. The advertising industry receives coverage bundled in target groups at favorable prices, and the websites generate higher revenues," Prinz explains the model.

With these three companies, Remo Prinz and his partners were able to create more than 50 attractive jobs in Zurich in just three years. All three companies are completely self-financed. "Most people thought we were crazy when we started building them up in 2008 in the middle of the economic crisis." Otherwise, his even greater pride and joy are now two one-year-old girls. A little less demanding in his free time, Remo Prinz enjoys evenings playing cards. Every Thursday he meets his buddies, "who for once don't include any advertisers." And why is an Internet pioneer interested in such things? "Jassen is like life. You always have to get the best out of your cards - both offensively and defensively. Sometimes you have to hold back the right card so that the others don't make the match. Or seize the opportunity when you have the decisive card. That's what I find exciting. Whoever gets more out of their cards wins," explains Remo Prinz. And he's on his guard: "There's always a reshuffle." Andreas Panzeri