Headwork instead of footwork

Associations With over 50 satisfied
participants attended the first SME conference of the Media Institute in
Winterthur a nice initial success. The Swiss Press Association wants to
What larger companies with their own staffs can do is continue along this path.
or the use of external consultants must be tackled on a small scale.
and medium-sized publishing companies are often characterized by the famous mixture of
intuition and improvisation. That is why
practice-oriented working aids offered by the association, double
in demand and welcome. Such knowledge transfer to the "best
practice" basis, i.e. on the basis of successful examples, is also
in the logic of the new association structure introduced two years ago,
which no longer distinguishes between operating modes and sizes, but
by subject area (departments). With the first ever
SME Conference, the Media Institute has continued its function as a platform
of the Association for Training and Quality Promotion and
extended to a new subject area. The fact that more than fifty
participants expressed their interest was a pleasant surprise and the
expectations were clearly exceeded. The same can be said of the
The entire conference will be held, with the external framework also changing,
In particular, the conference venue - the Casino Winterthur - proved its worth.

Added value through prominence
Under the skillful and winning leadership of the consulting and
sales professional Duke Seidmann (Dukebox Zurich), the participants were
with requirements, examples of success and questions from practice
confronted. The topic of the day was the appropriate organization of the
advertising sales and the positioning of the SME publishing house in the not quite
uncomplicated market structure.

Help came from competent and prominent guest speakers. Sarah Hammami
(Managing Director of Mediaxis AG) gave tips for the professional
Processing the media agencies. Two workshops were held in parallel to discuss
target group selection with AIS (Stephan Wyss, Project Manager Wemf) and
on the cooperation between advertising directors and publishers in
Leasehold securities (Otto Meier, CEO Publicitas and Marcel Siegenthaler, CEO
Edipub SA) informed.

In the afternoon, three recent success stories were presented.
presents: TV star of Jean Frey AG (Patrick Knecht, advertising manager),
NZZ am Sonntag (Marcel Kohler, Advertising Director NZZ Media AG) and
Walliser Bote (Jörg Salzmann, Publishing Director). Finally
Andreas Prokesch, President of the Art Directors Club Switzerland, is in the mood for
an in-depth examination of media self-promotion. This
He succeeded so well that this topic was included on the evaluation sheet.
clearly leads the "theme hit parade" of the next conferences. Between the
presentations, Duke Seidmann made "ten stumbling blocks to sales success"
and provided the attentive audience with concrete information about the
Information and handouts for target setting, the
sales planning, the bonus and commission issue, coaching, the
mixed forms of advertising, inbound sales, control, the
Sales documents and sales rhetoric.

Future theme hit parade
At the end of this busy day, the participants -
not unlike an ADC judging - the best self-promotion campaign
from publishers. Clearly at the top of the list were the elegant
The NZZ am Sonntag used a play on words in an article published by Publicis
long-term strategy to convey the message of the intelligent
reading pleasure across the ramp. The campaign was launched with two
Free advertisements in the trade journals Werbewoche and Persönlich
thanks to the two publishers who have contributed to the success of this
generous gesture to support the SME activities of the Media Institute
have!

The evaluation of the event has shown that in future one to
two SME events of the same type per year are desired.
According to the company's own advertising, the focus is on the following topics
Sales training,
Reader marketing, dealing with special requests and editorial marketing, CRM (call center).

Karl Lüönd
Karl Lüönd is Head of the Media Institute of the Swiss Press Association