M6 advertising window opens 

TV The Geneva cable network plans to broadcast the advertising window of the French TV station M6 at the end of March. The French TV station M6 actually has a market share of around 13% among 15 to 49-year-olds in French-speaking Switzerland. This put it in third place in the second half of 2006, only 5.2 percent behind TSR 2 and 9.3 percent behind market leader TSR 1. However, M6's good performance has so far been of little use to Swiss advertising clients. Although M6 broadcasts an advertising window for French-speaking Switzerland, this can currently only be received in around 37% of all cable households. The reason for this is that the largest cable networks in Geneva and Lausanne refuse to broadcast the M6 advertising window on their networks out of consideration for TSR. They are restricting themselves to broadcasting the original M6 signal - without Swiss advertising: Naxoo, Geneva's cable network with around 170000 connected households, decided to switch on the M6 advertising window at the end of 2006 despite resistance from TSR and the Federal Office of Communications. "We were in Paris last week and negotiated with M6. The contract is in place, it now has to go through all the M6 committees," says Naxoo CEO Antoni Mayer on request. Mayer expects the contract to be signed by mid-March. Naxoo is technically capable of launching M6 immediately, he says. With the launch in Geneva, the M6 advertising window could increase its technical reach to around 60 percent.   
Markus Knöpfli