Although some kinda milf ads make you admire them ...

Well, if we are going to get all serious about the topic... This mediocre Swiss advertising must be something new.

The Swiss were at the cutting edge of graphic design from what around 1910 to about the 70s.

What happened since then? Only the river gods know. My guess is that everyone and their brother has a computer and thinks they have the skills to make an ad where as before the home PC it was art and highly skilled work.

Here is some light reading to start.

http://guity-novin.blogspot.ch/2011/...and-dutch.html
http://www.designhistory.org/Poster_...issPoster.html
http://www.citrinitas.com/history_of...odernists.html
http://visualartsdepartment.wordpress.com/swiss/

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La Chaux-de-Fonds had a great Art Nouveau school from 1905- with l'Eplattenier and Le Corbusier too.

I agree Ximix- but talented and imaginative students who are encouraged and taught well will be able to develop in a way which is difficult to achieve in a very formal and academic education system.

The food advertising is also very mediocre imo. When you look through the Migros magazine each week, you will notice that there is no variety at all in the way they present food. Raw meat on a plate, and folded bacon. The colours can be very strange. When they make a photo of a meal, it seems that the ingredients are glued together, or it looks like vomit.

For me the worst are the typical window shops of local restaurants.... Can't figure out how someone still thinks that simply sticking a discoloured Coca-Cola sign on top of a door makes a place appealing to get into...

This is an awful ad, as although the hooker may be great, she makes the sofa look tiny!

Ever since I was born, I've found Swiss advertisement awful. Even as Swiss, we can tell when we watch French TV that the advertisement is of higher quality (that is before channels decided to send a different feed to Switzerland, now we get the same ads all over).

For me, the size of the market makes a huge difference in how much money is invested in marketing and therefore its quality. Think about advertisement on local TV in North America. It's often awful as well, and the target audience can often be as large as one of Switzerland's linguistic groups.

http://www.englishforum.ch/items-sal...her-basel.html

This mediocre Swiss advertising must be something new.

Not really, I remember I was switching to Swiss TV channels in the 80's just to have a good laugh with the advertisements (ads for Bico matresses were my favorite)

So... why would they carry on with what seem to be lame advertisement for all this time?
IMHO the Swiss have a very different value system from the rest of us (they've been stuck between all these mountains for such a long time after all) and it seems that the fancy or entertainment value of an ad is not counting for them at all. For the Swiss people, catchy means that there might be a catch. "Raw" means honest.

My 2 cents on that subject.

Or just lazy.

When customer matters, lazy will turn into effort. Recycling petrified cliches and simplistic, black and white schematic stuff, in shop windows even with dust on it, and on the button same time of the year, does not really entice the new generations much, they certainly do not care for nostalgia.

You might have a point about political ads (particularly those for candidates rather than referendum campaigns) but I don't reckon that mediocre advertising in the commercial sector is intentional. I think it's just the laziness of a small, mostly-captive market. Ads that do exhibit better production values are wildly popular which rather undermines your thesis.

The only quality ads I can come up with in Switzerland were made by the SVP. Everyone remembers the black sheep, everyone remembers the minaret posters.

But of course were those made by some German immigrant.
http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/schweiz/...story/29821806

Fun fact: When Swisscom did their rebranding a couple of years ago were they critizised in the media for spending so much and hiring a London based agency as a company that advertises with "Swissness". The company publicly commented that they did not find anyone in the same league in Switzerland which caused a bit of a stir up in the CH creative web forums... but I believe is true. And I do not even find the Swisscom logo that awesome.

It all depends on what you consider mediocre? You may find that creatively the advertising doesn't 'float your boat', but the advertisers have their own priorities. They want to shift product and if the advertising is doing that, then it is a successful campaign. Too many creative directors are only interested in winning awards and lose sight of the clients business priorities. If the model is working, which it clearly is, why change mid stream to satisfy the needs of a few who feel a creative void? Just saying...

What if I told you that the reason that it is working might the lack of competition rather than the campaign? Realistically does nobody buy more toothpaste just because the advertisement is good - all that brands do is to shift market share. In Switzerland is the percentage of people who always go to the same brand of supermarket, either COOP or Migros, extremely high. You will never reach them at all with you campaign, they buy whatever their brand of retailer stocks. So the percentage of potentially shifted market share is tiny. As a result do you not advertise to take over a market, but on a mediocre level to protect the status quo - because if you don't, the other supermarket could potentially win over some customers.

(And if anyone is really interested in the topic: That's a great free course on competitive strategy: https://www.coursera.org/learn/competitivestrategy)

What personally makes me smile are badly chosen anglicisms...

Personally I would live a lot happier and more fulfilled without advertising. For one thing it would be the end of the horrible blight of our once natural and beautiful landscape. We've stopped noticing these petrol stations everywhere which ruin every village with their shouting garishness all selling the same stuff. There are those adverts which appear to have been 'designed' (if that's the right word) by people living in a nightmare world. Magazines and letterboxes full of pointless matter, unbearable minutes in cinemas being shouted at by voices on the edge of madness, 'music' (excuse me using this word like that) in shops and blaring out of retail doorways.
I do my utmost these days to not watch tv channels where this junk is promoted, relying often on the BBC (whatever one may think) to avoid being looked upon as a fool. Unfortunately even the BBCs adverts for its own programmes is at basement level. And so on.


What a waste of money, time and talent.


We should be improving the world not turning it into one big circus..


In my opinion.

But that's because the advertisement is bad. It does not necessarily have to be that way... I for one find the commercials at the super bowl better than any game of American football.



And let's be honest - it's not a language thing. It's simply putting some creative effort into something. Even Swiss products are advertised better in Germany than in Switzerland.

Typical campaign in Switzerland - and that's already a better example:


German Rivella campaign:

Brings up an interesting question...Do you use any Old Spice products?

Nope. It's a very American product you will hardly find outside the US. I am sure the campaigns they run increased their sales, but they are not generating a need strong enough for me to search and hunt for their products... or get them shipped from the US.

Hands up if you snigger at adverts with PREISHIT written over them!

Or is that just me