Would you have thought 20 years ago that you would still be partner at Communicators today?

Christian Weber: In the beginning, of course, we had the idea of quickly building a PR agency and then selling it even more quickly at a high price. After all, we came straight out of the dot-com bubble in 2001, when a lot of money was made with far sillier ideas (laughs). The front-runner at the time was Think Tools, with a hare-brained software-based process that was supposed to revolutionize decision-making processes. When it went public in 2001, the company made a measly 3 million Swiss francs in sales and was worth 2.4 billion on the stock market shortly afterwards. The collapse then followed very quickly.

Obviously, you did not make it that far.

We did have a sounding name, VIPR, but we started from scratch. I had to borrow my share of the capital to found the company and the first office was modest, but it was located directly on Hirschenplatz in Zurich. Co-founder Ralph Spillmann and myself drew the share capital as a salary in the first few months until we were able to land the first mandates. But back to the first question: When I founded the company, I had already planned to stay in my own agency in the long term.

What was your first mandate?

In the second half of the 1990s, I worked as a PR director at a communications agency, mainly on investor relations mandates. The stock market was going through the roof, there were countless IPOs and the valuations were high. Among others, I handled the IPOs of Komax, Straumann, Emmi, Feintool and Actelion, which was the largest biotech IPO in Europe at that time. In some cases, we used multi-million advertising campaigns in all of Switzerland and multi-page glossy newspaper supplements to drum up interest in new stock market candidates. As a result, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of CPH Chemie + Papier Holding asked whether I could advise them on the share swap and the switch from over-the-counter trading to the Local Caps segment of the Swiss Stock Exchange. CPH Group became our first and at the same time most loyal client, as we still get to work for them today. In 2014, I was appointed Head of Corporate Communications at CPH. It is a great and exciting mandate.

Christian Weber has been
partner at Communicators for 20 years.

Were you planning to start an investor relations agency?

That was not our primary goal, although we repeatedly have had mandates in this area. I knew Ralph from the time in the early 1990s when we were involved in building the marketing and PR of the fund business at Credit Suisse. At that time, we had the idea of founding a fund magazine. As former financial and business journalists, we always had publishing ambitions, but we were not able to realize them until later. Twenty years ago, there was great potential for foreign asset managers who were slowly gaining a foothold in Switzerland. They usually had a sales manager who flew in from somewhere to work the market, but there was hardly anyone on the ground, and certainly not for communications. The financial industry just started to use product PR. At that time, the media had a great need for information and expert opinions on investment topics were in demand. There were no communication agencies that focused on financial topics.

So, you started advising foreign asset managers.

We started by inviting journalists to fund managers' presentations and road shows. At that time, it was almost revolutionary to be able to personally speak with specialists on specific investment topics. Ten media outlets, including television, attended presentations by emerging market investment guru Mark Mobius or value investor Jeremy Grantham. For clients like Nordea Asset Management, we organized press trips to investment conferences in Stockholm and Copenhagen. Pioneer Investments organized events for several hundred clients in Venice or Vienna, to which dozens of journalists were flown in from all over the world.

I guess that is no longer the case today.

Today, there is an information overflow. Although the stock markets are booming, the traditional media have largely abandoned investment topics. These take place online now in special interest vessels like investrends.ch. However, also here good content is key to success.

And what is good content?

Investors are looking for independent opinions on current topics. At the moment, almost all providers are riding the ESG wave. There is no question that the financial industry has an important responsibility with sustainable investments. But when a topic goes mainstream, and ESG definitely has, it becomes difficult to distinguish yourself from your competitors. The financial industry's communication has become much more professional in recent years. Today, all major asset managers have central marketing and PR teams that coordinate activities across Europe, define content priorities, create content, and also use various communication channels. The realization is slowly gaining ground that it does not matter which way the message reaches the target audience, whether it is through paid, earned, or owned channels.

Does that mean they have been relying on paid for a long time?

As I said, it makes no difference; the main thing is that the message gets through. Back in the 2000's, we already placed unpaid specialist articles in newspaper specials and at the same time published our own investment trends magazines as paid supplements for Finanz und Wirtschaft and Bilanz on topics such as funds, pensions and structured products.

We then spun off the magazine into the publishing house Publicontext in 2007 and launched the online magazine fondstrends.ch to give the fund industry a platform in the online world as well. Until 2018, I was able to live my journalistic passion as editor-in-chief of fondstrends.ch and test out what does and what does not work online. In 2019, we broadened the focus and renamed the website investrends.ch. Today, over 30 partner companies from the asset management industry support the news platform. The concept is successful and has now been copied by providers in the French-speaking part of Switzerland.

What happened to VIPR?

In 2007, we merged with an agency then called PIAR, and created Communicators together. Now, the second generation of partners is already in place with Peter Manhart, Martin Arnold and Maurice Desiderato. The Communicators name is well established in the market and we can count on an excellent team of consultants.