Russian Advertising: Old and Improved

MOSCOW — A giant pack of Russian cigarettes flies toward the defenseless New York skyline. Torch raised, the Statue of Liberty helplessly watches its flight.

There’s an undercurrent of vague menace in the picture that can be instantly recognized by anyone who ever watched a Cold War-era movie. And it’s underscored by the aggressive slogan of the flashy Russian advertisement, displayed on huge billboards all over Moscow: “Striking Back.”

The ad for a local brand of cigarettes, Yava, is just one of many indications that Russia’s newfound consumer fantasies not only are becoming as slickly designed and sophisticated as their Western models but are growing more nationally self-assertive.

In the post-Soviet crisis of the early 1990s, when most Russians were self-deprecating about anything that came from their own country, goods imported to Russia were instantly in demand. Russian producers even marketed their goods under pseudo-foreign names. For instance, the Moscow clothes designer Anatoly Klimin sells under the trademark name Tom Klaim.

But now, as the domestic economy revives somewhat, the pendulum has swung back.

Buyers here want to be shown that their home-grown Russian values, as well as their goods, are at least as attractive as foreign ones. And a big new advertising industry--made up of both the subsidiaries of Western agencies and of Russian agencies born after the Soviet collapse in 1991 but already surprisingly mature--is realizing that it must satisfy the demand for Russian national flavor if it is to continue succeeding here.

“As we’ve gotten more experienced, the magic of ‘imported’ has faded. We’ve learned to distinguish between good products and the second-rate,” commented the weekly newsmagazine Itogi. “Having been disappointed by stinking Turkish tea, rubbery Polish sausages, Chinese clothes that come apart and clocks from Hong Kong that fall to bits, Russian consumers are getting nostalgic for the Russian mustard and chocolate and sausage that they grew up with.”

Western Ads Misfired

The first Western ads shown in Russia in the early 1990s often got their market wrong, offending people because they didn’t take into account Russian sensibilities, according to Vyacheslav Chernyakhovsky, editor of Reklamny Mir (Advertising World) magazine. Ads for tampons embarrassed this prim society; ads featuring black people apparently touched a chord of racial unease. Now the agencies are learning to provide what the customer wants.

“Of course, we still adapt a lot of Western ads, but the amount of shooting we do for separate Russian ones has gone rocketing up since 1992,” said Elmira Mikhailova, the 29-year-old vice president of a subsidiary of the Western agency D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles, or DMB&B.;

Russia’s advertising business--and retail sales in general--is dominated by foreign firms. According to Vladimir Yevstafiev, the head of leading Russian agency Maxima, more than 90% of the ads shown on nationwide television today are for international companies’ products.

The top-billing Moscow ad agencies listed by Advertising Age weekly in April 1997 were also all branches of foreign companies, led by DMB&B.; The much smaller, leading Russian companies Video International, Premier SV and Maxima came in way down the list. Russian agencies operate at a disadvantage, Yevstafiev said, because they are hamstrung by Russian tax laws.

A Boyar’s Market

The stakes are high and the potential enormous in a country of 150 million people just learning capitalism. So whether ad agencies are Russian or foreign, they are now using Russian themes to sell--even if their products are not intrinsically Russian.

These themes are as popular with Russia’s small but wealthy circle of target buyers--known inside advertising agencies as “bandits, bankers and bimbos”--as the snazzy, jazzy ads of the purely Western approach.

Coca-Cola, which has built several plants here in an apparent attempt to be seen as Russian, has just put up billboards featuring a glamorous black-and-white shot of a modern man and woman about to kiss, above a heart reading “Coca-Cola.”

But, in a nod to the fairy tales every Russian remembers from childhood, it also names the lovers as Ivan the Czarevitch and Yelena the Beautiful--who fall in love and live happily ever after once he has rescued her from a wicked wizard with the help of a magic wolf.

Ads seldom feature reminders of prosaic or painful collective memories of real 20th century Soviet life. The Russian imagery that ad agencies prefer is a more fanciful mixture of history, literature and legend: czars, boyars, horses on gleaming snow, legends of firebirds and wolves, snatches of imperial balls, chandeliers, taffeta gowns and tiaras.

The lost glamour of last century’s aristocratic Russian language--written with an extra letter, the silent “hard sign,” which was abolished soon after the 1917 Revolution--has become a nostalgic advertising favorite. The “hard sign,” written like a small “b” with a tail in front, is now often inserted at the end of product names to suggest uninterrupted high-quality production since czarist days.

Western-made Smirnoff vodka pins its image on emigre chic--spelling the name “Smirnoff” with two Western Fs, like the aristocrats who fled the Russian court in 1917 to make a new home in France or America. Its current ad shows the two Fs magnified through bottle glass, and the slogan boasts of “international quality.”

Smirnoff’s new Russian-made rival, Smirnov, started modern production based on traditional family recipes only after the Soviet collapse. It emphasizes its links with the past by spelling its name with a quaint hard sign, festooning its ads with czarist double-headed eagle emblems and using the punning slogan “The Hard Sign of Quality.”

But there’s more to the new school of Russian advertising than vague appeals to a mythologized past.

“What’s natural in our ads is storytelling and sardonic humor,” newsmagazine Itogi commented. “One of the best ways of peddling goods in Russia is to tell a joke. That’s understandable: Jokes are the legitimate inheritance of Russians after a long period of autocratic and totalitarian rule. There are ironical ads in the West too, but it’s here that they correspond best to the psychological profile of society.”

One of the things that Russians argue about is whether their Soviet years of being bombarded with political slogans--along the lines of “Communism equals Soviet power and the electrification of the whole country!”--makes them more or less susceptible to modern ads.

Bakhyt Kilibayev, who in 1993 designed the first wildly successful all-Russian advertising campaign, for a pyramid-scheme savings company called MMM that later collapsed, said Russians are more gullible than Westerners.

“The media has mythologized our country’s catastrophe in the last decade. They probably didn’t do it on purpose. But as a result, we all feel that we’re living somewhere where there’s been a catastrophe,” Kilibayev said. “That’s why no one notices the good things in life--and there are plenty of them: the holidays in Turkey, the full fridge, the new television--because they’re convinced it’s nothing compared to the global catastrophe whose victim they’ve become. Perhaps by buying consumer goods, we’re stifling our inner sense of catastrophe.

“In this situation, when all real ideals and direction have been lost, you can tell people--and sell people--whatever you like,” Kilibayev added.

But Sergei Koptev, chief executive officer of DMB&B; in Moscow, said it is only a myth that Russians are conditioned to treat ads as obediently as if they were Soviet agitprop. The two concepts are qualitatively different, he and other ad executives say, stressing the new choices offered by capitalism.

“What is true is that adults notice ads more because they’re still a bit alien,” he added.

“But the kids growing up now accept them as a normal part of life. By the end of the century, kids who were born in the perestroika era and are completely uninfected with that old Soviet way of life will start turning 14 and 15. Those are kids who already have so many brands in their heads, and who talk in ad-speak, and who will influence our lives very strongly. Everything’s going to change when they come to the market in the next couple of years. That’s the great dividing line coming up.”

Fast-Paced Change

Ad executives are dismissive of popular grumbles that Russian advertising standards are still lower than those abroad, that too many naked women sprawl sexily on too many cars, and that shocking or teasing consumers is as high on the agencies’ agenda as explaining the products they’re selling.

“Our industry has grown up 20 years in just five or six. And we’ve got to go on moving just as fast because the consumer is moving so fast,” Koptev said. “He’s got huge choices, and he’s exercising his right to make those choices. All the fun of our life is that it’s changing so fast.”

Nevertheless, there’s a hint of unease among ad people at the Russian-first message coming from consumers.

“The message on everyone’s lips now is ‘Buy Russian,’ ” said Koptev, adding that he’d prefer a more sophisticated form of patriotism that would accept not only the traditional staples as Russian but also those foreign companies that have made commitments to the Russian economy--like his own client, Coca-Cola. “What they should be saying is ‘Buy Made in Russia.’ ”

At the Russian Maxima agency, creative director Vladimir Konstantin agreed that Russian-pride sentiment should be treated with caution.

“I don’t think it’s all good to go back wholeheartedly to buying only the brands we remember from our childhood. That kind of nostalgia might mean we’re producing and selling goods that are not of high quality,” he said.

“Russia’s always been a place of extremes, and when a trend starts it usually gets taken to the very limit,” Konstantin said. “So we won’t be using Russian chauvinism as a selling tool.”