Replacement ads

In the US, liquor purveyors generally stick to using less-strong beverages as surrogate products which they are able to advertise without violating the ban on hard liquor ads - Bacardi Breezer, Smirnoff Ice, JD's Lynchburg Lemonade, etc. In Russia, such surrogate beverages are used also (photo below is of a Smirnoff Ice ad in Moscow), but distillers here are also much, much more creative.



Watching TV and outdoor advertising spaces, one can see ads for Gzhelka mineral water (as well as several other waters bearing the names of vodka brands), Flagman chocolate candies, Nemiroff pickled peppers (Slogan - "it's all about the pepper"), etc. These ads are humorous because the fig leaf is so tiny - it's clear to everyone what's really being promoted, and often the products ostensibly being promoted don't even exist.

Here's a translated article from a local St. Petersburg paper about this phenomenon:

“Eyes half shut”
Diana Kachalova, Editor-in-chief
Oct. 22, 2004, My Region (Moi Raion) newspaper, St. Petersburg - page 6

One of Dovlatov’s characters didn’t know what to say when he was asked which he liked better, vodka or grain alcohol: “Gee, I don’t know,” he said, “Both the one and the other are so tasty…”

Like that Dovlatovian personality, I also don’t know what to say when I have to choose between beer and vodka. Especially when the State Duma complicates my already none-to-easy choice.

I’m sure you would agree that even in a fight it’s better when everything is fair. If the beer magnates have been banned from advertising their products “in athletic and cultural organizations,” then the same needs to be done to the vodka magnates. Beer mugs have indeed disappeared from the broadcasts of soccer and other sports – brewers used to sponsor 27 different sporting events. Why, then, do we see such strange “sponsored by…” messages on our televisions underneath the logos of well-known vodka brands, and then boxing, or hockey, or some other entertainment?

It could be argued that boxing is publicly sponsored not by Nemiroff vodka, but by an identically named food product. If you have time to grab your glasses and get up close to the television, you can read that money for the broadcast was provided by some Nemiroff-brand pickled peppers, which, of course, contain not a single gram of alcohol. But for some reason they are packaged in jars that are reminiscent of vodka bottles. Similarly, Flagman appears on TV as a sponsor of sporting events in the guise of bottled water which you can’t find in a single supermarket.

Experts have already come up with an intelligent name for this fraud: “substitute advertising.” I don’t know whether it’s substitution or deception, but any child can tell the difference between candy and the vodka with the identical brand. Only State Duma deputies are incapable of this; apparently they watch TV without their glasses on. Or with their eyes half shut. Because they have gone after the beer industry fiercely and passed the law on it with insane speed, but as for the pickled peppers, they’ll talk about them, if at all, no sooner than next spring. That, at least, is what the Ministry of antimonopoly policy has said. Maybe the deputies get more harshly hung over from beer than from vodka?