Rebranding

Snowsquare has a post about a cryptic ad campaign apparently setting up a rebranding by mobile telephony provider MTS.

There is something strangely appealing about the crazy drama of these "secret" ad campaigns. I can remember several from my time in Moscow. The silliest was one that involved a bunch of posters with nothing more than the letters "AB" (if memory serves) and eventually turned out to be advertising a new (and ultimately unsuccessful) line of potato chips being promoted by Alla Borisovna Pugachova, an aging, overweight pop star. Happily, I think the Russian marketers have become more sophisticated in the past couple of years, although some of snowsquare's photos suggest there are still companies taking a low-budget approach to advertising.

Another, more recent - and more captivating - campaign of this type involved a man with his hand on a curvaceous figure that looked like the silhouette of a woman, with the caption, "So that she doesn't leave [you] for someone else." ("Chtoby ona ne ushla k drugomu") Turned out the ad was for car alarms, and the man was resting his hand on what emerged (in the second version of the ad) to be a luxury automobile.

Strangely, I don't think I've ever seen anything similar in the US, except maybe once in a long while promoting movies. I think this is a function of Russia's money being concentrated in Moscow, a city which has more than enough outdoor advertising space to create a huge impression on any of its 10+ million residents. There is no such single concentration of wealth/influence in once US city, although maybe there are ad campaigns like this in New York and I've just never heard about them. Maybe it also has something to do with people who are only 15 years into the daily visual assault of advertising and are thus more willing to look at the billboards and think about them. On the other hand, I guess there are sometimes some pretty cryptic ads on US TV (our nation's equivalent of the common city-space), but I have been living TV-less and therefore have been deprived of them for the past 6 months or so.

If I may rave briefly, I'm a huge fan of snowsquare - the best English-language slice-of-Moscow blog around.

Not quite there yet

From a BBC Monitoring report sent around in Johnson's Russia List earlier this week:

[...] Ren TV's late-night news on 12 April noted that the number of bureaucrats has risen to 1,462,000, which is some 100 per person. Presenter Mikhail Kurennoy noted that since 2001 the number of officials has been "growing at an amazing rate", despite pledges to the contrary by President Putin and Prime Minister Fradkov. "There are now more bureaucrats than there were in the USSR," Kurennoy observed.

Right, the USSR never had more than 80 bureaucrats per person, tops...