Black PR or market manipulation?

This fake ad (image source - advertka LJ community) was apparently stuck up all over the Moscow metro in recent days. It appears to be an exhortation by TV personality Vladimir Soloviov to invest in Sberbank. The text above the photo reads, "In 2008 I made $2,000,000 with Sberbank." And below the photo, "You can do it too! After all, I'm just as ordinary as you."

Soloviov, who appears to be even more self-absorbed than your average TV host, is convinced that this is part of a campaign to discredit him in the eyes of the public, alleging that it's government-funded. And perhaps it is, I don't know what controversies he's been embroiled in as of late, and the text of the "ad" is not exactly flattering to Soloviov (the final line could also be translated as "I'm just as simple as you."

My first thoughts (most likely incorrect but more interesting than a theory as mundane as black PR) upon reading about a fake ad using a public figure to pump the idea of investing in Sberbank were (1) maybe someone's trying a low-budget way to goose SBER's share price (but it's not as if the Moscow Metro is full of retail investors in the stock market); and (2) I doubt that anyone made $2m on Sberbank last year, unless it was by short-selling the stock, which since the start of 2008 has underperformed even the collapsing RTS index.


[UPDATE 1/29: having seen this additional (obviously fake) ad involving Soloviov, which shows him promoting a sketchy-looking weight-loss method, I am more inclined to agree that someone is just trying to make him look bad.]

Ad gone wrong

I took this image from an online ad for AT&T. They are running a similar TV campaign advertising seamless worldwide service for people who straddle places like "Philawarapragacago." The TV spots were directed by Wes Anderson, are quite watchable and get a thumbs-up from Adweek.

But whoever designed the online image above needs to take another look at a globe (a real one, not one with the AT&T logo providing the latitude lines). As someone who has looked at many maps in my life and actually had to consider the relative merits of living in China (well, Hong Kong), London and Moscow, I found it disturbing that AT&T apparently thinks London is closer to China than to Moscow. Hey AT&T guys - London to Moscow is about a three-and-a-half-hour flight; flying on to China from Moscow will take you at least twice as long. Not to mention that anyone operating between London, Moscow and China would have to be crazy to use AT&T for mobile or other telephony.

The end of the Putin Era (?) in posters

The folks at Grani.ru, who brought us the Free Khodorkovsky! poster contest a few years ago, have updated the contest concept for the 2007-08 political season. This time, the theme of the contest is "The End of the Putin Era." The contest asked artists to respond to a few questions:

What awaits the country in 2008? When and how will the ruling regime in Russia change? What are the results of Putin's rule? Where will the new leaders take Russia?

I've decided to post a few of these posters here and will even attempt (no doubt futilely, in some cases) to explain the humor or multiple meanings behind some of them.

First, a few of my favorites:

This one I love because it's a photo that anyone in Moscow could have taken - a photo of
an ad for Putinka vodka's toast hotline underneath the sign for the Lubyanka metro station.

This one positions a glass in front of a bunch of bottles of
Putinka in such a way that letters spelling "Kaput" are hightlighted.

Self-explanatory.

This one I liked because it represents the role of broadcast media in inflating
the popularity ratings or visibility of various public figures in Russia (the 1 on the
pump is the logo of the state-run Channel 1 network, also known as ORT).

Represented are Putin, Ivanov and Medvedev, and also, among others, Ksenia Sobchak
(who's sort of like Russia's answer to Paris Hilton) and ORT political commentator
Mikhail Leont'ev, who was already delivering blisteringly anti-American monologues a
few years ago, so I can only imagine what he's progressed to lately.

"A king is made by his retinue," reads the poster, which has the king surrounded by
sixes ("шестёрки") of various suits. In Russian slang, to be someone's "шестёрка"
means to be their "flunky" or "gofer" (according to Multitran), but to give the word its
proper prison slang meaning (since VVP likes to throw around a bit of prison slang
himself now and again), it's best translated in this context as being someone's bitch.

A number of the posters dealt with the possibility that Putin might stay in power or continue to run things from behind the scenes, and with the Russian electorate's lack of choices:

This is another great play on an image from pop-culture: "лохотрон" means any kind
of a scam designed to ensnare suckers or "лохи." The smaller text reads "the future does
not depend on you." The reference is to an ad campaign by mobile telephony provider
Megafon, which had the tag line "the future depends on you." Megafon was originally a
St. Petersburg-based company (Northwest GSM) which exploded onto the national scene
in the early years of Putin's rule, allegedly thanks to help from Putins telecoms minister
Leonid Reiman, who supposedly has an interest in the company.

The lenses of the glasses read "the end of the Putin era," and the
text below reads "visible only through rose-colored glasses."

Pretty much self-explanatory; the small print
reads, "I'll make you an offer you can't refuse..."

The hand is making the "fig," a hand gesture sort of (though not entirely) like giving
someone the finger in the US. The gesture can be used in Russia to signify refusal
when asked to do something, as if to say, "like hell I will." The creative tilting of
the 8 in 2008 to make the infinity symbol suggests who is telling whom to go нафиг.

Another frequently recurring theme in the posters submitted for the contest was Russia's oil wealth, and all of its consequences - from international braggadocio to domestic dependency to good old-fashioned class struggle:

Self-explanatory.

"We are sitting well!"
This expression can mean "everyone's having a good time" when used in the
context of a social gathering; but "to sit on the needle" or "become seated on the
needle" is Russian slang for becoming hooked on intravenous drugs.

"The Chekists are on duty until the last drop..."

This one may be my very favorite, because it incorporates themes of both oil
wealth and the power of the broadcast media. The figure with its feet propped
up on the barrel of oil is labeled "the authorities" (власть can be a difficult word to
translate), and the submissive figure watching TV is labeled "the people."
The caption below reads "an earth-shaking (or 'epochal') age."

Immortal Sovok

The eXile reports on the resurgence of propaganda posters and billboards around Moscow:

Russian Propaganda Posters Are Back With A Vengeance
They also have the exact same design
By Alex Shifrin

It all started last year, with a heavier than usual smattering of non-profit and socially minded advertising appearing in the capital. The smattering soon became a deluge. The amount of public service announcement advertising has now increased to such a point that, last week, while driving on the embankment near the White House, it hit me: PSAs now outweigh regular product and service advertising.

Read on...

Global Voices Online recently reported on some old-school billboards ("Putin's Plan - Russia's Victory!") which are apparently more of a nationwide phenomenon than the Moscow PSA inundation that the eXile's article discusses. Not that such billboards are particularly new - I seem to recall seeing ones a few years ago, ahead of the 2003-04 election cycle, that had a photo of Putin (also on the background of the flag) and a quotation of his, something like "Together we will make Russia united and strong." I have a photo of such a billboard across the street from the central market in Kaluga, but it's on an external hard drive somewhere...

Stalin in the Underground

Are London subway riders more intellectual than the Metro hordes in DC? That is one conclusion one might draw from some of the things advertised in the Tube here. In DC, I recall ads for defense contractors, HIV medication, living in Baltimore (!), health & auto insurance, fake-me-out college degree programs, and (to be fair) a number of other things, including books, albeit usually trashy romances or pulp thrillers. In London, I see ads for musicals and museums, along with, of course, ads for travel agents, movies, booze, insurance, plastic surgery & botox injections, etc. But what made me pose the question was seeing this series of ads a couple of times:

Stalin in the Underground, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.

The product being advertised is Simon Sebag Montefiore's book Young Stalin (to be released in October in the US). The ads are attention-getting; my only beef with them is that they - like the posters for the Borat movie - use a Cyrillic "Д" in place of the Latin letter "A". I've griped about the same type of offense being committed in a similar context in the past, and I still don't understand why publishers / advertisers do this. Can someone who doesn't read Russian enlighten me? Does the appearance of an out-of-place Cyrillic letter that sort of resembles the Latin letter it's replacing instill an air of compelling exoticism in the product being advertised?

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.