Fun from Russian Marketing Blog

The always-interesting Russian Marketing Blog has had a couple of especially quality posts recently. One of them discusses the infamous billboard ad for Finans magazine that showed a Euro symbol and a dollar sign, uh, coupling, and was captioned, "A magazine about how money is made."

This ad became legendary because the Moscow city authorities banned it soon after it showed up on billboards around the city a couple of years ago. RMB moves beyond the basic reaction ("he-he, the euro and dollar are 'doing it'") and considers the implications:

What are a dollar and a euro doing? This is a kind of psychological projective test. Me and most of my friends at the first glance thought they were dancing. But then we looked closer and realized they are doing something else. They are making money.

Still I cannot get the message of this ad. First, if the dollar becomes pregnant, what kind of money would it bear? Like, if you leave a dollar bill and a euro bill inside your wallet for a night then in the morning you will find a thousand rubles. Second, if they make money then the euro is definitely male and the dollar female. Why? Because euro is stronger than dollar? But then if the US Federal Reserve changes dollar discount rate would it change dollar sex as well.

In the fall of 2003, when this ad appeared, the Euro had relatively recently overtaken the dollar for the first time, exchange-rate-wise. This was a big issue in Russia, because so many people keep (kept?) their savings in cash dollars at home, and another way to interpret the ad is that the Euro is "screwing" the dollar. As I traveled to Western Europe during that time, and ever since, I know I felt like my dollars were getting screwed...

RMB also had a post recently about something that I've found amusing for some time: the phenomenon of Russian liquor producers using "replacement ads" to promote their brand. These are ads, ostensibly for water, chocolates, or pickled peppers, which prominently display the logo and colors of a brand of vodka, often with an ambiguous slogan (RMB notes one I haven't seen before - Slavyanskaya vodka/water's tagline is, “A person can stand three days without drinking. But he can also spend them drinking."). Meanwhile, the products ostensibly being advertised are nowhere to be seen in your local supermarket.