Drinking to the nation: Russian television advertising and cultural differentiation

Abstract

This article explores the utilisation of cultural nostalgia for the past (Soviet and pre-revolutionary) and the concern with Russian cultural values in television advertisements for beer in post-Soviet Russia. In these adverts the effect of the foregrounding of these values is more significant than their effectiveness in selling products. Advertising, as a pervasive element of popular culture, is as contested as any other, such as film or television serials, in terms of refracting cultural discourses. Such adverts are termed ‘culturally differentiated’ to contrast them to global and glocalised adverts (where a few concessions are made to local cultural factors).

Notes

According to TNS-Gallup, the leading market research organisation in Russia, the quantity of television advertising for beer (4.5 million seconds) came second only to that for mobile telephones in 2005. Soft drinks and dairy products came in third and fourth place, respectively, with over three million seconds of adverts each. Caillat and Mueller (1996) have highlighted the importance of product categories such as beer in revealing culturally differentiated approaches in advertising.

Over 200 separate beer adverts were examined for the present study, including over 25 brands. Most adverts were shown on national channels between 2002 and 2006.

Although it would be mistaken to assume that advertising, consumer preference and even brands played no role at all in the Soviet Union, the resources spent by the state on manipulating consumption in a market of nearly 300 million consumers in 1979 (including satellite states) worked out at little more than $2 per person (Mattelart 1991, p. 27). Good overviews of the role of advertising in the Soviet Union can be found in Mickiewicz (1988) and Kelly (1998, pp. 223 – 46).

Levinson (1997) stressed the culture ‘shock’ not only of content (feminine hygiene products) but of the novelty of the advertising form itself as contributing to the negative reaction by the poorest members of society. He also highlighted the ‘social function’ of advertising in disposing of the Soviet period (and its after-effects) entirely by rendering it invisible on the screen.

The small amount of existing research on audience response in Russia is dealt with below.

The MMM pyramid scheme in which clever advertising directly courted the poorest in society was an exception proving the rule. Banking initially was seen by consumers as a murky area of the new capitalist system. The MMM pyramid scheme in many minds proved this supposition.

Figures from the Association of Communication Agencies of Russia, available at: http://www.akarussia.ru/rinok3/, accessed 3 March 2007. In 2006 that figure stood at over $3 billion, reflecting an increase of over 30% in each of the last two years.

Good examples from the early 1990s are spots on fashion and finance (Condee & Padunov 1995, p. 133). The practice is clearly still common in regional television. Mickiewicz cites figures of over 80% of airtime as ‘bought’ in some way or another (1997, p. 238).

Many multi-nationals had severely curtailed their Moscow agencies' operations and cancelled television contracts. At one point Channel One was close to bankruptcy, as it was owed tens of millions of dollars in unpaid advertising charges (Rivituso 1999).

A number of adverts for dairy products more or less obliquely referenced some of the sentimental and romantic films of the late Soviet era such as Menshov's Moscow Doesn't Believe in Tears (1980).

The very irregular supply led to beer becoming something of a sought-after commodity, if not a true luxury product. A line from the comic novel by I'lf and Petrov, The Golden Calf set in the 1930s, ‘beer is served only to members of the trade-union’, passed into common currency as a shorthand for the peculiarly Soviet forms of material rewards and incentives.

The Baltika group is the fastest growing part of the portfolio of a multi-national corporation, see note 16.

In 2003 a person watching an average of four hours of national television a day during prime-time would see nearly one hour of adverts. In 2006 a federal law restricted the amount of adverts that could be shown in a 24-hour period to 20% of broadcasting time, and in 2008 this is to be reduced further to 15%, bringing Russia broadly into line with most other European countries. In 2004 the Duma adopted a law (discussed since 2001) limiting the time when beer adverts could be shown to between 10.00 pm and 7.00 am. In response to the plethora of beer brands visible on the screen the law also stipulated a number of other restrictions, including a ban on the use of any images of people or animals (Tkanchuk 2005). Some of these restrictions have now been lifted.

Tobacco and vodka advertising was banned from television in 1995.

Borenstein (2005, p. 56) sees the borrowing of Soviet propagandistic modes (worker as hero) and the interplay between the personal and the collective as key to the success of the MMM marketing. Bank Imperial's expensive and pretentious ‘World History’ adverts (1993 – 97) were an attempt to associate the bank, for corporate clients only, with the gravitas of momentous events in Russian History such as the Emancipation of the Serfs or Napoleon's retreat from Moscow.

The majority shareholders in Baltika and its parent company Baltika Beverages Holding are Scottish & Newcastle and Carlsberg, two of the biggest alcoholic drinks companies in Europe, based in the UK and Denmark, respectively. The 2004 series of advertisements was created by the Moscow office (run and staffed by Russian nationals) of McCann Erikson, the biggest advertising company in the world. In 2006 Scottish & Newcastle predicted that the holding would become the biggest brewer in Europe on the back of the Baltika brand (Townsend 2006).

Comments posted at sostav.ru, 21 December 2004, available at: http://www.sostav.ru/news/2004/12/21/r1/, accessed 1 January 2007.

An adjective derived from the word for ‘dustpan’—sovok, used derogatively to define a ‘Soviet citizen’ and his outlook: supposedly typified by a narrow, suspicious and conservative world-view and especially the persistence of such an outlook after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Arsenal and Baltika command a third of the market (since 2004).

As might be expected, the Soviet achievement in this sphere is exploited repeatedly by advertisers—from mobile phone providers to chewing gum.

However, recent Tinkoff adverts in 2004 have included an explicit attack on ‘alien’ values of materialism and greed in a series about the nouveau riche, at the same time as appealing to an emergent affluent middle-class.