#5 - JRL 7285
Moscow Times
August 12, 2003
Hit Parade of Political Ads
By Boris Kagarlitsky
The State Duma elections are still a long way off, but political parties are already littering the airwaves with campaign spots. I admit that it's fairly amusing to watch political ads sandwiched between ads for sanitary pads and dandruff shampoo. So many companies now push their brand name rather than a particular product that all the messages run together after a while. "It's life!" proclaims the Party of Life. "Because you're worth it!" replies L'Or?al Paris.
It goes without saying that cosmetics, shampoo and sanitary pads are a lot more useful than Russian politicians. But if the politicians have the money, and they're willing to go head-to-head with shampoo on national television, we might as well tote up the winners and losers in this strange competition.
The ads for the centrist parties are impossible to tell apart. They're incomprehensible and faceless, just like the parties themselves. No one will ever be able to distinguish United Russia from the People's Party for the simple reason that their ads are so forgettable. Even if one of the ads were to stick in your head, there's almost no chance that you would remember which party it belonged to.
The Agrarian Party keeps it simple: fields, tractors, peasants, the occasional ancient monastery in the background. (The foreground is filled with farming equipment, of course.)
The Party of Life seems to have decided that less is more. Their ads fill the screen with a bouquet of flowers or an enormous strawberry that has clearly benefited from all sorts of chemical fertilizers. What is the Party of Life trying to tell us? In the popular consciousness, strawberries are most often associated with sex. But in this case, old man Freud is beside the point. This unnaturally red berry inspires nothing but disgust.
In another Party of Life ad, three "real men" are drinking vodka and reminiscing about their days as paratroopers. Apparently, the party believes that ads like this will lock up the paratrooper vote. Or perhaps the more significant support of voters who drink vodka.
My personal favorites are the ads for the Union of Right Forces. In one ad, children disappear from the screen, while an off-camera voice informs us that the birthrate is falling and that this is a serious problem. We've got to make more babies. A billboard has appeared all over town with a simplified version of the same message: pictures of pregnant women and the slogan, "Love!"
Its pro-kids message might lead you to believe that SPS is pushing for an increase in benefits and programs for children. You'd be wrong. The party actually opposes government "handouts," which it says lead to a culture of dependence. We don't need a social policy. Just love.
The SPS takes first place in my campaign advertisement hit parade for its clip showing a typical, young bureaucrat alone in his office. He's absorbed in his work -- a quarterly report, or perhaps a denunciation of a colleague. For some reason he is chained down, and another bureaucrat -- smaller, older and bald -- is sitting on his shoulder. The little one mutters something about why taxes should not be lowered. The young man responds by rising from his chair and casting off the bald dwarf and his pro-tax message. The chains that bind our hero miraculously disappear. Obviously, they existed only in his mind. The ad breaks off at this point, but it's not hard to figure out the sequel. The young bureaucrat sits back down at his desk and returns to the work from which he had been distracted by this hallucination.
According to its campaign slogan, SPS is dedicated "to stop bureaucrats from hindering our work!" In a sense, this ad neatly sums up the relationship between Russian liberals and the bureaucracy. On one hand, bureaucrat-bashing is par for the course. On the other, the people who complain the loudest are usually bureaucrats themselves. Even if they're in the private sector, their consciousness is thoroughly bureaucratic and they owe their success to their connections in government. They know nothing of the hassles their fellow citizens go through every time they have to deal with a government employee. The problem with the SPS ad is that it suggests that this very real problem exists only in the minds of ideologues, and that talking about it merely distracts us from more important matters.
Too bad the Communist Party hasn't launched its ad campaign yet. It's bound to contain some real gems -- if the party can afford TV ads, that is. Then again, judging by the ads produced by their opponents, the Communists might have better luck holding onto their voters if they leave the TV advertising to L'Or?al.
Boris Kagarlitsky is director of the Institute of Globalization Studies.
Aug. 12, 2003:
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