Scandals Sell

The placing of this billboard in a Russian town of Voronezh started with a scandal. The billboard advertises a local jewelry store “Rubin” but the man on the photograph is definitely Antonio Banderas. FAS – Russian Federal Service for controlling the execution of antimonopoly laws – suspected that the store couldn’t have so much money as to get the Hollywood star endorsement. The manager of the store Sergey Kuksov was asked to visit Voronezh FAS for an interview.

As Interfax reports, the FAS inspectors were dumbfounded when they saw the manager. “We thought the actor himself visited us – all in black.” It turned out Sergey Kuksov is Antonio Banderas look-alike. Yes, he is the chief manager of the store. Yes, he put his mugshot on the billboard to make the ad message more personal. No, he didn’t try to deceive anyone.

Actually the placing of billboards itself didn’t bring many customers to “Rubin”. But when the story was told on a local TV channel, dozens of women and men swarmed the store to take a look at Banderas’s twin.

Technorati Tags: Voronezh, Russia, billboard, advertising, Banderas, Rubin, FAS