IKEA Lamp

I'm not the only one to notice how quality of IKEA products dropped in the last several years. But they never forget to raise prices.

Purified by milk

Parlament Vodka. Purified by milk.

What makes genuine premium Russian vodka different? (Stress is on the word ‘premium’). You take quality alcohol, mix it with water in proportion 4:6 and bottle it. This easy process could be done everywhere in the world but usually outside Russia alcohol is mixed with distilled water that makes vodka tasteless but provides stability. In Russia we take natural mineral water that makes best brands of vodka unique but also brings a host of production problems. Distilled water is always the same but mineral water differs not only in quality of different sources but its content also changes over time. Another important feature of Russian vodka is that best brands do not use the highest quality alcohol as its taste is too “pure”. In other words - blunt, faceless, boring, and mediocre. Russian alcohol keeps some unique taste of grain it was produced from.

Premium Russian vodka requires numerous special methods of alcohol purification and filtering. When one reads ‘purified by milk’ it means that milk is used as biological coagulant for unwanted elements before filtering – usually with activated carbon. In the 19th century old good Russian landed gentlemen used all kinds of expensive coagulants, like egg yolks. It took a full bucket of yolks to purify just a single bottle of vodka. Not surprisingly when serfs were freed from bondage and stopped supplying gentlemen with free eggs such practices stopped.

Related Tags: Russia, Moscow, Russian vodka, advertising, vodka, alcohol

Cheburashka

Cheburashka is one of the most popular Russian animated movie character and a toy loved by several generations. Click here to read more about Cheburashka at Wikipedia. Everything was nice and good until the coming of capitalism to Russia. Marketers decided to play on Cheburashka’s popularity picturing the poor little animal on ice cream packages and milk. Eduard Uspenskiy – the author of the Cheburashka book spent several years suing marketing pirates and won at the end. His major argument was that Cheburashka – the name and the image – was his sole invention and has no analogues in the real world or in fiction.

Not quite so. A historian from Ulyanovsk Sergei Petrov discovered that Cheburashka actually did exist in reality. Originally cheburashka was a large float used for fishing nets. When floats become obsolete men used to carve funny animals from them. Those toys for kids were called cheburashkas.

Related Tags: Russia, animation, Cheburashka

Remove your moles

San Lazar is a medical centre that calls itself “Clinic of Aesthetical Medicine” offers services like removal of moles and birthmarks. Red arrows on the left read, ‘200 ruble – 3000 rubles – 500 rubles, etc.’ White arrow on the right has the caption, ‘You might want to keep this one’.
This ad poster is a product of creative process of Logvindesign Studio Moscow.

Via AdMe

Related Tags: Russia, Moscow, advertising, design, medicine

Kakdela

It seems that eXile newspaper started a new category “Reklama Report” on the never boring subject of Russian advertising practices. “Horoshiye Dela” by Alex Shifrin is about kakdela.ru promotion techniques:

The idea to tag walls as a form of advertising wasn't suggested to Kakdela by an expensive ad agency. This was something that they did because it was cheap and they needed to get their name out. It was done because they decided that it was the right thing to do. It took someone with a strong, likely inadvertent, intuition for advertising techniques, and the guts to go out and deface public urban objects, knowing full well that if they pissed anyone off, it wouldn't really be hard to track the vandals down. This is a campaign that cost almost nothing to produce, and anyone who's seen it around town has been exposed to some of the most effective brand building tactics out in the market. By being truly low end, and grass roots, the campaign with a pack of West superimposed on a graffiti laden print, with the tagline "We speak the language of the streets," which is patently ridiculous. Anyone who has to tell you that they have street cred... obviously has none. Put this billboard up against Kakdela, and tell me which of the two has managed to achieve real street credibility.

Read more…

Legevara

Le Brand agency – known for its revolutionary creative ideas – is hiring. If you happen to be a serious and experienced account manager click here.

Related Tags: Russia, Moscow, advertising, account manager

Аффтар жжот

There’s probably nothing wrong when a soda producer names its product by a teenage nerdy forum zombies’ slang word “Yad” (‘poison’ in normal Russian). There’s probably also nothing wrong when a grown-up trying to sound original uses another teenage nerdy slang word “Preved” (meaning ‘hi’). But when this is done by an editor-in-chief of Russian “Newsweek” that tries really hard to be regarded as a serious and trustworthy magazine – one has doubts about the effectiveness of this printed ad. Parfenov – once one of the best TV journalists in Russia – is going gaga.

Related Tags: Russia, Newsweek, advertising, Parfenov, slang, preved