Trendsetter:ICOM Executive Director Gary Burandt Views a New Russia
Gary Burandt, Executive Director of independent agency network ICOM, made history 22 years ago when he moved to Moscow in a different role. He opened the first U.S.-U.S.S.R. joint venture advertising and public relations agency for Young & Rubicam and Burson-Marsteller in 1988 during the days of the old Soviet Union.
On a recent business trip to Moscow, he recounted how the city had changed and how advertising had evolved in Russia's capital in the wake of the last two decades..
Burandt tells how there was no color in 1988 Moscow. ";No advertising, no retail window decoration, no colorful signage. Well, there certainly is now. Big lighted billboards are everywhere, some digital. Posters on bus shelters. Posters on utility poles. Banners stretched across boulevards. Neon signs announce retail establishments, and bright display windows show what's for sale."
He recalls how Y&R put up the first neon sign in Moscow on Pushkin Square in 1989 for Coca-Cola. "We did it to help Coke support its biggest customer, McDonald's, which was opening its first restaurant in the U.S.S.R, a 700-seat establishment also on Pushkin Square. The sign was a simple time-and-temperature indicator with a big red neon Coca-Cola logo atop an apartment building across the square from the Golden Arches. Not very exciting by Times Square standards, but it was the talk of the town back then. And, since the line to get in to the McDonald's was three hours long it made lots of impressions."
Gary Burandt's depiction of arriving at Moscow's airport may best illustrate the extraordinary changes in the market. In the 80's passengers were met with a line of "bent and battered Lada taxis" waiting for a fare into the city. He recalls that "A good negotiator could get that ride for a couple of packs of Marlboros. The driver would smoke one pack and sell or trade the cigarettes from the other pack one at a time. Rubles had no value, and it was illegal to pay in hard currency. It was basically a barter economy. As one taxi driver told me in '89, 'We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.'"
The new airport is bright, clean and works. It's filled with posters and digital billboards in multiple languages. The officials actually had a word of welcome. Outside there was a line of shiny taxis made in Europe, Japan and Korea. The ride to town now costs the equivalent of US$60. The driver didn't smoke.
More of Gary Burandt's observations will be found in the early summer edition of The Internationalist -- to be posted on this site next week.
