Bought and Sold: Living and Losing the Good Life in Socialist Yugoslavia

3. Selling It

109 Advertising [ekonomski publicitet] is something completely new in the socialist economy. Up until now, this topic has been addressed only to a relatively small extent in this country. We cannot transfer and take advantage of certain experiences of the Western countries, which have gone considerably further ahead in the field of advertising, because we are aware that these are a reflection of the capitalist economy. —Dušan P. Mrvoš, Propaganda, reklama, publicitet It is increasingly accepted that advertising works over the long term, and...for it to be successful, it must be in harmony with the accepted system of values and understandings in the given society. —Momčilo Milisavljević, “Društveno-ekonomska uloga ekonomske propagande” Yugoslavia’s departure from Stalinism opened the door to new attitudes toward commercial promotion, but those in positions of authority typically did not treat advertising and marketing as “natural” elements of the country’s commercial life. The atmosphere of official skepticism and even outright hostility did not disappear overnight. Rather, advertising and marketing activities—and, at times, even the very concepts themselves—had to be naturalized. To accomplish this, a small dedicated cadre of specialists mounted an aggressive campaign aimed at securing their creative autonomy, building an industry, and winning a place for themselves as respected professionals alongside other members of the country’s economic elites. This chapter examines that struggle to legitimize commercial promotion, to transform it from a seemingly useless relic of a spurned capitalist past into a necessity of modern, rational, socialist production and distribution. 3 SellingIt Legitimizing the Appeal of Market Culture Sources for the epigraphs: Dušan P. Mrvoš, Propaganda, reklama, publicitet: teorija i praksa (Belgrade: OZEHA Zavod za ekonomsku propagandu i publicitet, 1959), 9; Momčilo Milisavljevic ́, “Društveno-ekonomska uloga ekonomske propagande” [abridged version of address to the Conference of Radio-Television Centers and Subscribers, Dubrovnik, 6 November 1975], Ideja, no. 3 (December 1975): 4–6, at 5. 110 冷 Chapter 3 These efforts to sway political and public opinion are highly instructive. In the first place, they speak volumes about the nature and extent of the opposition that advertisers faced as they tried to secure a place for their craft. The tone of the trade sources and the kinds of arguments presented there, furthermore, reveal how those in the maturing industry perceived the limitations on their creative freedom, how they assessed their strengths and vulnerabilities, how they defined an agenda for the future of their profession, and how they maneuvered to establish their own, businessoriented values as legitimate within Yugoslav society. Because the barriers they met were often more a matter of a hostile political climate rather than any restrictive regulations or other overt official strictures, interpreting the industry literature sometimes becomes an exercise in reading between the lines—a task familiar to historians of communism—to determine just what it was that the advertising specialists experienced as hindrances to their work. Their long push for acceptance offers, moreover, an important illustration of the ways in which advertising and marketing, practices that might appear to be tightly or even inseparably linked to Western-style capitalism, could nevertheless be harmonized—in theory if not necessarily in practice—with the ideological imperatives of Marxist-Leninist governance. Finally, and more generally, there are definite parallels between some parts of the Yugoslav story and the sustained struggle of capitalist advertising professionals to justify their work as nothing less than an affirmative social good, and at the same time as nothing more, as the idea was expressed in the slogan of industry giant McCann-Erickson, than “Truth Well Told.” That deft little formulation manages to capture an important part of the ethos of the advertising and marketing specialists of socialist Yugoslavia: like their counterparts at the unapologetically capitalist McCann-Erickson firm, the often quite apologetic Yugoslavs continually characterized their work as both artful (the creations of highly skilled professionals) and truthful (informative , not deceptive). Yet the socialist environment did make a real difference , and in the end the Yugoslav industry’s efforts at self-legitimization underscore certain key distinctions between the brand of market culture that gradually developed in Yugoslavia and the more familiar and more thoroughly studied circumstances that nurtured the growth of advertising and marketing in the West. Truth Half Told: Finding the Perfect Pitch for Commercial Promotion in a Socialist System Members of the country’s steadily growing advertising and marketing institutions couched their work in soothing terms, as a benign, value-neutral, even apolitical endeavor, but in reality...