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

2. Making It

49 This is the way it used to happen: The shopkeeper filled up his stockroom. Customers bought from him or just walked by. Autumn approached, but in the stockroom there was still far too much merchandise. And the shopkeeper also knew that too much of his merchandise was out of date. He worried about things for two or three days, and on the fourth day he called the newspaper to get them to send him “someone” quickly. “Someone” came, and an ad appeared announcing a great sale of the best merchandise at the lowest prices, saving the day....“The crowds are swarming—save me!” This was advertising in the old style of the fairground hawkers, which is still to be found today. —Naš publicitet, 1955 Told from the perspective of one of socialist Yugoslavia’s first professional advertising journals, the vignette related in the epigraph above tried to capture the way things got done in the bad old days. With this mordant little tale, brief but full of meaning, the disapproving editors of Naš publicitet [“Our Publicity” or “Our Promotion”] offered their readers (and, not coincidentally, the clients and potential clients of their parent institution Oglasni Zavod Hrvatske, or OZEHA) a taste of the supposedly backward past of Yugoslav advertising and the sorts of shoddy practices they were aiming to transcend.1 It was not a pretty picture. The poor merchant in question followed no marketing program. He just bought merchandise and sold it—or not—in a haphazard way, slipping from blissful ignorance into a panic when things went poorly. Then, in desperation, he resorted to Source for the epigraph: untitled piece, Naš publicitet 2, no. 2 (September 1955). 1. The possessive adjective “naš” in the publication’s title requires some special attention. Although its literal meaning is “our” or “ours,” in the standard Yugoslav usage encountered here it ordinarily connotes something that applies to the whole society. Following the dissolution of the federation, the word is now used to signify ethno-national communities, but during the period under consideration in this book it was often used more or less synonymously with the adjective “Yugoslav.” Given the multivalence of both words in the journal’s title, Naš publicitet—literally, “Our Publicity” or “Our Promotion”—might just as properly be understood to mean something more on the order of “Yugoslav Advertising” or “Commercial Promotion in Yugoslavia.” Given the really quite expansive purview of the journal’s coverage, this might indeed be the superior rendering. 2 MakingIt Building a Socialist Brand of Market Culture 50 冷 Chapter 2 an advertisement of the simplest and crudest sort, not much more than an announcement really, and one that relied on exaggerations and unmerited superlatives: a “great” sale of the “best” goods at the “lowest” prices. The appeal was, moreover, deceptive and unfair: while it promised the finest quality, in reality the goods were out of fashion or growing obsolete. More problematic still, the merchant ultimately proved unable to satisfy his customers’ needs, overwhelmed by the “swarming” crowds. There were far too few buyers for long stretches of time, and far too many in an instant. Nothing about these contacts with the market was timed or planned. And to make matters worse, the advertisement was slapped together—certainly not “created,” the piece suggested—by the kind of inexpert, mercenary hack who really had no place in a modern, sophisticated, genuinely professional advertising campaign. That “someone” referred to darkly in the piece was almost certainly an akviziter, that is, an agent of the newspaper who, as one of the commission-hungry “modern pirates” so disliked by the emerging cadre of creative industry professionals, made his living by selling advertising space to merchants and others for a cut of the expenditure, typically somewhere in the range of 5 to 20 percent of the cost of the advertisement.2 With the pointed concluding remark about “advertising in the old style of the fairground hawkers” [to je bila reklama vašarskog stila], the anonymous author of the piece succinctly dismissed the previous traditions of doing business. In the first place, the old mode involved the disreputable, primitive reklama form of advertising and not the modern, salutary ekonomska propaganda.3 Worse yet, it was undertaken in the simplistic style of market 2. See C., “Moderni gusari,” Naš publicitet 1, no. 1 (August 1954) (the omission of page numbers here, and in following citations, indicates that the journal pages were unnumbered). These akviziteri were the bane of the new, aggressively professionalizing...