Ukraine: Social advertising

A couple of months ago, with the temperature hanging resolutely below 10 degrees and winter still far too close for comfort, advertising boards across town sprouted posters proclaiming ‘Kyiv – City of Flowers’.

Now I don’t know about you, but this kind of stuff doesn’t really do it for me. Maybe it’s my English understatement, but I figure that generally it’s easier and more convincing if people make up their own minds about such things, and that such self-aggrandising slogans imply a certain insecurity, or even desperation. For example, unless I dreamt it, when driving into Grimsby you are greeted by a sign saying ‘Grimsby – Fish Capital of Europe,’ or something very similar.

Let me illustrate my point in two ways. Firstly, on a trip back to London about a month ago, my wife and I were both struck by the fact that there were flowers everywhere: by the roadside, in the middle of roundabouts, in people’s gardens, in parks, and so on. We probably saw more flowers driving around Ealing than in the whole of Kyiv…

Secondly, a couple of days ago I was strolling along the road where I took all these photos, vulytsa Gorkogo. In a 20-minute walk I managed to see 7-8 of these posters. Guess how many (real!) flowers I saw? That’s right. Not one.

The City of Flowers posters are only part of a wider phenomenon that I find bemusing and slightly disconcerting: social advertising. As well as these posters, in the same 20-minute walk I also passed a number of other similarly mindless posters, such as ‘My Kyiv!’ and ‘My Ukraine!’ (see the posts below - it seems I can't put more than one photo per blog, so I uploaded them separately).

Of course, I am not your average resident of Ukraine, but I find it all a little simplistic and cheesy, and it makes me want to laugh, and then sigh. However, I can only assume that market research has been done that proves that this kind of social advertising does succeed in filling a fair proportion of Ukrainian hearts with pride for their city and motherland. But even that doesn’t exactly reassure me. It still feels a bit Soviet to me, appealing to people’s patriotism with meaningless words and clichéd images.

I wonder what the budget for designing and putting up all these posters is. It may not be that massive, but I still reckon it could be better spent. Take for example Photo 3, a rather straggly entreaty to ‘love Ukraine’, draped over a busy road near our house where Olga was hit by a car last year (not seriously, fortunately). Personally, I think the money would have been better spent on traffic calming measures – or at least on repainting the zebra crossing more regularly, as it is often invisible.

For a change, though, I want to finish on a bright note. It doesn’t have to be this way, as we Kievans found out last year. Instead of the tedious rubbish above, somebody or other decided to try a different tack: humour! With declining birth-rates and high mortality, Ukraine potentially faces demographic meltdown (as does Russia). In this context, last summer’s advertising campaign was a masterstroke. The caption below reads: ‘There’s not enough footballers in this country – let’s get loving!’ (Photo 4)