Are London subway riders more intellectual than the Metro hordes in DC? That is one conclusion one might draw from some of the things advertised in the Tube here. In DC, I recall ads for defense contractors, HIV medication, living in Baltimore (!), health & auto insurance, fake-me-out college degree programs, and (to be fair) a number of other things, including books, albeit usually trashy romances or pulp thrillers. In London, I see ads for musicals and museums, along with, of course, ads for travel agents, movies, booze, insurance, plastic surgery & botox injections, etc. But what made me pose the question was seeing this series of ads a couple of times:
Stalin in the Underground, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.
The product being advertised is Simon Sebag Montefiore's book Young Stalin (to be released in October in the US). The ads are attention-getting; my only beef with them is that they - like the posters for the Borat movie - use a Cyrillic "Д" in place of the Latin letter "A". I've griped about the same type of offense being committed in a similar context in the past, and I still don't understand why publishers / advertisers do this. Can someone who doesn't read Russian enlighten me? Does the appearance of an out-of-place Cyrillic letter that sort of resembles the Latin letter it's replacing instill an air of compelling exoticism in the product being advertised?
8 comments:
The whole A/Д thing drives me up the wall, too.
At Euston station, some wag has stuck a little piece of paper over Stalin's mouth, with the text (from memory, so probably slightly wrong):
www.needstogetlaidmore.com
As much as Id like to take the intellectual high ground on this one I cant. Even though I try to read and learn as much as I can to educate myself, I still find Cyrillic ever so exotic and I am at the mercy of some advertiser who wants to grab my attention by using one of the characters. Maybe also because it is a crappy Stereotype, I have a soft spot for them even though know better
It could be the same for British but growing up in Australia, Russia seemed like this big black void which we knew nothign about except they had funny letters and stood in long queues for things. Sad but true, maybe Russians didnt know so many things about Australia either! :)
Louis
www.zezeran.com
Louis, I appreciate that perspective - I guess the ad-men/women know what they are doing by sticking in the odd Cyrillic letter.
Andy, I've seen those stickers all over the Underground (though they seem to tear them down quickly, so I haven't got a good photo of one for the graffiti blog yet) - I think they say "ireallyneedtogetlaid.com" but I could be misremembering, so to speak.
Yeah, Louis has got it right. To somebody who can't read Cyrillic, the use of a letter here and there on a Soviet-related subject adds to the mystery and is pretty effective. I remember this from the time when I couldn't read Cyrillic, although its most common use was the back-to-front 'R'.
Now I can read Cyrillic, it just looks like gibberish, but the advertisers know that most people can't.
I don't think you could use "я" effectively in the US without people thinking of "Toy's R US" (which uses the backwards R).
To be honest, I found Cyrillic really easy to learn. For an engineer, almost 1/3 of the letters are familiar anyway. About another 1/3 are the same as English ... so you just have a handful to learn. If you know anything about the origins of alphabets, it isn't too difficult.
The "Д" for "A" thing is annoying, I never found it effective either .. but I'm probably not typical.
I would agree with Tim, before I knew any Russian, the use of cyrillic letters were the equivalent of Soviet propaganda posters, AK-47's, soviet anthems with deep male vocals, etc. The latest Stolichnaya vodka commercial is a nice example of the effect.
The video game Half-Life 2 uses alot of signs with cyrillic lettering, some even that make sense, to give the game a weird other-worldly atmosphere. Some commentary on the game even mentions that during a portion of the game where you are in a hospital, they tried to give the hospital an eastern european look to make it more creepy.
Montefiore's book is fantastic. I'm reading it right now.
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