ABSTRACT
In recent years, and particularly since the early 1960s, there has been a sudden increase in interest in commercial advertising in the USSR. A great many advertising organisations have been created: according to a recent Soviet press report, 'nobody even knows' how many advertising organisations exist in the country; another speaks of forty such organisations in the Ukraine alone. Display advertising of consumer goods now appears regularly in the press, most notably in a weekly advertising supplement to the Moscow city evening paper, Vechernyaya Moskva. This chapter describes, briefly, the economic environment in which Soviet advertising is conducted and in more detail the origins, functions and administrative subordination of the main advertising organisations themselves. Some relevant structural differences between the present Soviet economic system and that of the UK are very briefly outlined. It is the net effect of different organisational influences that determines the volume of marketing expenditure.
