Awareness Ad: We Have 7 Years Left

At the UN Millennium Summit, Ukraine undertook, by 2015, to reduce poverty, to raise the quality of education, to improve maternal health and reduce infant mortality, to secure sustainable environmental development, to curb the AIDS and TB epidemics, and to ensure gender equality. We have seven years left to make Ukraine better.

Are Ukraine’s leaders listening?

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The Govt’s Version of the Ukrainian Dream: Romance Without Finance

Voiceover: The State Employment Agency.

Jobseeker: Hi, I’m dreaming of a job, too!

Voiceover: For real help, call toll-free 24/7.

Nice try! But be-all-you-can-be creativity does not always translate into credibility as long as the cross-country income differential remains so large.

Try luring all those blue-collar workers back from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Russia, where they earn in a week what the Ukrainian market pays in several months.

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Another NATO Ad

Just one more sensible ad.

Ukraine aspires to become a member of the European Union, which is being protected by NATO. This road has been traveled by the majority of our neighbors: Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Rumania and Bulgaria. Meeting NATO membership criteria is the road to the European Union. NATO is the big league, a European future.

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The Dumb, the Dumberer and the Dumbest: Another Social Ad

Ukraine’s huge outflow of skilled blue-collar workers has created a significant shortage in the local labor market. In Kyiv’s crisis-free construction industry, for example, workers earn more than college professors and doctors.

While the trend has driven up wages, to argue that a blue-collar job can provide a decent living standard would be a hard sell. Especially when you sell like this:

Recruiter: I’ve been waiting for you for so long. I’ve been looking for you. I’ve almost lost hope. What a delight it is to have found you!
Job applicant: And how much will you pay me?

Recruiter: For these golden hands of yours [camera zooms in on man’s wedding ring], I would…
Job applicant: So?

Job applicant: That’s good!

Recruiter: It’s just base pay. Then you have bonuses, a full benefits package. You a turner of the fifth degree! A worker’s hands cost a bundle!
Job applicant: That’s what I’ve been telling my son. He’s just like me: He’s going to be a turner!

Voiceover: A blue-collar occupation means:

Stabilnist today,
Confidence tomorrow,
Success forever!

Ministry of Labor, State Employment Service.

Welcome to Ukraine’s dumbest social ads! Instead of disclosing some financials — to compare them against costs of living — we have a commercial that plays on sexually suggestive and ethically questionable fantasies.

When you have stabilnist (stability) today, which escalates into confidence tomorrow and success forever, you have a credibility gap right there. In the mind of a critical thinker, these chronologically redundant and exalted rungs will send Maslow’s hierarchy of needs tumbling down like a house of cards.

Well, perhaps the Ministry of Labor's idea of the target audience did not include critically thinking turners. Taxpayers' money does not cost a bundle, right?

Another Social Ad That Sucks

Social ads in Ukraine rarely carry strong selling points.

Still convinced that you’ll be better-off in a foreign country? Illegal labor migration, illegal employment abroad means children left without parental guidance, inhuman living conditions, forced and unpaid labor, human trafficking for labor and sexual exploitation. Don’t look at employment abroad through rose-colored glasses. Work in Ukraine. Keep up the good old human values: the parents, the kids, and the Fatherland. You deserve a decent job and a decent pay in Ukraine.

Decent pay…hmmm. You mean, like, $200-300 a month? Is that enough to support the parents, the kids, and the Fatherland?

Forget it, say millions of skilled blue-collar and thousands of white-collar Ukrainians who work abroad. Known as zarobitchany, they sent an estimated $8.4 billion worth of remittances to Ukraine in 2006, a figure twice as high as the country’s FDI for that year.

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Just Another Counter-Reality Commercial

Girl 1: Would you take us for a ride?
Sugar Daddy: Right to the edge of the world!

Girl 2: Got enough gas?
Sugar Daddy: Full tanks!

[APC approaches in a cloud of smoke, shock and awe-style.]

Serviceman: I’m dying for a glass of water. Could you fix me some, girls?
Girls: Just a second!

Girl 3: And when do you get home?
Serviceman: We’re already at home. We’re in the club every evening after work.

Girl 4: What kind of work?
Serviceman: Nothing out of the ordinary, work by contract.

Girl 5: What kind of contract? You mean a marital contract or what?
Girl 2: A military one, for the time being. [refers to the enlistment contract]

Sugar Daddy: Girl, girls, girls, don’t you wanna ride?
Girls: Go take Granny Manya for a ride, rider!

Voiceover: The time for new heroes has come. Contract-based service in the armed forces of Ukraine.

If the use of humor in this army recruiting ad was intended to tranquilize the brain, that mission hasn’t been accomplished. You can’t "be all you can be" if you can’t even pay your bills. So, dear advertiser, until you get the financials straight, you’re not fooling anyone but yourself.

Same Voiceover, Same Product Placement, Slightly Better Visuals

Slightly less surrealistic, if you will.

To raise the salaries of public employees by 58 percent.
The social initiatives of President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko.

To raise merit-based pensions by 35 percent.
The social initiatives of President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko.

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Social Advertising Gone Bad

To double the compensation of military personnel.
The social initiatives of President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko.

15,000 hryvnias ($3,000) on the birth of a second child.
The social initiatives of President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko.

Consider these post-parliamentary election ads as harbingers of the 2009 presidential campaign climate. They aim to make the best case for President Yushchenko’s policies, and — conceivably — to put the best face on his grand coalition designs involving the Party of Regions.

In case the political climate gets that hot, as some scenarios indicate, the presidential election may shift to 2008. Therefore, all players should be prepared.

These sociopolitical slice-of-life ads target specific voter segments. As Yushchenko wrestles with his arch-rival Tymoshenko, he makes amends for torpedoing her key campaign promise: to abolish the draft as early as 2008.

Unfortunately, the biggest reform in the Ukrainian army so far has been the recent phase out of puttees and the introduction of socks, as romanticized in the first ad. The second ad tries to pull the rug from under the Party of Regions’ welfare teasers.

Still, there’s hardly an aspirant to the Ukrainian Dream to whom this campaign does not look and sound like a public relations Chornobyl.

First, the voiceover can be identified as the voice of the corrupt official in a creative NUNS ad.

Second, a young serviceman who makes $400 a month instead of $200 still won’t make much "romance" out of this much "finance."

Third, $3,000 can buy 1 square meter of middle-class housing in Kyiv.

As President of Ukraine and as a former banker, Viktor Yushchenko should employ communications that build credibility and reflect the cost of living. Otherwise, he will subject himself to self-sabotage and will further erode his brand equity.

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