Soviet advertising expenditure

Abstract

There are no good, comprehensive data on the volume of Soviet advertising, published or unpublished. The IDCA, responsible for national co-ordination of advertising, appears to have data only for the major advertising organisations, STR, RTR and UTR, plus information on the overall size of funds earmarked for advertising throughout the distributive system (i.e. the retail and wholesale networks controlled by the USSR Ministry of Trade and Central Union of Consumer Co-operatives). The former data, for the 1970 annual plan, were quoted to me in interviews. There are references to the latter in the literature, for 1966 and 1967.¹ To what extent the two kinds of data overlap is not clear. A great deal of the advertising financed by the distributive system, but by no means all, is channelled through STR, RTR and UTR (see chapter 2 above). At the same time, some of these organisations’ turnover is financed by manufacturing and service organisations. Moreover, actual advertising expenditure by the distributive system corresponds roughly, but not exactly, to the official advertising appropriation (see next section).