Social advertising as a means of promoting governmental policies in the post-Soviet era:

how much have things changed? (the case of Belarus)

MA in Sociology
Yuliya Martinavichene
European Humanities University
Vilnius, Tauro g., 12
julia.martinavichene@ehu.lt
In spite of the fact, that today the research on mass-media instruments employed in implementing governmental
policies provides a useful interdisciplinary framework for analyzing media effects, very little attention is paid to a
systematic and comprehensive insight into social advertising as a privileged discourse and a means of introducing and
promoting governmental policies in the context of post-Soviet countries.
Social advertising is widely recognized as a non-profit discourse that seeks to introduce positive change, and this
notion functions as a kind of alibi whereas possible connotations of social ads ideological influence, or a systematic
bias in favor of power groups are rarely, if ever, actualized in public opinion. That is the reason why social advertising
appears to be an effective managerial tool that may play a significant role in shaping human behavior, interpersonal
relations and personal identity, working at the same time as a justification of state ideology.
These issues should be referred as critical regarding former USSR member-countries, where governmental
structures are - in most cases - the main sponsor of social advertising. The paper aims at providing an analytical and
empirical framework for answering the question, whether or not social advertising messages function as a seemingly
innocuous form of propaganda in post-Soviet space. An evidence from the Belarusian context proves a hypothesis that
modern Belarusian social advertising is to a considerable extent influenced by stylistic features of USSR propaganda,
and - in some cases - serves the same function.

Media as an ideological instrument

"One can thus categorically assert the existence of ideology
qua generative matrix that regulates the relationship between
visible and non-visible, between imaginable and nonimaginable,
as well as the changes in this relationship".
Slavoj iek1
It is a common knowledge nowadays that governments use media to publicize and promote its policies. The role of
media as an effective instrument of an agenda setting and inspecting gaze has become a common place in media theory
over the past fifty years. Such theoretical frameworks as the theory of priming and the theory of agenda setting2 can
serve as the examples of theorizing media as a way of segmenting reality according to the relative "relevance" of its
sectors and constructing the knowledge about reality. Thus, Lang & Lang observe: "The mass media force attention to
certain issues (...). They are constantly presenting objects suggesting what individuals in the mass should think about,
know about, have feelings about"3. To develop the issue further, "those problems that receive prominent attention on the
national news become the problems the viewing public regards as the nation's most important"4 . Media messages
become a part of invisible disciplinary procedures, an evaluative device, that regulates and controls not through a direct
oppression but through a veiled therapy and consultancy.
As Louis Althusser puts it, it is crucial for each Ideological State Apparatus to trigger an imaginary attitude of
individuals to the condition they are living in and to incorporate it in the everyday life and common practices5. The state
uses ideological schemes in order to construct the idea of normal and abnormal, acceptable and non-acceptable, that
could be the basis for desirable models of behavior6 :

Slavoj iek, "The Spectre of Ideology", in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj iek (London: Verso, 1994), 1.

See, for example: McCombs, Maxwell E., and Donald L. Shaw. "The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media." The Public
Opinion Quarterly, 36, no. 2 (1972): 176-187, and Kurt Lang, and Gladys Engel Lang, "The Mass Media and Voting," in Reader in
Public Opinion and Communication, eds. Bernard Berelson and Morris Janowitz, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1966).
3

Kurt Lang, and Gladys Engel Lang, "The Mass Media and Voting," in Reader in Public Opinion and Communication, eds. Bernard
Berelson and Morris Janowitz, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1966), 468.
4

Shanto Iyengar, and Donald R. Kinder. "News That Matters - Television and American Opinion" (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1989), 16.
5

Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj iek (London: Verso, 1994), 130
131.
6

In the context of our discussion the notion of ideology designates both a complex of ideas, "serving as weapons for social interests",
and ideological state apparatuses (in Althusserian sense).
1

"Authority must also try to determine what is permissible, eccentric, or transgressive, what can be said or shown,
even how the permissible will be expressed. The obverse of this is equally important: hegemony normally
involves a process of silencing or rendering invisible, a series of prohibitions, and it is here that the element of
repression enters the picture (...). Little wonder that one of the headquarters of hegemony is the mass media"7.

Public service advertising and ideological oppression

Actually, when we think of public service announcements (or - as it is also called - social or advocacy advertising)
as a media discourse, we probably ascribe to it the same attributes of a mechanism of authority that like good old
fairytales tells us what is good and what is bad. The most general notion of PSA is "announcements regarded as serving
community interests". According to the notion given by the US Federal Communications Commission PSA "promotes
programs, activities, or services of Federal, State, or local governments (...) or the programs, activities or services of
nonprofit organizations (...) or any other announcements regarded as serving community interests"8 . In other words,
PSA promotes socially (or - we may say - ideologically) approved action. So we see, that a kind of regulative and
repressive function is encoded into the very notion of public service announcements, and - what is more important, this very notion is seen as legitimized and valid.
"Achieving hegemony for this discourse means achieving a misperception of its arbitrariness (...) so that it comes
to be seen as transparently reflecting economic realities rather than constructing them in particular way"9.
Hence the ambiguity of PSA lies not only in the sphere of its functioning but in its notion and theoretical discourse
concerning it. Regarding a theory of PSA as reproducing an existing (or "natural"?) mode of its conceptualization and
production leaves outside the analysis of the very frame within which the functioning of PSA is assigned and
legitimized.
The questioning of the very process of PSA conceptualization, its constitution, and retrospective justification by a
theoretical discourse is an object of a future research that could be extremely productive in terms of redefining the basic
concept of PSA that is determined by the notions of public service and social problems, and the way they should be
actualized in a public sphere.
By saying this, I in no way imply that PSA is just an instrument of state ideological oppression. On the contrary,
social advertising can be a powerful instrument of promoting public interest. In the case of PSA the content of a
message may well be "true" (it is obvious that drunk driving is a negative practice that should be omitted), but a
rationale for such message may be ideologically motivated (e.g. to highlight drunk driving as the reason of road
accidents in order to divert public attention from other possible reasons: technically defective cars, bad road
maintenance, non-informative or deceptive road signs, etc.). From this point of view, we see PSA as a medium of
ideology "destined to convince us of its 'truth', yet actually serving some unavowed particular power interest"10. Large
masses of audiences incorporate the meanings decoded from public service advertising (that has a potential readership
of millions of people) into their everyday practices that cumulatively produces significant in its scale sociopolitical
effects.
Gramsci's concept of hegemony could be potentially fruitful in actualizing PSA as a means of domination:
"Hegemony is relations of domination based upon consent rather than coercion, involving the naturalisation of
practices and their social relations as well as relations between practices, as matters of common sense - hence the
concept of hegemony emphasizes the importance of ideology in achieving and maintaining relations of
domination" 11.
Interpreting PSA as a "routine, institutionalized, organized, and generally accepted"12 tool of hegemony may prompt
political and social scientists to unveil the role of this discourse as a cultural means of exercising power13.
7

Paul Rutherford, "Endless Propaganda: The Advertising of Public Goods" (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 46.

FCC Rules, Section 73-1810 [d][4].

Lilie Chouliaraki, and Norman Fairclough, Discourse in late modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis (Edinburgh
University Press, 2005), 5.
10

Slavoj iek, "The Spectre of Ideology", in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj iek (London: Verso, 1994), 10.

11

Lilie Chouliaraki, and Norman Fairclough, Discourse in late modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis (Edinburgh
University Press, 2005), 24.
12
13

Paul Rutherford, "Endless Propaganda: The Advertising of Public Goods" (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 45.

Similar attempt is made by Paul Rutherford in his influential "Endless Propaganda: The Advertising of Public Goods" (2000)
where he approaches to the controversiality of advocacy advertising as a means of introducing positive changes and, at the same
time, a means of manipulating public opinion. As Alissa Sklar puts it in her review of the book (Canadian Journal of Communication,
Vol. 26, No.3 (2001), "Rutherford offers three compelling ways of characterizing civic advocacy as an instrument of hegemony. First,
these ads tend to be totalizing, controlling texts, which create and erase meanings. Second, they interpellate viewers into political
subjects through naturalizing strategies like direct address and personalized language. Finally, they are privatizing, turning public
goods into tools of government, non-profit, and corporate interest. This propaganda defines and constructs its viewers according to
the needs of the producers". However, critical elaboration on the topic is still rare among social and political scientists.
2

The representation of social problems through PSA is often perceived as an insignificant fortuity, and a thematic
variety of such messages is often interpreted as a mere given. However, as Slavoj iek states it, "the task of the
critique of ideology (...) is precisely to discern the hidden necessity in what appears as a mere contingency"14 .

The role of an addressee of public service announcements in legitimizing its discourse

As already noted, PSA offers a ready-made version of social conditions, an obviousness of which does not cause any
doubts. As a result, the discrepancies between a PSA discourse on social problems and our own everyday experience of
socially relevant fields are rarely articulated and even recognized. This could be called an elementary ideological effect
of social advertising.
PSAs offer a knowledge about the realm of social problems, but this is a knowledge from a certain position that
represents only one side of a multiplicity of social truth. Administrative function of PSAs in the realm of structuring the
field of social problems results in interpellating individuals into certain codes of interpretation, which are at the same
time forms of consciousness and value systems.
Recognizing PSA as a legitimized discourse on social problems individuals automatically legitimize the social
problems that are enunciated through this discourse. Public service advertising discourse (as any other kind of media
discourse) functions in this situation as a gatekeeper of the information on social problems, a managerial tool that
determines what issues are important and what should be hidden.
Another cue that serves as a means of legitimation of certain social problems is the fact that knowledge about
potentially dangerous or simply unacceptable modes of behavior originates in our everyday life and "is maintained as
real"15:
"The reality of everyday life is taken for granted as reality. It doesn't require additional verification over and
beyond its simple presence. It is simply there, as self-evident and compelling facticity. I know that it is real."16
A vast majority of issues that public service advertising actualizes are already routinized. As a result, the validity of
PSA's evaluation of social problems and its socio-historical selection is often taken for granted.
The way public service announcements are constructed also triggers individuals to accept as evident a certain mode
of representation of social problem. For example, it is a usual practice of PSA discourse to employ a realistic way of
telling the story. This tendency is realized on a multi-level principle: "reality effect" is employed both on the levels of
form and content.
In order to connote the sense of reality on the level of form PSA often employs close-to-reality genres of
photography (e.g. documentary, street, or forensic photography), "amateur" techniques in producing visual material
(shaking camera, low quality of video and photo materials), or mimics editorial content ("breaking news" and "accident
report" stylizations), and the like.
On the level of content the "reality effect" is realized through using specially experienced person as a messenger
("victim / survivor evidence" scheme, introducing role models, etc.), a "true story" narrative, eyewitness report, and the
like.
Hence, in the PSA discourse a subject is already-interpellated as an onlooker, that is never invited into the very
process of deciding on what socially relevant problems should be actualized through this discursive space. This state of
things is constructed as self-evident by the ideological situation all individuals are situated in.
At the same time, a position of a citizen as a "decision-maker" is nowadays simulated through the involvement of
amateur designers and artists into the process of creating public service announcements on a certain topic, that is
already prescribed17. Such stance is undoubtedly comforting as long as it allows to shed (to a certain extent) a
responsibility towards society, giving at the same time a heartening illusion of participation and active involvement.
However, this politics of estrangement places an individual outside the domain of hierarchical arrangement of social
problems, and provides him with a new model of individual social responsibility. Individuals are situated as taking
responsibility for aiming at positive behavioral change through following the models that PSAs propose us (instead of
taking a responsibility for positive behavioral change as such). In other words, power groups through the social
advertising discourse provide us with a system of coordinates for a change that is marked as "positive", "necessary", or
even "obligatory".

Public service advertising as an ideological instrument in the post-Soviet era

Due to a lack of coherent rationale of its functioning, PSA media model is often involved in mimetic relationships
with other forms of mass persuasion - for example, institutional, political advertising or propaganda.

14

Slavoj iek, "The Spectre of Ideology", in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj iek (London: Verso, 1994), 4.

15

Peter L. Berger, and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), 20.

16

Ibid., 23.

17

One of the recent examples of such initiative is a "Create the Next 'ThinkB4YouSpeak' PSA" contest, judged by Brett Ratner and
Tom Ford. The contributors are invited to dwell on a topic of the 'ThinkB4YouSpeak' campaign, that aims at "educating straight teens
about the prevalence and consequences of anti-LGBT bias and behavior in Americas schools" (see more at www.adcouncil.org/)
3

The fact that social advertising is widely recognized as a non-profit discourse that seeks to introduce positive change
functions as a kind of alibi whereas possible connotations of ideological influence of PSA, or a systematic bias in favor
of power groups are rarely, if ever, actualized in public opinion. That is the reason why social advertising (in its
extensive notion) appears to be an effective managerial tool that may play a significant role in shaping human behavior,
interpersonal relations and personal identity, working at the same time as a justification and legitimation of state
ideology or power groups interests. Rutherford notes that an extensive use of "persuasion rather than regulation or
direction, as a mode of governance (...) seemed better suited to the formalities of a democratic polity"18.
However, this instrument can be used effectively in any kind of society. It is widely acknowledged, that in Soviet
times social advertising and propaganda were the two discourses that were closely intertwined and both were
incorporated in a system of management of social problems in private and management of human consciousness in
general. From the perspective of social constructionist approach, PSA appears to be one of the instruments of marking
different areas of reality as problematic. In the USSR power-knowledge system advocacy advertising may be seen as
an expert knowledge conductor that helps to legitimate the existence of some social problems (e.g. laziness or
alcoholism) as well as to stigmatize or even mask some others (poverty, absence of freedom of speech, etc). Thus
PSA in the form of posters placed in a public space served as an instance of ruling and visitatorial gaze, a kind of
inspector that constantly compares beliefs, attitudes, knowledge, and behavioral patterns of an individual with a
standard that is prescribed through these advocacy messages.
The USSR media landscape was extremely rich in posters that advertised different social issues, prescribed
behaviors, and the image of the country. Among usual topics of such announcements are: a high quality of life in the
Soviet Union (often as opposed to capitalistic countries) with "Each Day Life is Getting Better" slogan; public
representatives that should selflessly serve people ("Bureaucrats Do More Harm to Crops and Industrial Production than
Worms and Gophers"); ideals of Communist lifestyle presented as universal moral values ("The Sacred Flame of a
Mother's Love Inspires Working Women in Their Struggle for the Bright Future"), popularizing governmental initiatives
(e.g. cooperatives: "Cooperation Is the Path to Socialism", "Lowering Prices Is the Main Goal of Cooperation";
increasing productivity ("Let Us Reach the Productivity Goals of the 7-Years Plan in 5 Years", "Let us complete the
plan of great intentions", "Soviet collective farmers, vote for a further increase of collective farming!"). The
Khrushchev Thaw brought some non-politicized topics into the realm of Soviet PSA: healthy lifestyle ("Be ready for
labour and defence", "Everybody, get on skis!"); striving for technical progress ("Let Us Conquer Space", "Be Proud,
Soviet Citizen, You Have Opened the Path from the Earth to Stars"), and the like. However, most of these messages
were still ideologically charged, linking some positive behavioral pattern with an image of a Soviet citizen (e.g. "Soviet
people vote for a happy youth").
Twenty years have passed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Have the things changed? The analysis of modern
Belarusian PSA discourse shows that it is fueled by the same strategy of mixing public service announcement,
institutional advertising, political advertising, and propaganda.
The Belarusian Law on Advertising presents a quite elaborate notion of social advertising. It refers to PSA as a nonprofit advertising of rights, juridically fixed interests, and responsibilities of citizens and organizations. It also specifies
a range of topics that can be considered as crucial in the discourse under consideration. Among them are: a healthy
lifestyle and efforts towards the safety and social security of citizens; crime prevention, nature preservation and
sustainable use of resources; development of Belarusian culture and art; international cultural collaboration;
governmental programs in the spheres of public health, education, culture, and sport, or any other kind of social
initiatives that are directed towards maintenance of public or national interests. It is also mentioned that an advertiser of
advocacy messages are governmental structures 19.
Therefore, a leading role of State in the production of public service announcements in Belarus is predetermined on
a legislative level.
Two years ago I have carried out a research on thematic variety of Belarusian outdoor posters that are considered according to the Belarusian law of advertising - as social advertising. The research gives strong evidence that a
considerable amount of Belarusian non-commercial outdoor messages are devoted to the construction of the image of
Belarus ("For Belarus" campaign - about 26 percent of the whole number of outdoor non-commercial announcements,
"I Love Belarus" and other messages that can be considered as a territory branding - about 6 percent), as well as to the
construction of the image of power structures (The Ministry of Interior Affairs - about 7 percent each) (see Figure 1).
"For Belarus" campaign launched in 2004 was a pioneering initiative in creating a positive image of social, political
and cultural aspects of the country. Since then several campaigns of this kind were launched, namely: "Belarus for...",
"We are Belarusians" (2008), "Together for a strong and prospering Belarus", "Belarus for people", "I Belarus",
"Together we are Belarus" (2010), "Belarus is my honor".
The messages of these campaigns may be considered as a hybrid form of institutional, political and social
advertising, as long as they not only popularize a positive image of the country, but also implicitly connect it to the
existing political situation and structures, - a strategy that Soviet advertising has employed in a more explicit way. This
connection is often realized through citations borrowed from public speeches of Alexander Lukashenko or some other
program documents of Belarusian authorities. Thus, the name of "Together for a strong and prospering Belarus"
campaign is copying the title of Lukashenko's electoral program (2001); the name of "Together we are Belarus"

18
19

Paul Rutherford, "Endless Propaganda: The Advertising of Public Goods" (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 69.

The Law on Advertising of the Republic of Belarus, May 10, 2007, 225-3, Article 2 [
10 2007 . 225-3. 2].
4

campaign reminds of the similarly-named 2010 election campaign; the name of "Belarus for people" campaign refers to
the President motto of 2006 ("The State for People").
Fig.1. The thematics of non-commercial outdoor advertising20 in Belarus (2003-2009)
"For Belarus" campaign (26%)
"We are Belarusians" campaign (5%)
Territory branding (6%)
Institutional advertising (The Belarusian Republican Youth Union) (3%)
Institutional advertising (The Ministry of Interior Affairs) (7%)
Public service announcements (53%)

26 %

53 %

5%
6%
3%
7%

Hence, on the level of content modern Belarusian and Soviet public service advertising have very much in common.
The same consonance may be found on the level of form. Belarusian PSAs often employ similar strategies of
representation (both verbal and visual) to that used in Soviet advertising. A scheme I am for that is often seen in
Soviet-time propaganda posters is literally copied in For Belarus campaign (Belarus for development, For a
peaceful and flourishing Belarus and the like). Belarusian public campaigns often employ the same visual symbols as
the Soviet advertising did: a dove as a symbol of peace, wheat and flowers as symbols of prosperity and well-being.
Another conceptual rhyme of modern Belarusian and Soviet posters lies in the principles of portraying of heroes. It
is common for Belarusian posters that expansively smiling heroes of these images are often pictured in a labor
environment (most commonly a plant or an agricultural context) that is also a common feature of Soviet posters. A
direct look at the viewer that refers to a "demand" type of pictures21 is also often employed when designing an
interactive constituent of the Belarusian and Soviet posters.

Conclusions
The discourse of modern Belarusian public service announcements retains many features of the Soviet social
advertising discourse. The parallels may be found both on conceptual level (thematic diversity, principles of
incorporating politic and institutional advertising into a public service one), and on formal level (employing similar
verbal and visual rhetorical structures and patterns). Both discourses are intended to legitimize ideological claims
through the discourse of PSA that is perceived by the audience as a more innocent channel of communication. However,
on a broader scale the problem seems to be much more far-reaching and may root in the very notion of public service
announcements.
There is hardly a possibility of accessing (and assessing) reality beyond discursive devices and predefined
perspectives, attitudes, and beliefs. Each public service message is already an argumentative gesture (in the sense of
Ducrot22) of a producer and initial message sender, an attempt to establish its own body of knowledge about social
problems as "reality"23 . In the situation, when the number of such subjective positions is highly limited (as it is in
Belarus where the main player in the sphere of PSA is the governmental body) the mode of actualizing social problems
field is quite homogeneous and leaves no space for re-interpreting the field. However, when the number of players in
the field of PSA production and dissemination increases (due to participation of national and international nongovernmental organizations, and even individuals) the situation may change dramatically - as it changes with the move
from a monopoly to a competitive market. In a situation of a competitive management of social problems'
representation individuals will face an infinite chain of equivalences of the initial field of social problem and its
possible "solutions". When a discursive existence of social problems takes the form of a complex and pluralistic
20

The empirical material was collected by the author during 2007-2009 for MA thesis which successfully defended in 2009 at the
European Humanities University (Vilnius). The title of the thesis was "Cross-cultural analysis of Belarusian and Lithuanian public
service announcements".
21

Gunther Kress, and Theo van Leeuwen, "Representation and interaction: designing the position of the viewer", in Reading images:
The Grammar of visual design (New York: Routledge, 2006), 114-153.
22

Oswald Ducrot, Le Dire et le Dit (Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1986).

23

Peter L. Berger, and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Anchor Books, 1989).
5

communicative event there will be a greater likelihood of a more or less fair representation of social problems in a given
society. However, it doesn't mean that PSA will no longer be an ideologically driven instrument of social problems'
management. In order to introduce a significant shift there is a strong need to rethink and re-formulate the notion of
public service announcement and advocacy advertising as a whole.

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Communication, eds. Bernard Berelson and Morris Janowitz, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1966).
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Verso, 1994).
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(Edinburgh University Press, 2005).
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