Estonian TV Ads

This link is from BoingBoing . It includes a number of Estonian TV commercials from 80s -as video clips. It is striking how the contents are unrefined -not only regarding their low budgets, but also in terms how they integrate sexual content.


Link - For the collection.

The submitter of the link explains the reason for the nightmarish contents skillfully,

"It's interesting to look at these ads as the product of a society which was just then, all of a sudden, opening up to capitalism, advertising, and private media production. Countries where such systems have been in place for longer also manage to stick sex in everything, obliquely or otherwise. But in these early Eastern European television ads, it's all clumsy and creepy. Even the color gamut is scary -- Egipt's ads all have the drab pallette of a vivid, bad dream." - Xeni Jardin

And the following discussion is great:

"I'm old enough to remember most of those TV ads from the 80s, but too young to put them into any kind of perspective. For example this ad for "Penguin" icecream is rather pervers by todays standards but perhaps it was not so 15 years ago because we did not have "necessary" background from porn industry. What I mean was that less people were familiar with blowjobs because there were no magazines or movies etc freely available (they were being smuggled from Finland but still hard to find)." - Siim Teller

My personal opinion -if you care at all- is that the sexual references in these ads are most obvious. Check out the "perfume" advertisement for the most overt example. It seems that such extravagant sexuality is, indeed, the result of hasty liberalization, thus inexperience in dealing with private advertising and, actually, consumerism itself.

Furthermore, I had come across -semiotic- consumer society analyses by I-don't-remember-who (I'll check out some resources) that discussed implicit sexuality in even the most modest of ads: Sexuality is not peculiar to those countries, it is a 'natural' function of marketing exercises. So, Estonians' incompetence to properly amalgamate the ideological functions into the commercials should be the result of their inexperience with the buorgeois ways of seeing.