Truth Half Told: Finding the Perfect Pitch for Advertising and Marketing in Socialist Yugoslavia, 1950–1991

Abstract

Beginning in the 1950s, advertising and marketing specialists in Yugoslavia campaigned aggressively to change public and official perceptions of their work. By casting commercial promotion in terms of categories already established as legitimate in the ideology of Yugoslav socialism, the industry gradually naturalized advertising and marketing, transforming them from suspect capitalist practices into apparent necessities of progressive, rational production and distribution. Although the rhetoric used in this campaign consistently appealed to socialist values, in practice Yugoslav advertising and marketing were largely based on Western models. Yugoslav commercial promotion was only superficially “socialist advertising”; practitioners' arguments tended to obscure the true qualities of the industry.