Time Bomb from the West: Video, the Advertising Industry, and Consumer Culture in Late-Socialist Czechoslovakia
Abstract
The article analyses how the Czechoslovak advertising industry in late socialism embraced the new medium of video and through it attempted to innovate the sales environment.In the centralized system of state-socialist media production, this step was a manifestation of an attempt at emancipation in relation to film and television institutions as the dominant producers and distributors of audiovisual content in late socialist Czechoslovakia. However, as the study shows, full emancipation was not possible even in the case of advertising, and the emergence of video in advertising thus became part of the "culture of small synergies", i.e. the intertwining of commitments and interdependencies between institutions and individuals in the audiovisual industry of the late 1980s.