A lot of work was supported by the photographic artists union (Союз фотохудожников СССР) which received government grants and income from journal subscriptions, photo book sales, and sales from international gallery shows. Antanas Sutkus talks about it in this interview: https://birdinflight.com/ru/vdohnovenie/opyt/intervyu-sutkus...

In late 80s they ran a TV show with Soviet and American audiences and hosts talking to each other[1]. Once they were a few seconds late to cut off a commercial being shown to the Americans and Soviet public learned that this show had commercials and demanded them to be shown to the Soviet side as well. This should tell you how much advertisement was there.

All I can recall is few absurd billboards like "Fly Aeroflot!" (the only airline) or "Keep your savings in the Sberkassa!" (which probably did not advertise the Sberkassa itself, since it was the only retail bank, but the savings accounts, still looked funny).

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.–Soviet_Space_Bridge

> All I can recall is few absurd billboards like "Fly Aeroflot!" (the only airline)

There were many airlines (from different countries) flying to and from the USSR.

It was supposed that soviet citizens don't need to fly to decadent West.

Advertisement can not exist in a planned economy. Everyhthing belongs to the state and there is no competition. No point in avertising then.

Advertising of consumer goods certaintly did exist in USSR planned economy, but it was very different style of advertising. It didn't have advertising as a tool for brands to compete between themselves, but simply as a tool to communicate about a brand/product.

Companies had ads in various mass media that (a) advertised new products that had been issued; (b) advertised features & proper usage of products (including nudging towards desired behavior) (c) advertised the new styles/designs issued for e.g. clothing. Illustrative product catalogues were a thing. It's a quite different sort of advertising, more like public information and sometimes a bit towards propaganda, but it certainly is advertising.

Also, quite a bit of "traditional" advertising material was made in USSR for export markets.

Actually, there was some internal competition (e.g. Aeroflot vs railways, tobacco brands etc) and advertisement was indeed used as a tool to compete. It also worth to mention the NEP period of USSR history with full-scale competition, when a lot of advertisement artworks were created by Rodchenko and others.

I'm not familiar with any of it, but...

I would expect any central economic plan to miss consumer needs/desires by a fair margin on a regular basis. Was such advertising also trying to sway consumer behavior back to what the economic planners had original anticipated (as to avoid shortages/surpluses of goods)?

Central economic planning does not automatically mean that it will always miss consumer needs. It was a big issue in USSR which some academics were planning to address with advancement in cybernetics (which meant something like what we call "big data" today), but it never received proper attention from the government.

Regarding advertising, the customers of advertisement agencies (there were few in USSR) were firms themselves, not Gosplan. Every Soviet firm or Glavk ("main committee" - sort of a business unit in Soviet government responsible for the management of whole market segment) had a plan, that's true, but it was up to them how to implement it, so some did invest in advertisement (examples were beverages, perfume etc etc).

For an incredibly interesting and riveting (even "just" for the fictional parts) treatment of Soviet's attempt at planning the whole economy I always suggest Red Plenty by Francis Spufford. Get it, read it, become a fan.

When I first went to Latvia I was surprised at how small store signs were. At first I thought this was a an ideological thing. No need to advertise. Then I realized the much bigger signs, in Russian, that had been above the small signs in Latvian, had been taken down.

Signs are still pretty small. It's just a matter of taste I guess.

Is it just that though? How did photography magazines look in the US around the same time? And if there was advertisement, was the ratio of content:advertisement as bad as it is today?

I've heard many times that the difference in public advertising between East and West Germany (or East Germany before and after '89) is striking.

But you are right, there may be more to it. I couldn't find a period American photo magazine on archive.org. There are old issues of a magazine called "Art Photography"[1], which sounds right, but turns out to be more pornography than photography, so I'm not sure it counts (there are only a few ads, for what it's worth).

On the other hand, popular mechanics is on archive.org ([2], featured previously on HN), and it's chock full of ads; the ads vastly outweigh the editorial content. I guess that's a feature, not a bug: in the 80s and 90s my dad bought computer magazines as much for the ads (ie. as a monthly product catalogue) as for the actual content. Like popular mechanics, they were pretty cheap (PM was 35 cents in 1965, around $2.50 in 2017).

The Soviet Photography magazine could serve as a case study. It wouldn't take forever to tally up the amount of ads in each issue, or even a sample of them. The 89/7 issue had zero ads. One of the last available issues is from around '94[3]. There is a bit of advertising, but not a lot.

The final (outer) page is a full page ad for a Canon EOS 1.

[1] https://archive.org/details/ArtPhotography1952Vol03No08 NSFW, obviously

[2] https://archive.org/details/PopularMechanics1960

[3] https://archive.org/details/sovphoto_v1_1994_02

Edit/PS: I expanded my sample size to 3. The second to last page of a 1975 edition[4] has a full page ad for a Practica LTL[5]. No ads, apart from that.

[4] https://ia801505.us.archive.org/10/items/sovphoto_v1_1975_12...

[5] http://camerapedia.wikia.com/wiki/Praktica_LTL I'm sure the advertised 1.8/50 lens made for fun shooting. Better image quality than an iPhone! Both camera and lens fetch ~50 bucks on ebay, today.

They're just nudes. Nothing pornographic that I can see?

There were brands and advertising from the very beginning.

There were certainly brands and advertising in the Roman Empire, but I've read books on branding (in the marketing sense) that point to Josiah Wedgwood as more or less the inventor of modern (post-Roman Western) brand identity. I think Meatball Sundae, for example, said this.

That is 100% correct . There was however propaganda , like "Reach the goals soon " , "Communisum makes the country great ".

And after posting this ... I am worried FBI or Homeland Security will knock on my door and ship me to Alaska no questions asked.

There was basically no advertising in the Soviet Union. There was no economic competition, for one thing.