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Re:Sovetskoe Foto (Soviet Photography) by PeterisP on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @10:22PM (#13992366)
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.

Re:Sovetskoe Foto (Soviet Photography) by ivan_gammel on Thursday March 30, 2017 @06:16AM (#13994161)
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.
Re:Sovetskoe Foto (Soviet Photography) by sbuttgereit on Thursday March 30, 2017 @12:04AM (#13992793)
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)?

Re:Sovetskoe Foto (Soviet Photography) by ivan_gammel on Thursday March 30, 2017 @06:09AM (#13994131)
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).

Re:Sovetskoe Foto (Soviet Photography) by Pamar on Thursday March 30, 2017 @07:34AM (#13994486)
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.