Ukraine paid ad in "Washington Post", 2012

Two things about our country “perception management” infuriated UA internet last week.

First, the scan of the ad pages published in Washington Post for 100 000 US dollars paid by Ukrainian government (aka taxpayers’ money). Idea is not that bad, but the picture of the country symbols is quite contrast to the slogan “Moving in the fast lane”. Most of the images show historical places and beautiful nature with 3 symbols of nowadays country – penis-like missile, steel production and aviation presented by plane flying apparently to the past. Quite obvious – country mostly uses it’s natural resources. Where it moves in the “fast lane”, eh?

Second, the “beautiful” tourist web-site Kyiv City Administration has been just launched. It cost about 55 000 US dollars to Ukrainian taxpayers and you could have access this epic fail here until developers suddenly closed this chef-d’œuvre for maintenance after all the fuss in the internet. Ok, they used free CMS system. Ok, design is the matter of taste. But what to do with the missing or untranslated content in English version? Can you imagine emotions of the person who wants to know more about the city from OFFICIAL web-site? Maybe we can’t do it because we don’t know how to? But please check the Lviv City official travel web-site. It is made by humans for humans and it helps many people.

Image of Ukraine has become a sort of cargo cult during last 10 years. Some statesmen watched BBC or CNN advertising campaign for Turkey or Croatia and thought that logo, promo video and some special PR would make people come to Ukraine and become just happy. They don’t think that this money would be better spent on English signs in Kyiv, for instance, and that it would make greater impact on tourists than bright and expensive TV ad. After all, before promoting something you must have the object of promotion, otherwise you are sort of a con-artist, aren’t you?

There is another explanation – and this one is even more despairing. Those who order such promo perfectly understand the need to make country more “guests friendly”, but just care about spending country budget money allocated for this promo.

Enjoy “showy image of Ukraine” in this promo-video:

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