Some years ago, in 2000, we were making an advertising campaign for Audi. We had tossed around lots of material, held dozens of focus groups and tested our potential customers on case studies of other brands. I had never seen such focus-groups before. 1 – Mercedes owners; 2 – Volvo owners, 3 – BMW owners, and so on. Each focus-group was different. A very interesting group of consumers was revealed, and we called it the New Commercial Intelligentsia. Before we had encountered this in a phenomenon called the New, New Russians.
But before, they used to be called just New Russians. New Russians are active predators who burst into a passive herd of na¿ve people with a Soviet mindset, with a strong desire to gorge themselves full. The herd has grown for many years and it was big, the “sheep” were more or less fat, the predators were few and there was plenty for them to eat. They were pushy and merciless. The guys valued force and faith; therefore, they created their own code of honour. They got together in packs, set their own dress code, rules of behaviour, their own language. They loved money. They were offered everything “exclusive and elite”.
New New Russians are professionals who work for money. They appeared in order to serve the New Russians. They are well-educated and dynamic. They allowed New Russians to survive when there was not enough free space – in this or that way, they ensured efficiency. They started to suppress conflicts and facilitate unification. They resemble yuppies in a way, but with our Russian soul – pointless and merciless. The goal remained the same – material values; and their source has not changed.
It is the New Commercial Intelligentsia who represent a break from the old onto a new level. The material values are still here, as a natural need, but a huge pile of differing motivations has built up on top. It seems to me that this group has transformed for a simple reason – when everyone had been deceived and eaten up, there was a need to create something. And when creation begins, very different actors come onto the stage. They are free skilled craftsmen and apprentices. They are the managers, the warriors of big and small corporations. They join, create, and facilitate – this is their job.
So, the people belonging to the three groups became the passionaries of their era
Now I understand that these three groups defined and transformed the trends and mindsets in our country. All the others only acted as a crowd, as people who only worried about their possessions, either actively or passively.
Gumilev has a very simple description of passionaries: they are people who strive to achieve more than is necessary to maintain their own life and the life of their descendants. And they don’t care whether it will do them good or harm. They are eager to act, which means, they have energy in abundance. If we look at the groups closely, we will find all these criteria. The last of the three groups is characterized by lower activity and higher heterogeneity. We saw this while working for Audi. Posi-tioning the Audi umbrella, we spread different cars for different parts of the group. It was interesting that the new type of a leader emerged as a result of a simple collision of circumstances. I was very interested in one more feature – those people, who were broad-minded and highly potential, did not feel isolated from society.
Leaders define values. “Naturally born” leaders define values that are absolutely natural for the society.
SELF-EXPRESSION OF THE NEW COMMERCIAL INTELLIGENTSIA IS NOW DEMANDED BY SOCIETY.
Accordingly, the NCIs did so in the self-expression of those who design for a living (designers, artists and so on). So their work is now demanded too. The “elite and exclusive” things have given place to “unique design”. For me it is a sign. A sign that now there is a target audience for “real advertising”. It is from a dialogue with them that Megafon started off . And so did others – Beeline, Alfa-Bank, Nokia.
But what should we do with this contradiction: a high personal potential and opportunities limited by corporate frames? Indeed, only a tiny part of the young and active were able to express themselves within big corporations. I came across such an example while working for the Baltica beer brewery. What Andrey Rukavishnikov and his marketing team managed to do in a very short time deserves a separate article. I will only say that this is one of many examples when the trend works. The strive to do more than is necessary brings results, and these are results not only for the person him- or herself; they are valid and achieved for the thousands involved in production, distribution, consumption. And it means that there are a lot of people in the chain who have “found themselves” in a common cause. Otherwise, nothing would have been achieved. But what about the others? The others have become entrepreneurs. They did exist before, but they used to look and act differently – they had the values of the Soviet intelligentsia and practices of “wild capitalism”. I remember, once in my studio (at the time I was a freelance graphic artist) an old friend of mine, who owned an incredibly diversified business, was arguing with a Canadian photographer about whose trainers were cooler. The mentality was far behind the changes in our life…
A few weeks ago, I was flying to Barcelona. A group of jolly young people around my age got on board. “Which object- glasses have you brought?” – “The regular one and a 300” – “And I have picked up a 20th…” I thought they were photographers. One of them sat down next to me. We chatted about photography. Then – about Gaudi, Picasso, El Greco. After that – about motivation, corporate culture and problems in working with recruitment agencies, since it had turned out that he was the owner of a finance firm and his friends were also entrepreneurs. We all had bought cheaper- class plane tickets. I was going to a meeting of Grey Worldwide creative directors in Western Europe; my neighbour – on holiday. The business-class seats were occupied by children and wives of passionaries of the previous generation – all smartly dressed. Their language and manners reminded me of the trainers conversation in my studio.
We switched to discussing missions, vision and the absurdity of control when employees do not have proper understanding of values and goals. So, I thought, this world is a harmonious place; there is room for El Greco and for corporate culture. There is past, present, and future. And the real freedom is based on knowledge and the use of this knowledge.
The plane was flying, because someone knew how to use the law of aerodynamics and aeronautical engineering in order to overcome the law of gravity. And I thought: I am sitting near people who will help me to overcome the law stating that advertising can be of some strictly defined types | 
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