A series of 15-second TV spots advertising post-Soviet Russia's most successful pyramid scheme, MMM. The scheme's popularity had much to do with the simple action-reward structure of the TV spots which gave a simultaneously winking and sincere vision of a capitalist utopia.
Post-Soviet
1994
Sergei Mavrodi’s 1994 Ponzi scheme MMM became one of the most success financial pyramids in history defrauding between 5 and 10 million investors of their savings. Launched in February of 1994, MMM promised investors up to 3000% annual return on investment. Through the first months of the year, the scheme worked, drawing in millions of investors (or “partners” as MMM insisted on calling them) and paying out promised dividends. The early success of the scheme was aided in no small part by the extensive ad campaign that Mavrodi and his company launched on the major television channels. The campaign featured a post-Soviet everyman, Lyonya Golubkov, a construction worker who simply wanted to make a little extra money for himself and his family. The first 30 second spot shows him taking a chance on MMM and quickly earning enough returns to buy his wife some boots. Soon he has bought her a fur coat and even a car, and he plots out his financial plan for his family on a exponential curve marked with various purchases that mark what sociologist Boris Dubin called the “new Russian dream” (novaia russkaia mechta), an unquestioning adaptation of the American dream distilled to its most materialistic essence.
Not only did these commercials facilitate the growth of the most successful pyramid scheme in post-Soviet Russia, they also played out the fantasy of the capitalist promise. To quote from Dubin once again, by structuring each advertisement “according to a single model of ‘action-reward’,” these ads project a “utopia of social order,” in which certain actions are reliably rewarded, and in which one can “in a very simple manner bring order into life, and control it with elementary and generally understood […] methods.” In an environment where the actual workings of the new capitalist economy—from price liberalization to privatization—proved destabilizing at best and more often devastating, the “utopia of social order” offered by Mavrodi’s ponzi capitalism was both more comprehensible and attractive than the alternative offered by reality.
By the peak of MMM’s activities in late spring 1994, the company was taking in fifty million dollars daily and had become a force in public life that could not be ignored. In late July, the Ministry of Finance opened a tax evasion investigation into the company. Sales of shares were suspended. Protests erupted. And on August 4, 1994, Mavrodi was arrested for tax evasion, the police raid on his apartment was broadcast on live TV, and he immediately announced his intention to run for the State Duma. He won his seat in October of that year, only to be stripped of his office in 1995 as a criminal investigation into MMM was underway.
https://youtu.be/a9FA0b61zSE