Billy Graham did it, but Russia's State Property Committee has not. Pochemu?


While the American spiritual leader went to town covering Moscow with a massive advertising campaign for the sermons he gave this weekend, advertising promoting Russia's controversial privatization program failed at the start to materialize. Why?


For Graham, there were billboards, leaflets and posters, all urging Muscovites to think about the meaning of life and to flock to the sermons to hear his answers.


But for privatization, too little of the promised advertising campaign has appeared, too late.


State Property Committee officials say that as much advertising as they can afford is now on its way. But they have nowhere near the funds available that Billy Graham can command.


The large-scale privatization program launched Oct. 1 actually goes into effect Jan. 1, and officials say that over the next few weeks, their promotion will build.


But for some Russians, it is already too late.


After President Boris Yeltsin announced the program in late August, bewildered Russians choked over the word "voucher" and talked about trading them for boots, cows, and winter coats. Even the well informed were not sure what vouchers were or how to get them.


The State Property Committee responded in September with lengthy television interviews with committee officials, urging people to hold onto their vouchers and wait for more information. The vouchers, after all, would not be available until after Oct. 1.


By late September, full-page information sheets appeared in newspapers like Izvestia and Trud.


But there were no advertisements, no image campaigns, nothing to get people excited about the idea of privatization. The campaign that the government had said it wanted seemed to be nowhere in sight.


What happened?


First, the program was planned for November instead of October. Yeltsin sped it up in hopes of offering a sweetener to a disgruntled population - but the result, according to the director of the State Property Committee's information department, Lev Tsvetkov, was that privatization officials were caught off guard.


''We had to clear up when, where, and how the program would run before we started promoting it", he said.


Second, the State Property Committee made a last-minute switch in the Western communications firm it was working with. It had hired BBDO Marketing in Moscow and its sister public relations firm. Countrywide Communications. But it switched in the days before privatization was launched to Young & Rubicam/Sovero, a joint-venture advertising agency.


BBDO representatives say they were told that their contract would not be renewed after October because the firm had disregarded client privileges by talking about its work to the press.


By Oct. 1, BBDO, which also handled Graham's campaign, had delivered two television commercials and one print advertisement to the State Property Committee, but privatization officials instead ran an advertisement done by Young & Rubicam.


That advertisement, which aired on Russian State Television on Oct. 1, spends 90 seconds with a family of several generations talking over what vouchers are and what they would do with them.


The agency also designed a print advertisement, which appeared in the first weeks of October in several newspapers. It pictures a voucher - which officials now call a "privatization check", following Yeltsin's cue - with seven points of information. Among those the advertisement told Russians that 150 million checks would be distributed over three months and that they had a year in to spend them.


Playing down its size, privatization


officials say they are committed to promoting their program in a way that will appeal to their citizenry.


A second television commercial with more details about the privatization program was due to be released this week, and radio advertising has also begun.


The State Property Committee helped in advertising by a grant from the U. S. Agency for International Development, has no million dollar budget, Tsvetkov says. Without disclosing what his finances are, he admitted that money was tight.