It was the early days of 1992. I was 11 years old, the Iron Curtain lay in tatters, the “end of history” was upon us and with the purchase of a 12-pack of Barq’s root beer one could own what would become a relic from the Cold War.

I remember the going-out-of-business-sale-style TV commercials showing images of the Kremlin and tumbling statues and beckoning viewers to “quit Stalin” and buy a case of Barq’s. In my mind, this remains the pinnacle of capitalism, the height of the United States’ power and the farthest reach of American weirdness.

The promotion was the brainchild of Rick Hill, then the vice president of marketing for the mid-sized soda pop manufacturer based in Biloxi, MS. A couple years later he would go on to conceive yet another of Barq’s brilliant ways to shill it’s product through an almost uncanny understanding of the Zeitgeist and total disregard for good taste with a “Match the DNA” sweepstakes based on the O.J. Simpson trial.

When Barq’s, founded in 1898, was bought out by Coca-Cola in 1995, Hill moved on after nine years with the local brand that he had helped bring to the national stage with a then-15% share of the root beer business. He had become known as a ball-buster with too-candid-for-Coke comments such as his response to the Chicago Tribune when the paper asked about Barq’s high carbonation content, which results in the fact that when you pour a can of Barq’s there is less frothy volume on top of the glass than with other root beers: “Foam is for shaving and birth control,” said the Wharton School-graduate. Another time, after the Christian Right accused Barq’s of supporting Satanic worship for being an early advertiser with MTV’s heavy metal program, “Headbanger’s Ball,” Hill snarled back to the person who handed him a disapproving letter from New York’s Cardinal O’Connor, “With all due respect, does His Holiness drink a lot of root beer?”

But despite a career of off-color come-ons that included such classics as “Stink-N-Stare” stereoscopes, which saw Barq’s distribute images of camels that smelled like crude oil, Hill’s genius campaign to exploit the downfall of the Soviet Union was probably his most daring. Less than a week after the December 25, 1991 collapse of the USSR, Barq’s released word of its outlandish ploy (according to Promo magazine, Hill had been flipping from live TV news coverage to an ad for a “lost our lease” sale when he came up with the idea, which the head of Barq’s green-lighted after the planned promotion to chop up and distribute pieces of Elvis’ Cadillac fell through because of a licensing dispute). On January 22, Hill boarded a plane to Moscow with $70,000 to procure memorabilia such as military medals and Metrushka dolls. He told Promo that he ended up buying 4,000lbs of tchotkes from the Soviet mafia: “the country had gone to hell, and the only people to do business with were the criminals,” he said.

Hill knew he had to succeed. Barq’s had already announced its campaign before purchasing the stock of souvenirs it planned to give away. While the company was waiting for Hill to return with his bag of loot, one of his friends had resorted to traveling up to New York’s Russian communities in Brighton Beach in order to buy up any goodie he could get his hands on just in case Hill came back empty handed, or, worse, with his thumbs broken.

Rick Hill may not be a household name but his legacy is secure. Besides the commercial being nominated for a Cleo award and the promotion raising Barq’s year-on-year sales by 30 percent, Hill’s exploits have been detailed in such marketing textbooks as Terrence A Shimp’s Advertising Promotion and Other Aspects of Integrated Marketing Communication, which continues to be read for MBA courses today, using Hill’s example to demonstrate the value of guerilla branding.

I thought of Hill recently while visiting an antique shop in Bishkek, the capital of the former Soviet Socialist Republic of Kyrgyzstan. I was paging through propaganda posters with Ivan, my Russian-speaking driver. I asked him how old he was.

“Twenty-five,” he said.

“You’re too young to remember any of this.” I responded.

At 29 years old myself, Ivan was almost right to throw the comment back in my face.

Except that, because of Barq’s root beer and Hill, the USSR’s demise is firmly hammered into my mind. I have vague recollections of Tiananmen Square, Maggie Thatcher or even the invasion of Kuwait. But I remember those Barq’s commercials as clear as my first wet dream. Perhaps I recall what must be one of a million TV ads I have viewed in my lifetime because it was such a strange and uniquely American response to the end of a tug-of-war that had defined global history for the previous 50 years and that had made America into the contrast to Communism that it projected to the world with every frivolous dollar spent. It was as if every consumer good we bought we believed was another nail in Gorby’s coffin – a tactic that ironically eventually built up the Communist state of China and that failed us miserably when George W Bush tried to call it into service again in the aftermath of 9/11 and told us to go out and shop our way to victory as our forefathers had done.

But aint that America for ya? Never in the history of the world has a group of people so championed a spend-it-in-your-face mentality. I mean can you imagine if the tables were turned and Reagan had overseen the dissolution of the 50 states? Would Muscovites have gobbled up pieces of Americana to gloat over? Vodka toasts alone likely would have sufficed.

All along marketers – and in many cases politicians — have understood our patriotic zeal for purchasing and translated that into their own personal victories by selling us things we don’t need. In some cases we have ended up with Barbie Dolls and Mustangs and beachfront property and enough nukes to blow up the moon. But as much as our culture has been defined by the things we bought, our success as an influential world power for decades was based on the rest of the world wanting this junk too. True, England in the 1800s revolutionized industrialization and manufacturing. But we were the ones who made the world into a marketplace of hungry consumers. Unlike England’s forays into this territory, we didn’t strike single-mindedly, like getting Asia hooked on opium. We did them one better by addicting the world to our addiction, the very act of buying – the idea that life is better with one more thing, which is a far more powerful, profitable thing for a demographic to succumb to.

Among the dealers of this habit there’s the Lee Iacocas who did business with straight faces. But more fascinating to me are the people like Hill who can see that this is bizarre, and whose promotions are part self-parody. Like a sketch comedian spoofing the man selling Veg-O-Matics on late night TV, Hill pokes fun at us, but like a clever advertising exec he also does so in a way that moves the product, no matter how quixotic the value of that product is.

On the plane ride to Bishkek I was chatting with an American businessman who had worked for the last two decades in former Soviet states. He was lamenting having visited some of the dismal Soviet-era hotels in the former USSR where accommodations resembling gulags are sold as health retreats. “You ask yourself,” he said, “how could anyone ever have thought this was good?’” It’s just as mysterious as how anyone could have ever thought that the lowly Lada was a quality automobile, I said. But to turn the microscope back on ourselves, is it any more of a quandary than how could Americans ever have thought that McDonald’s sold good burgers? And then how did McDonald’s sell this idea to the rest of the world so that in Russia after the fall of communism people waited in line for hours to get a Big Mac.

The answer is that the Lada was sold to an embracing public by party officials who made people believe that there was something patriotic about driving an automobile that crept along like a lawnmower. They lost. We won. To celebrate, our root beer came with a prize.

Copyright Last Exit 2009