In the countries of the former socialist bloc, the emergence of market advertising was the first sign of the end of Communism. North Korea is no exclusion from this rule.

However, the chosen course of “reforms without openness” made nascent North Korean advertising quite special, in many aspects different from the post-Soviet analogue.

While in post-perestroika Russia new advertising symbolized collapse of the previous world, North Korean advertising has so far been a negotiation between the requirements of the new economic order and the norms of juche.     

POST-SOVIET ADVERTISING

In the late 1980s, flamboyant billboards and TV commercials