I love watching new ads on Youtube from around the world but this is my favourite one this week. As reported by Reuters:

North Korea’s latest launch is sure to cause much frothing…it is a locally brewed beer that promises drinkers it will help ease stress.

The impoverished state this week launched an advert on state TV for Taedonggang beer, a tipple it has been quietly brewing since shifting an entire brewery it bought in Britain to North Korea in 2003.

State TV shows almost no adverts so the beer advert is a rare step towards commercialism.

Set to chirpy music and low-quality graphics, the ad opens with a glass filling with draught beer and the slogan: “Pride of Pyongyang.”

In the ad aired on Thursday, the beer is consumed by a miner dripping with sweat and served to well-attired urban dwellers by attractive young women dressed in traditional Korean clothes.

“It represents the new look of Pyongyang,” said the ad, monitored on Friday in Seoul. “It will be a familiar part of our lives.”

The 3 minute advert (!) has a dual purpose – to sell beer internally but also to present an image externally of N.Korea. Strategically leaking a beer advert at a time when the country is threatening the world with its ‘other launches’ is an intent to send a message to the people of the western world that N. Korea is a different country to that than depicted by the western press and that there are some shared values.

For me, I see it as another form of propaganda… but isn’t all advertising?