## TVTropes entry on Silent Announcer
### Listed on What Were They Selling Again? by *OneWay*, since removed.

In 1992, for quite some time, the evening newscast ''Vremya'' (Time) on Russian television network Ostankino were constantly followed by a 30-second clip of the presenter sitting behind the desk, doing and saying absolutely nothing. With advertisements still being a fairly new spectacle in the former Soviet Union, speculation ran wild. Eventually the presenter started talking, yet saying just one phrase: "When the time comes, I will tell what I think about that" (the original plan had been to keep him silent, but other companies bought the next ad slot, and tried to lead people into thinking it was part of their commercial). So, what were they selling? Now we know that up until the last one of their broadcasts they were selling nothing, or if you will, the ad slot itself. A small media buying agency ended up with this very lucrative post-''Vremya'' ad space, and this was their idea to keep the oven warm until someone would pay them to be in The Reveal. That "someone" eventually was Menatep Commercial Bank. To make sure everyone was there for the reveal, they asked Ostankino to broadcast a message before the news: "Dear viewers, please stay until the end of the news broadcast for a very important announcement". Unfortunately for them, Russian citizens in the eastern part of the country (they usually get the true live broadcasts, within the Russian television industry, it's called "orbit") interpreted "very important announcement" exactly how you'd thought they would, and rightfully enraged government officials cut the announcement from the delayed broadcasts for the rest of the country. Many people vividly rememeber the silent presenter, not many will tell what it was about.

*This TVTropes entry by OneWay was licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. It is unedited from the original except for formatting fixes.*