This presentation looks at the short history of corporate sponsorship in post-Soviet Russian cinema, and especially the way that practices of Western-style product placement have shifted in an attempt to appeal to a younger demographic. Earlier works—such as _Night Watch_ (2004) and the _The Best Film_ trilogy (2008, 2009, 2011)—inserted advertisements with a touch of irony predicated on the assumption of a skeptical audience grounded in Soviet cinema. More recent films, by contrast, have begun to naturalize product placement and the process of branding by co-opting techniques of crowd sourcing that presuppose a younger audience, for whom the Soviet era is a distant historical past. The paper examines the _Six Degrees of Celebration_ films (three films with a fourth in post-production) produced by the studio Bazelevs, and looks at the way that the process of branding in capitalist Russia interacts with the demands of state-sponsored cinema to produce an ideology that denies its own existence.