Celebrity Endorsement in South Korean Advertising

When I first came to Seoul, one thing that took me by surprise quite heavily was the strikingly high percentage of celebrity endorsement in advertising. As you walk down a shopping street such as those in the Myeongdong area, you will find many familiar faces smiling at you from life-sized cut-outs, hugely spread over a whole building and even on bottles and tubes of beauty products. K-pop idols seem to be most common, followed by drama actors and actresses. In a 2014 article I read that, in fact, “[i]n the first decade of this century, 70-75% of Korean ads featured celebrities” (Fedorenko 2014, p. 357). Compared to the roughly 25% of advertisement with celebrities in them in America, this sums up to about 200% more celebrity endorsement in South Korean (Fedorenko 2011, p. 103). Furthermore, in the figure below you can see that the use of celebrities for advertising purposes is higher in South Korea than in any other country researched within the study by Carolus Praet from 2009.

 

(Praet 2009, p. 10)

What I find most striking, however, is that most of the time the celebrity that is chosen by the company for promotional purposes has no direct connection to the product he or she is promoting whatsoever. This might not be important when it comes to an idol singer and juice (as is the case with BtoB’s Yook Sungjae and the juice shop Juice Six), however, when it comes to an idol singer and a bank, the advertisement might seem quite odd (as is the case with SNSD’s Sunny and Shinhan Bank).

Similarly, there also seem to be many cases of one and the same actors, actresses or idol groups advertising several companies and products at the same time. Currently this is paramount in the case of highly popular hallyu group EXO. They are the faces of clothing brand SPAO (together with idol group AOA), beauty product brand Nature Republic, luxury brand MCM and quite recently the chicken restaurant chain Goobne Chicken released a commercial with EXO as its protagonists too.

However, will someone really move all their finances to a different bank just because Sunny tells them to do so? Also, does the average consumer not get tired of EXO’s faces all over the city and will he or she not start to question the brands and products they are promoting if there are this many that have no concrete connection to each other? The question at hand now is, of course, how effective is celebrity endorsement in reality? In the film Starsuckers (2009) the narrator explains: “The power of association with someone who’s famous or even infamous is far more potent than we even realize.” As humans we tend to trust people we know more than people we do not know. Thus, we are more likely to go inside a shop that has an EXO member plastered all over the front door than if the same door had a less famous model on it. Similarly, we might not instantly run to Shinhan Bank to open a new bank account there just because we saw Sunny’s face on the poster in front of the building but we might actually read what is written on the poster for once, instead of just passing by, which might eventually lead to us becoming interested in the plan offered by Sunny’s poster, which might then lead to us actually opening up an account in Shinhan Bank. Celebrity endorsement definitely works, for example in the case of Woongjin Conway water purifiers, the sales rose by 400% in 2011 as compared to the previous year after they were endorsed by the idol girl group SNSD (Turnbull 2012, par. 4). Thus, while celebrity endorsement is definitely effective in terms of raising sales and spreading the company or brand name, it might become somewhat boring and in many ways hold back the creativity of advertising in South Korea.

Sources:

Fedorenko, Olga. “Tending to the ‘flower of capitalism:’ Consuming, producing and censoring advertising in South Korea of the ’00s”, Phd Thesis. Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto, 2012.

Fedorenko, Olga. “South Korean Advertising as Popular Culture,” in The Korean Popular Culture Reader, ed. by Kyung Hyun Kim and Youngmin Choe, Duke University Press 2014, pp. 341-362.

Praet, Carolus L. C. (2009), “National wealth or national culture? A multi-country study of the factors underlying the use of celebrity endorsement in television advertising.” In: P. De Pelsmacker & N. Dens (Eds.), Advertising Research: Message, Medium, and Context. Antwerpen: Garant, pp. 383-392.

Turnbull, James. “The Korean Ad Industry’s Celebrity Obsession”. April 9 2012.
http://busanhaps.com/korean-ad-industrys-celebrity-obsession/ (Accessed: March 22 2016).

Pictures:

http://mulpix.com/instagram/btob_yooksungjae_sungjae_juice6.html

http://www.wgsnsdfx.com/2015/12/snsd-sunny-promotional-picture-shinhan-bank.html