Banks produce web dramas and variety shows. Retailers try short-form comedy. Brands commission songs and music videos, and even create their own idols. Construction companies are joining in, seeking an audience that can swipe past a conventional ad in seconds.
As viewing shifts toward streaming services and algorithm-driven feeds, brands are no longer simply buying space around something people want to watch. They are trying to become something people want to watch.
One of the latest examples features a tunnel engineer with a microphone.
“Break Through,” a hip-hop music video released Sept. 15 by the Korea Construction Engineers Association and Samho Development, was filmed at an actual construction site and features a real engineer rapping about his work. It had topped 200,000 views as of Tuesday.
Lee Ji-young, a 34-year-old office worker from Anyang, initially mistook it for a low-budget music video by an independent rapper.
“I didn’t think it was an advertisement,” Lee said. “The song was surprisingly good. The beat didn’t feel completely professional, but it was strangely addictive.”
Discovering who was behind it made her consider whether she would have watched it at all.
“If someone told me from the beginning that it was an advertisement, I probably wouldn’t have gone looking for it,” she said. “But if I came across it without knowing that, I think I would watch it until the end.”
Korea’s advertising money is following its viewers.
Online advertising reached 10.1 trillion won ($7.1 billion) in 2024, up 7.9 percent from a year earlier, while broadcast advertising fell 5 percent to 3.22 trillion won, according to the Korea Broadcasting Advertising Corporation.
Online spending is projected to approach 11.5 trillion won in 2026, against about 2.56 trillion won for broadcasting. More than three-quarters of online ad spending already goes to mobile.
A 2025 survey by the Korea Creative Content Agency found that 89.1 percent of respondents used online video services, with YouTube reaching 85.4 percent. Among online video users, 91.7 percent watched on smartphones.
Nearly six in 10 respondents watched short-form content. Of those, 76 percent cited its brevity and ease of consumption as a reason. Entertainment and variety clips were the most popular category.
On those screens, a brand competes with whatever comes next: an idol performance, a restaurant review, a comedy clip or a friend’s holiday video.
“In the past, brands placed advertisements around good content,” said Kim Ye-won, a brand marketer at an Incheon-based marketing firm. “Now brands themselves have to make content that consumers would choose to watch.”
Banks have been among the most active.
KB Kookmin Bank’s fantasy web drama “Walking Through Kwangya” accumulated more than 30 million views, according to the bank. It later worked with SM Entertainment on aespa’s “Live My Life,” which appeared on the group’s first full-length album and recorded more than 17.8 million streams across major Korean music platforms by early 2025, the bank said.
Woori Bank’s 10-part financial education web variety show “Teen Receiving Friends” drew more than 2.6 million YouTube views by April 2025. An accompanying campaign generated more than 20,000 comments.
Convenience store chain CU got an earlier start. Its short-form drama “Convenience Store Veteran” passed 100 million cumulative views in 2022. By 2023, it and a companion series had together exceeded 300 million views.
Branded entertainment is hardly new. What is changing is its reach into banks, industry groups and organizations whose publicity once had little reason to entertain anyone.
A single production can also travel further. A web variety show can supply a full YouTube episode, several Shorts, Instagram Reels and TikTok clips. Individual scenes can then be reused as paid ads.
But getting people to watch is only part of the job. They may remember the joke, song or character and forget who paid for it.
“I liked it, so I pressed the like button,” Jung said. “I like that kind of B-grade feeling.”
A more polished production might have put him off.
“If there were drones flying around and everything looked flashy, I probably wouldn’t have watched it,” he said.
Yet his viewing habits also reveal the weakness of advertising that blends into entertainment.
“Sometimes a video is really funny and I can watch it several times, but when I try to find it again, I can’t remember the name,” he said.
For marketers, that gap separates a popular video from an effective advertisement.
“Views show whether the content worked. They don’t necessarily show whether the advertising worked,” Kim said.
Marketers therefore examine watch time, completion rates, comments and shares, she said, then look for evidence that attention carries over into brand recall, searches, website visits and purchases.
Some company figures suggest that it can.
Fashion group Handsome said the sales growth rate at its premium online mall more than doubled in the days after its web drama aired in October 2021. Monthly views of its brand among younger consumers rose from about 300,000 to more than 3.7 million.
CU said average monthly views on its YouTube channel jumped 391 percent after “Convenience Store Veteran” launched in 2022, with the channel adding more than 20,000 subscribers in a short period.
An Incross report found that short-form video ads had the highest brand recognition rate among digital formats at 67.7 percent. Social media feed ads recorded the highest post-click purchase conversion rate at 60.3 percent. An academic survey of 222 YouTube web-drama viewers also found that immersion improved brand image and attitude.
Those findings offer only a partial measure of effectiveness. The campaign figures are largely company-reported and several years old. The Incross report covers digital advertising more broadly, while the academic study measured attitudes rather than purchases. None establishes that entertainment alone drove sales.
For banks and industry groups, whose offerings are rarely impulse purchases, the connection can be harder to trace.
Advertisers must also judge how prominently to feature themselves. Push the brand too aggressively and viewers may swipe away. Hide it too well and they may remember everything except the advertiser.
A related shift is drawing billions of dollars into creator advertising in the United States.
U.S. spending in that category more than doubled from $13.9 billion in 2021 to $29.5 billion in 2024, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. It was projected to reach $37.1 billion in 2025 and roughly $44 billion in 2026. Nearly half of U.S. ad buyers surveyed by IAB called creator advertising a “must buy.”
Korea’s figures measure a different market. Its broader digital creator media industry, which includes production and platform businesses, generated 5.55 trillion won in sales in 2024, with advertising accounting for 53.7 percent.
Kim also sees a difference in how brands participate.
In the United States, creator advertising often involves paying individual creators for access to their audiences. Korean brands, she said, are increasingly becoming producers themselves, commissioning dramas and variety shows, releasing music and developing recurring characters for their own channels.
Lee still remembers older campaigns that made the brand inseparable from the entertainment.
She cited Gatsby hair wax and Old Spice, recalling how her younger brother once showed friends his Old Spice deodorant largely because he wanted to talk about the commercials.
Jung’s relationship with newer branded content is more detached. He watches, likes and sometimes sends it to friends. But asked whether a video had ever persuaded him to buy the product behind it, he could not recall an example.
“I don’t think I’ve bought anything because of them,” Jung said. “I just consume them as funny videos and pass them around.”
AJP Takeaways
- Korean brands are increasingly producing dramas, variety shows, music videos and short-form content as advertising shifts toward streaming and mobile platforms.
- Online ad spending reached 10.1 trillion won in 2024, while broadcast advertising fell to 3.22 trillion won.
- The challenge is not just attracting views but converting attention into brand recall, searches, visits and purchases.
Copyright ⓒ Aju Press All rights reserved.
