Flower of Capitalism: South Korean Advertising at a Crossroads 9780824893255

Citation preview

F l ow e r of C a pita l i sm

H AWAI‘I ST UDIES ON KOREA

Flower of Capitalism South Korean Advertising at a Crossroads

Ol g a Fe d or e nko

University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu and Center for Korean Studies, University of Hawai‘i

© 2022 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing, 2022 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fedorenko, Olga, author. Title: Flower of capitalism : South Korean advertising at a crossroads /   Olga Fedorenko. Other titles: Hawai‘i studies on Korea. Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022. | Series:   Hawai‘i studies on Korea | Includes bibliographical references and  index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022010461 | ISBN 9780824890346 (hardback) | ISBN   9780824893255 (pdf ) | ISBN 9780824893262 (epub) | ISBN 9780824893279   (kindle edition) Subjects: LCSH: Advertising—Korea (South) Classification: LCC HF5813.K6 F43 2022 | DDC 659.1095195—dc23/eng/20220315 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010461 The Center for Korean Studies was established in 1972 to coordinate and develop resources for the study of Korea at the University of Hawai‘i. Reflecting the diversity of the academic disciplines represented by affiliated members of the university faculty, the Center seeks especially to promote interdisciplinary and intercultural studies. Hawai‘i Studies on Korea, published jointly by the Center and the University of Hawai‘i Press, offers a forum for research in the social sciences and humanities pertaining to Korea and its people. University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Cover art: Advertising posters on the Seoul subway, August 2009. Photo by author. Cover design by Aaron Lee.

C onte nts

Acknowledgments

vii

Note to Readers

xi



Introduction: The Politics and Aesthetics of South Korean Advertising

chapter 1

Historical Struggles over Advertising Freedom

37

chapter 2

The Dreams and Realities of Advertising Practitioners

70

chapter 3

The Quandaries of Advertising Censorship

101

chapter 4

Advertising Publics

133

chapter 5

Advertising Suppression and Consumer Citizenship

166



Epilogue. Digital Times: Wither Advertising?

197

Appendix 1: Chronology of Major Events in South Korean Advertising

207

Appendix 2: Acronyms

210

Appendix 3: Details on Advertisements Mentioned

211

Notes

217

References

247

Index

271

1

Acknow l e d g me nts

Seeing this book out into the world has taken much longer than I expected. I am grateful to all those who helped its meandering journey. It all started at the University of Toronto, and I thank the faculty and fellow graduate students who helped this project germinate. I am endlessly grateful to my advisor, Andre Schmid, for encouragement, inspiration, and always-sothoughtful comments. My committee members—Joshua Barker, Tania Li, and Janet Poole all provided helpful critiques and suggestions. I also benefited from advice and encouragement from Ken Kawashima. From my grad school cohort, I reserve special thanks for Lindsay Bell, my writing partner during the last year. Finally, I am indebted to the late Nancy Abelmann, who, in her capacity as external reviewer provided extensive comments that helped chart the path for reworking the original study into a book. The research that informed this study was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Most work on the manuscript was done while I was at the East Asian Studies Department at New York University, and I thank my NYU ­colleagues—Henry Em, Rebecca Karl, Phillip Kaffen, Tom Looser, Arvind Rajagopal, Ethan Harkness, Moss Roberts, and Xudong Zhang—for academic insights and strategic advice. It was my good fortune to have been included in Rebecca Karl’s writing group, whose members critiqued the first chapter drafts, while Rebecca herself became an inspiring role model. In South Korea, I am grateful to all the people in and around the advertising world who participated in or supported my research otherwise, particularly Bae Seog-Bong, Ha Haeng-Bong, Kim Hung-ki, Park Jin-Ho, Park Jeong-Sun, Park Ki Hong, Park Kwang-Soon, Park Yunjin, and Yun vii

viii

Acknowledgments

Jeong-ju. I am deeply indebted to In Sup Shin, for taking interest in my research, sharing his rich stories, giving advice on navigating Korea’s advertising circles, mediating introductions, supplying me with references, and sending me materials, as well as for his warmth and curiosity about my endeavors. At Seoul National University, I thank my colleagues at the Anthropology Department, and also gratefully acknowledge the research assistance of Suyu Lee, Okcheon Kim, and Yoonjung Kim. For commenting on the whole manuscript on different occasions, I thank John Lie, Gabriella Lukacs, Laura Nelson, Robert Oppenheim, Kathryn Ragsdale, Guy Podoler, and Jun Yoo. Individual chapters and sections benefited from comments by Christian Baier, Lindsay Bell, Ksenia Chizhova, Anatoly Detwyler, Nicholas Harkness, Taejin Hwang, I-Yi Hsieh, Hyang Jin Jung, Phillip Kaffen, David Kang, Rebecca Karl, Nojin Kwak, Alice Kim, David Kim, Jimin Kim, Kim Hong-Jung, Monica Kim, Katherine Lee, Marcie Middlebrooks, Tom Looser, Arvind Rajagopal, CedarBough Saeji, and Deborah Solomon. An earlier version of chapter 3 was published as “Quandaries of Advertising Censorship in South Korea: Freedom-Loving Censors, Smart Consumers, and Cynical Sensibility,” Anthropological Quarterly 89 (4): 1049–1079. Parts of chapter 4 were published as “South Korean Advertising as Popular Culture” in The Korean Popular Culture Reader, edited by Kyung Hyun Kim and Youngmin Choe. Those and other chapters were presented at the Center for Korean Studies at UC Berkeley, the Center for Korean Research at Columbia University, Rising Stars of Korean Studies Workshop at the Korean Studies Institute of University of Southern California, the Media in Contemporary Korea Symposium at New York University, the Korea Society in New York, Haifa University, the Songdo and Wonju campuses of Yonsei University, and the Asia Center Brown Bag series at Seoul National University. I am grateful to organizers and participants of all those events. I received invaluable feedback during the SSRC Korean Studies Junior Faculty Book workshop in August 2015, and thank all the workshop participants. I am particularly thankful to faculty mentors John Lie and Jun Yoo, who so kindly guided me through book publishing mazes and organized a workshop for the manuscript at UC Berkeley in August 2017. At different turns of its protracted journey, the manuscript also benefited from practical advice and some cheering from Ruth Barraclough, Ted

Acknowledgments

ix

Hughes, Hyang Jin Jung, Jiyeon Kang, Rebecca Karl, Laurel Kendall, Nan Kim, Sharon Heejin Lee, and Andre Schmid. Finishing this book would have been much harder without friends who provided encouragement and pleasant distractions. I thank Cosmo Lee, Valerie Deacon, Inna Drobouchevitch, Alexey Dan Chin-Yu, Guy Podoler, Sebastián Patrón Saade, and Christian Baier, who at different times all heard probably much more than they wanted to about this book and its trajectory. Special thanks to Cosmo Lee, in the peace and quiet of whose coworking space, Park Slope Desk, major revisions were completed. Finally, I commend the professionalism and courtesy of the University of Hawai‘i Press. Working with editor Masako Ikeda has been a pleasure, I thank the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and generous comments on the manuscript, and gratefully acknowledge the copy editing and production team, Ivo Fravashi and Grace Wen, for seeing this book through the final stages.

Note to R e a de r s

All translations from Korean are mine unless otherwise noted. In transliterating Korean words, I use the McCune-Reischauer system, except when common usage differs. Korean names are given with the surname preceding their first name, unless the author in question publishes primarily in English. Unless otherwise noted, for Korean organizations, I use their preferred rendering of their names in English, as indicated in their publications or on their websites. The names of my interviewees are pseudonyms, except for public figures and those people who indicated that they wished to appear under their real names. Details on advertisements mentioned in the text are provided in appendix 3. Most of them can be viewed at https://bit.ly/FlowerOfCapitalism.

xi

Int r oduc tion The P ol itic s a nd A e st he t ic s of S ou t h Kor e a n Adv e rt ising In modern society, advertising is reputed as the flower of capitalism. Because the power of capital and the power of creativity are concen­ trated in advertising, it is no longer a mere instrument for earning money but can be categorized as a domain of culture. . . . If advertising is made only to make money . . . it must be expelled from the public domain. —Ch’ae Pok-hŭi, Flower of Capitalism, Advertising Revived as Culture Of course, not all advertising is objectionable and, obviously, some informative advertising provides genuine benefits to consumers, as well as helping business move its products. Moreover, public interest groups can use advertising techniques to transmit their messages and positions and to raise consciousness on issues of public importance. The problem is thus not advertising per se, or the rise of an image culture, but capitalist control of advertising for commercial purposes. —John Harms and Douglas Kellner, Toward a Critical Theory of Advertising

A

smiling man on whose arms two young children are hanging is a “Superman”; a mother holding a newborn is a “Wonder Woman”; a technician repairing unruly city wires is a “Spiderman”—such are captions to the ambient slideshow of fading black-and-white photographs that extoll the achievements of ordinary people in the “Hero” episode of 1

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IntroductionThe Politics and Aesthetics of South Korean Advertising

one of the most beloved advertising campaigns in South Korea at the beginning of the new millennium, “Toward People.”1 The soundtrack of a child singing “Let It Be” in a trembling voice leaves no doubt about the ­sentimental punch packed. “We all are a hero for someone,” the final caption an­nounces. While the ad was for a telecom service, “Hero” contains no clues to the nature of the advertiser’s business, except for the name of the company, SK Telecom, which flashes at the end. Intensely sentimental campaigns such as this one—regularly run by South Korean conglomerates—realize the local ideal of what advertising is, what it does, and whom it serves first. Whereas commercial logic constitutes advertising as a means of promoting advertisers’ material interests, its cultural logic attunes it to local sensibilities, values, and politics, which might or might not serve advertisers’ business imperatives.2 How those orientations—sometimes aligned, sometimes conflicting—shaped South Korean advertising as a media form and social

Figure 1.  A storyboard of the “Hero” commercial for SK Telecom, 2009. Reproduced with permission from SK Telecom.



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institution in the first decade of the twenty-first century is the subject of this book. This study ethnographically explores contests over advertising messages and advertising-mediated money flows among advertising practitioners, censors, and activists, while examining their implications for the distribution of freedoms and burdens among vested interests, particularly among corporations and media audiences. Historicizing the aesthetics and politics of advertising, my analysis raises critical questions about the social contract that governs advertising in late-capitalist societies and attempts to rescue arguments that prioritize advertising’s public accountability over private purposes, the arguments that were reexamined in postmillennial South Korea. Historically in South Korea, the cultural logic of advertising prescribed that the commercial interests of advertisers be subordinated to the considerations of public interest.3 More evocative than precise, public interest—kongik [公益], often conflated with publicness (kongkongsŏng [公共性])—has been mobilized to signify the interest of the imaginary ethnonational whole and opposed to self-serving advantage-seeking and group egotism (Sin 2000; Moon 2010). Evoking moral authority and selfless concern with society at large, this normative ideal disavows the existence of irreconcilable interests within a nation, such as the interests of labor and capital. It implies that differences stem from ethical failings— narrow-minded self-interest that is half-expected of corporations but also of other interest-based groups, such as labor unions. The vernacular notion was the pillar of the local moral economy, or culturally prescribed forms of reciprocity that connect ordinary South Koreans with political and economic elites.4 South Korean advertising—promotional messages publicly circulating in service of advertisers’ private interests—was drawn into the Manichaean struggle between partisan calculations and pure concern with fellow compatriots and often judged for its contributions to public service. Beyond favoring the virtue-inspiring advertising aesthetics, the local cultural logic of advertising privileged its potential for financially enabling diverse mass media, whether or not this public service suited advertisers, an orientation hardly ever expected of commercial advertising elsewhere. On the surface, the mainstream of South Korean advertising bore few traces of those public commitments. As generative ideals, cultural logics are often conceded to practical situations and immediate interests. The

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IntroductionThe Politics and Aesthetics of South Korean Advertising

majority of South Korean advertising campaigns were formulaic ones that announced the features of advertised commodities and included a ­celebrity to testify to their utility and prestige. Particularly on the terrestrial TV channels, the home of the most coveted and expensive ad spots in the late 2000s, most ads relied on popular entertainers to keep viewers tuned during commercial breaks.5 Campaigns like “Toward People” were outnumbered by ads for predatory private moneylenders, boy bands dancing with the newest cell phone models, girl groups pitching cosmetics, or, a new trend at the time of my fieldwork, Hallyu entertainers sharing a kiss over a can of coffee. Particularly jarring were daytime insurance ads, which showed gory scenes of car accidents and quoted cancer statistics. Moreover, when buying those advertising slots, South Korean conglomerates were known to leverage their marketing budgets to secure positive media coverage and, in the case of newspaper advertising, buy favor with the political camps associated with the mainstream dailies. South Korean advertisers were no greater paragons of selfless virtue than their international counterparts. Often sacrificed in actual practice, the cultural logic nevertheless informed unusually restrictive advertising controls, such as tight advertising censorship, legal obstacles to unmediated dealings between advertisers and terrestrial broadcasters, and bans on in-program advertising. The ideal of publicness also animated extensive advertising-focused activism by consumer and media organizations. The sheer number of advertising-related controversies—celebrities criticized for endorsing dubious services, protests against sexist portrayals, residents mobilized to limit outdoor advertising in their neighborhood, and consumer boycotts of conservative-press advertisers—was a puzzle driving this research.6 In postmillennial South Korea, advertising remained susceptible to public intervention on a scale unimaginable in many other latecapitalist countries. Remarkably, this orientation to public interest in advertising proved resistive to the neoliberal ideologies of freedom and market fundamentalism. South Korean ruling elites espoused the neoliberal doctrine in the 1980s, and, especially after the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the national economy has been restructured to expand the freedoms of capital, whereas South Koreans were compelled to treat their lives as an enterprise, not to count on state protection, and to personally leverage social



IntroductionThe Politics and Aesthetics of South Korean Advertising 

5

risks.7 Advertising, curiously, was a domain in which the expansion of corporate freedoms met tenacious opposition. By detailing the clash of advertising’s lingering obligations and expanding freedoms, this study also tells a story of how neoliberalism was embraced in fits and starts, offering a window on political-economic struggles and sociocultural shifts in postmillennial South Korea. In addition, documenting those contests also serves a historical goal: to chronicle the South Korean advertising scene just before its center of gravity shifted from the traditional mass media to web-based platforms. In South Korea, the Internet has been an important medium for content delivery and communication since the 1990s, but it was not until the early 2010s, after the mass adoption of networked smartphones, that the full significance of the unfolding technological transformation would become apparent. The so-called new media had profound consequences for eroding the stabilized media forms and institutions, including advertising. Not only did the web-based content capture the niches of those traditional media but new technological affordances allowed online media to escape the existing regulatory environment, while hastily developed regulations for the new media content and infrastructures struggled to maintain the yesteryear ideals of publicness amid the new course on freedom and competition. This study captures South Korean advertising as still largely continuous with the advertising of the decades of the previous century yet on the brink of a substantive transmutation. The next section elaborates on the cultural logic of South Korean advertising, by unpacking the implications of its most common metaphor, the “flower of capitalism,” and by mapping the semantic field of the word “advertising,” kwanggo. The following section, presenting this study’s theoretical and methodological choices, situates my analysis at the intersections of political economy and the anthropology of media. Then I explicate the organizing analytical thread of this study: the structural tensions and situational accommodations between advertising private purposes and public circulation, whose rationales I complicate by the local inflections of the public and the private. The chapter then returns to South Korean advertising, first to foreground its peculiarities, and then to explain how contests over advertising have reflected contests over capitalism and its ideologies in South Korea.

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IntroductionThe Politics and Aesthetics of South Korean Advertising

Th e “Fl ow e r o f C api tal ism ”: The S o u th K o r e an Metaph o r f o r A dv e rtisin g While in the transatlantic countries modern advertising developed to meet the needs of mass production and mass consumption,8 in Korea the origins of modern advertising were linked to imperialism, the ambitions of media owners, the availability of technology, the desire to emulate American practices, corporate attempts to win legitimacy, and only eventually the need to market mass-produced commodities. These differences are reflected in the semantic field, which in Korean does not unequivocally link advertising to its commercial functions. Unlike advertising in contemporary English, Korean kwanggo (廣告) does not automatically evince commercial advertising and is shared with public service announcements—but also with classifieds (saenghwal kwanggo) and even notices of condolence (aedo kwanggo).9 When I asked my informants—South Koreans of all walks of life interested in talking about advertising—to record their everyday interactions with advertising in a diary, I was surprised that noncommercial public service advertising was included in those accounts. While my directions were intentionally vague and emphasized the open-endedness of what they could write about as long as it was somehow related to advertising, I assumed public service announcements to be outside the scope of my research, because in my mind they were not categorized as advertisements. But, as my interviews revealed, for many South Koreans the distinction between commercial and noncommercial advertising was not particularly meaningful. On quite a few occasions, while recounting an advertisement, my informants would describe its visuals and the message but not remember whether it was a commercial advertisement or a public service message. Others, when talking about advertising in general, would describe a public service campaign and talk about its creativity, treating its noncommercial nature as insignificant. At the same time, unlike with my Englishspeaking colleagues, I rarely had to explain in South Korea that my research did not include promotional or marketing activities, such as product placements or sponsored articles in the mass media. What appeared central to the definition of advertising in South Korea was that it was an explicitly paid-for message circulating publicly. Its commercial goals, or lack thereof,



IntroductionThe Politics and Aesthetics of South Korean Advertising 

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were an extraneous condition, whereas its affinity with public culture was at least as intuitive as that with marketing management. The clichéd metaphor for advertising, “flower of capitalism” (chabonchuŭi ŭi kkot), reflects this willful disregard for advertising’s commercial dimension. In Korean, to call something the “flower of ” a particular phenomenon is to say that it is the crucial part of that phenomenon, just as flowering could be seen as the culmination of the life of a plant. Such a designation implies an appreciation for both the phenomenon and the part designated as its “flower.” For example, the statement “Elections are the flower of democracy” started a political commentary in popular news service PRESSian.10 Similarly, the expression “advertising the flower of capitalism” acknowledges advertising’s intrinsic connection to capitalism but obscures any unfavorable implications of this connection or critiques of capitalism itself. The flower metaphor is so pervasive that there are few Korean-­ language books on advertising that do not include “advertising, the flower of capitalism” in their blurb, and journalists and industry observers habit­ ually evoke the “flower of capitalism” to rhetorically preface their points, whether critical or, more commonly, appreciative. Even when used critically, the metaphor is evoked to target particular advertising deficiencies, such as the excessive use of sex appeal or crowding a public space with advertising posters—it does not imply a critique of advertising as a capitalist phenomenon but rather a moral critique of its opportunistic misuse. Curiously, floral patterns even make it to the covers of serious academic publications in South Korea. I first registered this fact when presented with a copy of Advertising in Korea (Shin and Shin 2004), which is dotted with tiny blossoms of the mugunghwa, the Korean national flower. Professor Shin In Sup (Sin In-sŏp), the coauthor who gave me the volume, confirmed that the mugunghwa was there to signal the Koreanness of the topic—but also because advertising was known as a “flower of capitalism.” He dated the expression to the 1970s and believed it came from some Japanese scholar, whose name he, a walking encyclopedia of everything advertising related, uncharacteristically could not recall. Other Korean advertising experts I asked about the phrase would similarly insist on its foreign origins, yet no actual reference was ever produced. The simultaneous acknowledgment and disavowal of advertising’s connections to capitalism in South Korea can be illustrated with an

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IntroductionThe Politics and Aesthetics of South Korean Advertising

Figure 2.  Flower-decorated cover of Advertising in Korea by In Sup Shin and Kie Hyuk Shin (Seoul: Communication Books, 2004).

e­ ducational article in the Ŏrini Dong-A, a children’s edition of one of the biggest national dailies, from May 18, 2006. In it, professor Pak Hyo-sin of Yonsei University distills the origins and purposes of advertising for his young readers as follows: “Advertising is called a flower of capitalism. Advertising is as common in our surroundings as air or water. After the industrial revolution in the United States, automobiles became massproduced, and the advertising industry developed greatly. The financial support that private newspapers and private broadcasters receive is also precisely from advertising. Apart from numerous advertisements for products and companies, there are advertisements which are used for the purposes of public interest [kongikchŏgin mokchŏg ŭro].”11 Pak concludes with a praise for an oft-celebrated print ad for SsangYong Group from 1984. Titled “Feeling Unwell Today” (onŭl ŭn sok i pulp’yŏn haguna), the ad featured a drawing of two lunch boxes accompanied by a redolent story of a teacher who gave away his lunch to hungry students, pretending that he was unwell—a narrative that would evoke childhood memories for the ad’s many contemporaries, who grew up during Korea’s lean years. Pak applauds the ad as “a good advertisement in which the hundred-year history of Korean advertising culminated,” and commends it for containing “not a single line that promotes the company or its products.”



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Figure 3.  “Feeling Unwell Today” advertisement for SsangYong Group, published on Teachers’ Day, May 15, 1984, in the Dong-A Ilbo newspaper. Reproduced with permission from SsangYong C&E.

The article is stunning in how, while calling advertising a flower of capitalism, it omits any relation between advertising and its capitalist function, to sell commodities; instead it praises advertising for supporting the mass media and promoting public interest. The exemplar of all advertising is not an advertisement that resulted in the highest sales for the advertiser or perhaps won a high-profile prize. Rather, it is an advertisement that is barely distinguishable from a noncommercial public service announcement. Pak’s article, which is representative of South Korean public discourse about advertising, should be interpreted as neither sinister propaganda for the advertising industry nor naivety about advertisers’ commercial motives. Rather, this discourse reproduces the cultural logic that subordinates commercial imperatives to public interest obligations and, importantly, urges intervention toward their enforcement—an orientation different from irony, cynicism, or resignation about advertising excesses that advertising frequently meets in late-capitalist democracies. Resonating with the activist orientations of South Korean civil society and buttressed by lasting legal and institutional arrangements, this public discourse transforms advertising into a battlefield over public interest, the distribution of freedoms, and the limits of corporate and consumer sovereignty, as this book details. By putting “flower of capitalism” in the title of the book, I deploy this

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IntroductionThe Politics and Aesthetics of South Korean Advertising

metaphor both literally and critically. I foreground, rather than bury, the link between advertising and capitalism, even in such public interest–­ oriented campaigns as “Toward People” and “Feeling Unwell Today.” At the same time, I hope that the strangeness of the metaphor helps denat­ ural­ize the habitual assumptions about advertising, and unearth critical openings, which are bared when advertising as a social institution is reduced to its instrumental ends. The book explores tensions and opportunities that imagining advertising as a “flower of capitalism” has opened in South Korea, while developing a critical anthropology of advertising.

A C r i ti c al A n th r o p o l o gy o f A dv e rtisin g Sitting at the intersection of culture and economy, advertising, in South Korea and elsewhere, has been implicated in many processes that have profound local consequences for capitalism, democracy, and social life (Harms and Kellner 1990; Leiss et al. 2005). Grasping its place adequately requires keeping in the same analytical frame a macrolevel understanding of advertising’s systemic role in capitalist reproduction and a microlevel analysis of concrete advertising-related practices, whose dynamics often diverge from what one might expect if privileging its instrumental functions. Neglecting the former leads to naive celebrations of creative consumers subverting the culture industry with resistive advertising readings, whereas ignoring the latter results in totalizing conspiracy theories of all-powerful elites manipulating the masses. Neither extreme is helpful for recognizing advertising as a contested social institution amenable to public politics. Drawing together threads from critical theory, political economy of media, and sociocultural anthropology, particularly the anthropology of media, this section sketches a critical anthropology of advertising. By “advertising” I mean neither simply advertising texts nor the advertising industry but a historical institution whose social meanings and functions need to be grasped in their context.12 I approach advertising as a complex of interests, discourses, practices, as well as technical and cultural infrastructures that connect corporations, advertising agencies, mass media, policy makers, and audiences, and question how those linkages are made,



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stabilized, maintained, and contested. The challenge is to draw out the complexities and contingencies of those connections without losing sight of the constraints and pressures imposed by the systemic forces of capitalism. An indispensable starting point for a critical analysis are Marxist approaches that elucidate how advertising is deployed for capital accumulation and reproduction. Most immediately, advertising, a tool for selling commodities, is implicated in commodity fetishism, reifying commodities and masking the social relations that bring them into existence. Expanding Karl Marx’s critique of capitalist exploitation to the sphere of consumption, Wolfgang Fritz Haug posits advertisements as a tool of “commodity aesthetics.” A “beauty developed in the service of the realization of exchange value” (1986, 8), commodity aesthetics exaggerate the use value of commodities to enhance their sensual attractiveness and command a higher price, serving the interests of the commodity seller and subordinating the human needs of the commodity buyer to the valorization needs of capital. Its long-term historical effect, Haug argues, is molding human sensuality in service of profit drive. Other critics have emphasized advertising’s role in propagating worldviews and libidinal investments that naturalize commodity fetishism and direct human aspirations toward commodity consumption, in alignment with the needs of capitalist reproduction.13 The political-economic effects of advertising money are at least as crucial as those of advertising texts. Because commercial media draw their main revenue from advertising, they are effectively in the business of selling audiences’ “eyeballs” to advertisers (Smythe 1977; Jhally 2014). The economic power of advertisers to keep media afloat makes them “a de facto licensing power” (Curran and Seaton 2009, 29; also Herman and Chomsky 2002, 14–18) that enables commercial interests to dominate media content and confines public debate to the elite perspectives. James Curran and Jean Seaton (2009, 31–32), for example, track the disappearance of left-wing newspapers from the United Kingdom because those publications’ significant readership was made up of the working class and the poor, who were not an attractive audience for advertisers. Not only are voices that challenge the moneyed interests silenced, but critical cover­ age of social and political issues is systematically sacrificed to entertainment programs because of their greater compatibility with consumerist

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IntroductionThe Politics and Aesthetics of South Korean Advertising

messages and the political-economic status quo.14 Overall, the structural pull of advertising dependence precludes the mass media from being a space of open public debate, promotes an undemocratic social order, and privileges the interests of companies with big advertising budgets. This dynamic has been uncovered for commercial media industries internationally, including in South Korea.15 Nevertheless, specific configurations of media institutions, including their connections to advertising, are an outcome of historical struggles and contingencies. Those configurations cannot be deduced from instrumental purposes, social needs, or available technical capacities, as has been demonstrated for various media in various contexts. Raymond Williams details how television broadcasting in the twentieth century was an effect of “a set of particular social decisions, in particular circumstances, which were then so widely if imperfectly ratified that it is now difficult to see them as decisions rather than as (retrospectively) inevitable results” (2010, 100). Echoing Williams yet foregrounding hard and soft infrastructures at play, Brian Larkin (2008) shows, with an analysis of a Nigerian case, that the meanings and social functions of modern media are not inexorable but are unstable and subject to debate, and that their actual technical and social uses sometimes elide the intentions of their ideologues and sponsors. Among the tasks for a critical anthropology of advertising is to uncover how advertising’s connections to larger social structures—media, business, state—are not automatic, as many wellmeaning but simplistic advertising critiques assume, but formed in the interplay of capitalist, cultural, and situational logics. Particularly relevant for unveiling those contingencies are historical studies that have shown how, before the neoliberal consolidation in the second half of the twentieth century, the commercial model of media was competing with the social democratic one, which framed media as a public utility, linked its operations to public interest, and prioritized the social goal of enabling democracy (e.g., Pickard 2011, 2013). Specifically for advertising, Inger Stole (2006) details the struggle of consumer groups in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s to subject the advertising industry to binding public scrutiny—and their defeat by the advertising industry’s lobby and the advertising-dependent mass media. Armand Mattelart (1991) draws a broad-strokes picture of how the advertising industry had fought to win liberties internationally, particularly since the 1980s. Yet it



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is important to recognize that those outcomes were not predestined and to uncover histories and politics that have kept advertising publicly accountable at some historical junctures. Ongoing contests over advertising are overlooked in otherwise sophisticated ideology critiques, which posit advertisements as a privileged tool for capitalist subjectivization but often struggle, or neglect altogether, to demonstrate specific connections between advertising representations and social reality (e.g., Williamson 1978). Those nuanced semiotic interpretations have been extensively critiqued: for assuming, rather than empirically demonstrating, advertising effects; for placing the semiotician in the privileged position to grasp the true meaning of the text and ignoring possibilities of multiple readings; for assuming a gullible consumer and passive audience; and for overall totalizing and deterministic tendencies.16 Mica Nava (1997) critiques this textually focused approach for “incriminating” advertising “as the iconographic signifier of multinational capitalism” (34) by “attributing to it [advertising] the injuries of our dependence on commodity capitalism” (47). It can also be argued that critiques of advertising texts may mediate the critics’ “cynical consumerism,” or participation in consumerist rituals from a critical distance, which disrupts nothing and masks practical complicity.17 However compelling—and convenient—textual approaches to advertising are, its critical study requires an investigation of actual practices of advertising production and circulation. Ethnographic accounts have demonstrated complex negotiations that integrate advertising in various contexts. Several ethnographies of dayto-day work at advertising agencies have revealed how particular adver­ tisements are better explained by office hierarchies, client relations, and advertising practitioners’ class work and professional ambitions than by marketing research—and practically never by self-conscious propagandistic purposes. Brian Moeran’s (1996) ethnography of Japanese advertising agency details social relations that shape advertising productions within the agency and among the agency, its clients, and media organizations, explicating various conflicts of interests that shape specific campaigns. Similarly Daniel Miller’s (1997) ethnography within a Trinidadian advertising agency shows how an advertising campaign for a soft drink was born of ritualistic encounters within the agency, which had more to do with workplace seniority than with a calculated marketing strategy.

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Miller demonstrates that local advertising agencies make their livelihood off convincing international clients of the uniqueness of local consumers, marketing to whom requires local expertise, which results in advertising campaigns that emphasize—and arguably produce—local uniqueness. The observation that advertising agencies are primarily selling their expertise to clients, not commodities to consumers, is confirmed by Steven Kemper (2001) and William Mazzarella (2003) in the contexts of, respectively, Sri Lanka and India, whereas sociologists find a similar dynamic in the United Kingdom (Cronin 2004; Nixon 2003). Ad makers have been shown to be driven by personal motives in their creative solutions—clever artistry that leads to recognition among peers (but not necessary sales) in the United Kingdom (Nixon 2003) and progressive identity politics at a small Asian American agency in the United States (Shankar 2015). These studies go a long way in demonstrating how the glossy coherence of the end product, an advertisement, hides the contingent compromises on the conflicting agendas of variously positioned actors, whose motivations are refracted through practical considerations, office politics, and personal ambitions.18 What advertisements actually do once they have been created—the “social life” of advertisements, to use Anne Cronin’s (2004) term19—has received little ethnographic attention, however. Though there is much anxiety about how advertising texts reflect and shape social reality, few studies have been able to connect symbolic analyses of specific ads and audience ethnography, and those that have conclude that advertising influence on specific purchases is uncertain and that advertising alone is unlikely to make a product or associated behavior popular (e.g., Alperstein 2001; Miller 1997; Kemper 2001). It is even more difficult to isolate an advertising campaign as a cause of a social transformation other than by implication, and analysts who attempt to empirically capture those effects agree that advertisements generally reflect and possibly reinforce popular attitudes, rather than create them (e.g., Marchand 1985; O’Barr 1994; Miller 1997). Nevertheless, like other public-cultural productions, advertisements too at times express social issues and contradictions, as, for example, Mazzarella shows for KamaSutra condoms advertising in India of the 1990s, where it mediated “some of the most persistent contradictions that arose in the transition between the developmentalist and the consumerist visions of the nation” (2003, 71).20



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In relation to South Korean ads, much attention went to their constructions of gender roles. Roald Maliangkay (2008) considers how advertising helped instigate changes in social norms and practices in colonial Korea, arguing “that the prevalence of images of women, and in particular of those in traditional costume, came from a desire to connote tradition and the home on the one hand, and the fact that image of Korean men had lost its ethnicity, on the other” (34). Dennis Hart (1991) analyzes South Korean ads of the late 1980s as both reflecting and constructing new ideas of womanhood in the wake of South Korea becoming an industrialized society and traditional family structures and gender roles being transformed. Nicholas Harkness (2011, 2013a) contends that South Korean alcohol advertisements in the 2000s were “emblematic of a shift in how features of masculinity and femininity are idealized as points of cultural orientation in contemporary South Korean drinking rituals” (2013a, 15). Taking up advertising portrayals of race and age, Michael Prieler (2012) argues that the overrepresentation of white non-Koreans in independent roles is symptomatic of racial hierarchies and South Koreans’ reluctance to interact with foreigners, whereas the underrepresentation of old people, combined with their never appearing alone, reveals their perceived unimportance. Such accounts offer insights into cultural shifts as they are refracted through the contingencies of advertising production. Further, processes of advertising regulation, while crucial for enabling the circulation of advertising, have almost completely escaped attention. The few available studies illuminate conflicts and negotiations among the interests of advertisers, audiences, governments, and formal and informal regulatory organizations, which can be deduced neither from looking only at the end products nor from the material interests of the parties concerned. Analyzing records of advertising censorship in India, Angad Chowdhry (2009) argues that in the process of protecting “the consumer,” the censorship board produced “a contemporary subject that is both resistant to and open to the efficacy of advertising” (125). Mazzarella’s brief discussion of how the Indian government unsuccessfully attempted to curb a racy ad for condoms posits the dispute as an important chapter in the struggle for popular support and legitimacy between government and private industry in transforming India (2003, 128–129). Focusing on regulatory codes and a number of advertising controversies in the United Kingdom, Cronin (2004) argues that the common fixation on a­ dvertising

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representations shields the advertising industry from scrutiny of its actual social impact. Incorporating the vagaries of advertising regulation further complicates the intentionality of advertising representations while foregrounding often ignored social actors whose interventions shape the circulation of advertising messages and money. A critical anthropology of advertising also needs to challenge the implied universalism often associated with advertising and to foreground its historical specificities. Fascination with cultural differences as revealed in advertising texts masks a tendency to universalize the particular notion of advertising that has arisen from the historical and cultural contexts in North America and Western Europe, where modern advertising was pioneered and whose advertising practices and industries serve as the benchmarks when international advertising is analyzed. This assumed universalism ignores that the specifics of how modern media are integrated into social life are “something worked out over time in the context of considerable cultural debate” (Larkin 2008, 3), as Larkin’s historical and ethnographic analysis demonstrates in Nigeria. Arvind Rajagopal (2013) reminds us about media in general that to assume that the contemporary globality of media is an effect of the spread of the Western media is to ignore how media are defined not only by universal technologies but also by their local social histories. In the case of advertising, I show with the South Korean example that its local configurations are shaped not only by its capacity to entice potential consumers with commodities, nor even by its capacity to buy favorable media coverage for corporations, but are also negotiated against the local ideologies of capitalism and media as well as the specific needs of multiple interested parties, such as capital, the state, advertising practitioners, the mass media, regulatory institutions, and media audiences. While cautious about cross-cultural universalism, I foreground commonalities of advertising circulated via diverse media channels within the same cultural context. There are, of course, important cross-media differences in terms of how advertising is acted upon. In postmillennial South Korea, advertising via terrestrial media was still considered most trustworthy and deserving of interference when problematic, whereas advertising on cable channels or on the Internet was viewed with suspicion and resignation. Such differences reflect how advertising picks up the “media ideologies” of the carrying medium—beliefs about the medium’s proper



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uses (Gershon 2010). Yet to call something advertising is to recognize it as a particular kind of phenomenon with inner and outer coherency—and it is its cultural and social constructions that this study privileges. To translate these analytical commitments into a research program, I offer a multi-sited ethnography of advertising-related practices. “Multisited ethnography” was proposed by George Marcus (1995) for studying contemporary cultural formations as imbricated in global processes, by specifying parts, fragments, and their connections as they can be identified in particular sites and in-between. In this spirit, this study examines “advertising-related practices”—a broad term to capture any social phenomena that in any way link to advertising. The designation is inspired by Mark Hobart’s (2006, 2010) argument that the proper focus for anthropological studies of media are media-related practices (as opposed to “media practices”), so that “the range of contexts and situations in which media become relevant” (2006, 503) is fully accounted for. Advertising, the following chapters show, becomes relevant in a variety of circumstances that often have little to do with advertising commercial functions—from informing jokes and expressing generational sentiments to demonstrating open-mindedness and fighting for democracy. The anthropology of media is a major influence for this study. Scholars within this tradition insist on treating media as complex phenomena embedded in and integral to social life, while positing far-reaching questions about the processes and effects of social mediation (Boyer 2012; Postill and Peterson 2009). They caution against interpreting the meanings of media texts separately from their contexts, demonstrate how audiences are active in reinterpreting the meanings of media content to fit various contexts of reception, recognize media producers as complex subjects with their own agendas, and draw attention to how material interests, contingencies, and infrastructural inertia shape media. In this vein, social actors involved in advertising-related practices require an ethnographic complexity that looks beyond their functional relation to advertising. Audiences are not necessarily “consumers” and are capable of appropriating advertisements for their own goals. Advertising practitioners might pursue personally meaningful and at times activist agendas within the industry infrastructures, just as other cultural producers, from filmmakers to journalists, do. Advertising censors are intellectuals and professionals in other fields who are not necessarily eager to

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silence others.21 Advertising-related practices and their subjects need to be recognized as situated, and to be ethnographically grasped across the contexts in which advertising is produced, responded to, and regulated. Such an ethnographic approach is advantageous for resisting the totalizing impulse common to critical studies of advertising, and for drawing out how systemic forces and vested interests manifest in disorderly social reality, where acting subjects entangle advertising in pursuit of diverse projects and ambitions, which may or may not be conducive to corporate profits and capitalist reproduction. In this spirit, this study details how contests around postmillennial South Korean advertising were muddled by the situationally implicated agendas of variously positioned actors and were neatly mapped onto neither their political affiliations nor vested interests; how publicly elected advertising reviewers distanced themselves from their censorial tasks to assert themselves as open-minded, liberal subjects; how progressive activists from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were reluctant to interfere with offensive advertising out of respect for advertisers’ freedom of expression; and how advertising practitioners did not particularly care about enhancing advertisers’ profits but were instead invested in benefiting the underprivileged or advancing social agendas through advertising. Exploring those complexities on the ground, I draw out their far-­reaching politics by focusing on the underlying tensions between advertising private purposes and public circulation.

Th e P ublic ne s s a n d Pri vate ne s s of A dv ertisin g While the cultural logic of South Korean advertising meshes the legal, symbolic, and cultural meanings of publicness, here I consider “publicness” and “privateness” as analytical terms that describe key social relations under capitalism, to clarify what is at stake in contests about advertising. Most of those contests boil down to the distribution of resources, rights, and obligations between private and public domains as delineated by legal ownership rights—to what degree should advertising flows be controlled by advertisers or private capital? And to what degree do advertising’s public circulation and functions justify regulation, ex-



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ternal oversight, and moral-economic demands to benefit communities subjected to advertising? This section unpacks the competing claims on advertising while clarifying the multivalent meanings of its publicness. Most immediately, commercial advertisements are produced with an advertiser’s money to advance its material interests. Insofar as advertisements are an expense undertaken by businesses, advertisements are governed by the social relation of private property. Therefore, an argument could be made for the right of those sponsors to freely determine their advertisements’ content and placement. Such a position is often formulated in the language of “freedom to advertise,” which is entangled in freedom to enterprise and freedom of commercial speech, all grounded in the classical liberal ideas of the invisible hand of free markets. Those claims are aligned with neoliberal doctrines, which posit the market as the ultimate arbiter and promote it for regulating economic and extraeconomic areas of life. However, advertising is also a public medium, on the basis of its public circulation, infrastructural dependencies, and perceived social and political effects. First, advertising transmission relies on the infrastructures and utilities that are public. This publicness could be legal or s­ ymbolic—even if privatized, media platforms are commonly understood as serving the addressed audiences. An obvious case is advertising via terrestrial airwaves, whose scarcity made them a limited public resource to be managed similarly to other utilities, such as the power supply or water. This logic posits airwaves as commons, stipulates a public oversight over access, and often prescribes a use that honors obligations to the community. Even privately owned mass media platforms, such as newspapers, are drawn into the social contract that prescribes that their reporting serve the public, not advertisers. Wary of advertisers’ influence, public service models of media limit, or even reject, advertising and instead rely on subscriptions and taxation. The pervasive circulation of advertising encourages beliefs in its reality-shaping omnipotence, which also calls for its public accountability. Such beliefs, for example, drove limitations on the advertising of tobacco and alcohol—“dangerous goods” for the health and productivity of the population—as Cronin (2004) demonstrates for the United Kingdom of the 1990s (while critiquing the underlying assumption of a causal relation between advertising portrayals and social behavior). Importantly, public

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scrutiny is directed at advertising portrayals of not only commodities and consumption but also social values, cultural codes, gender roles, and normative behaviors, whose disagreeable depictions provoke criticism and occasionally intervention in the name of public morals, health, and social justice. Advertising, in other words, is tasked to also “sell” socially approved ideals and aspirations. Such wishful aspects of advertising prompted Raymond Williams (1999, 421) to declare it the “official art” of capitalist societies. The resemblances between propaganda-driven socialist-realist art in the Soviet Union of the 1930s and capitalist advertising in the United States of the 1980s are explored by Michael Schudson (1984), who designates the latter as “capitalist realism.” Capitalist advertising, Schudson argues, is remarkably similar to socialist realism in how it articulates the hegemonic ideology and circulates images of ideal types and sanitized reality. However, to highlight only the propaganda role of advertising is to overlook how advertising also contains collective dream images, to use Walter Benjamin’s (1999) language—“expressions of a utopian desire for social arrangements that transcend existing forms” (Buck-Morss 2000, xi; also Benjamin 1999, 174). Even with most consumerist campaigns, let alone feel-good advertisements such as “Toward People,” advertisements portray social relations that prioritize human needs—commodities and corporations that serve people, not profits. Just as socialist realism materialized the socialism that was far removed from the mundane reality of the “really existing socialism” (Dobrenko 2007), so “capitalist realism” creates a parallel reality of a fulfilled harmonious society in which the ugly sides of “really existing capitalism” are derealized. The overlap of these aesthetic conventions with beliefs in the reality-changing powers of advertising transforms advertising depictions into subjunctive wish images and holds them accountable not so much for the truthfulness of their depictions as for their faithfulness to collective aspirations. In so far as advertisements express culturally significant messages, they belong with public culture, a mass-mediated realm where worldviews are advanced and contested among the culture industry, state, and diverse actors (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1988; Fraser 1990). Like other cultural productions, advertisements are incomplete, open-ended, and struggled over—a site of multilevel negotiations among corporate managers, advertising practitioners, regulators, and diverse audiences.



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Though ultimately for the marketing cause, advertisements accommodate both emancipatory and reactionary agendas. Advertising’s entry into the South Korean public domain, however, is complicated by the vernacular notions of publicness, which, infused with neo-Confucian echoes, conflate its public circulation with publicness as a value linked to ethical legitimacy. Kong (公), the key character in contemporary public-related concepts, denotes a normative neo-Confucian concept and evokes multilayered meanings with strong ethical implications, including “the universal ethical principle of impartiality, fairness, and justice; and the common good and communality” (Lee 2006, 104). Its counterpart, the private (sa, 私), is marred with associations to partiality and privatism, and the premodern moral doctrine prescribed “minimization of the private and maximization of the public” (Lee 2006, 117). Admittedly, to approach twenty-first-century South Korea through premodern moral dicta is to risk essentialist interpretations. Yet to neglect those traditional notions is to flatten layers of cultural meanings that shape social action and to ignore how local capitalist modernity was molded by local realities, including the incumbent moral-ethical coordinates. With the notion of publicness, those residual ethical imperatives lurk in distinctly modern terms, such as “public interest” (kongkong iik) and “public culture” (kongkong munhwa), and the perceived moral superiority of the public over the private becomes mobilized when conflicting interests are at stake. Teaching about the desirable balance between public and private interests has been one of the subcategories of democratic citizenship within moral education and ethics curriculum at South Korean middle and high schools, and even in the twenty-first century schoolchildren are warned against neglecting public interest and advocating for individual freedoms and rights only (Kim, Yu, and Chŏng 2020). The introduction epigraph, which calls for expulsion “from the public domain” of the advertising that “is made only to make money,” is an illustration of how those cultural intuitions play out. Such residual moral notions of publicness synergize with its dominant modern notions to encourage advertising scrutiny and media activism, empowering audiences to realize their political potentiality as a public. An advertising public is a particular case of media publics, which, Michael Warner (2002) theorizes, are self-organized virtual collectives that come into being in relation to circulating media texts. In general, a

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public is a large-scale mass-mediated subject that recognizes itself as such (Cody 2011). According to Warner, a mere act of paying attention to a media discourse recruits one as a member of its public, and inserts one into a relation with strangers who are imagined as also addressed by the discourse. An advertising public thus neither necessarily includes those whom the advertiser wishes to address nor excludes those with limited purchasing power or uninterested in the advertised item. Often it is not attention to the commodity or brand advertised that conjures an advertising public. Despite the marketers’ obsession with segmentation in the post-Fordist order, South Korean advertising publics frequently formed across consumer niches based on the interest in particular aesthetics, a celebrity endorser, or a social issue raised—more reliably so than on consumer profiles. In the case of nationwide, transmedia advertising campaigns, advertising publics become “the public,” a social totality of people organized as a national polity.22 The significance of a public lies in how its collective agency is inherently political. “The projection of a public is a new, creative, and distinctively modern mode of power,” Warner (2002, 108) observes, as he asserts a public as a performative “world making.” Recruited into a public, one at least minimally acquiesces to its world—the values, ideologies, social relations, and power dynamics that the media discourse implies—and thus circuitously brings that world into existence. This argument hinges on the notion of performativity as theorized by Judith Butler (1993), who builds on poststructuralist theory and sociolinguistic anthropology to posit the power effects produced by a discourse whose authority is accumulated by repetition and citation of prior authoritative discourses. Centrally for advertising’s marketing purposes, the social reality conjured by the advertising address hinges on consumption delivering the surest way toward human fulfillment—the world of “capitalist realism,” to use Michael Schudson’s (1984) term. Even when advertising abandons commodity aesthetics, as does the “Toward People” campaign described above, whatever the advertising content, the message of advertising as a medium is to buy and to look for satisfaction in commodities. By recognizing a text as commercial advertising one recognizes that metamessage and is minimally recruited as a consumer-subject. Yet advertising publics also undertake performative world making



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beyond commodity fetishism. Seeking to resonate with media-fatigued audiences, advertising often dramatizes not the usefulness of specific commodities but ideas about desirable lifestyles, identities, and behaviors, which are then potentially normalized by attention, reactions, and adoption by advertising publics. In June 2009, a commercial for Maxim T.O.P. canned coffee, which showed two celebrities kissing, not only illustrated the drink’s tastiness but also asserted the acceptability and coolness of public displays of affection. Its social cue was picked up by South Korean youths, many of whom suddenly could be spotted making out in public that summer, a shocking sight in sexually conservative South Korea. The world making effected through advertising discourse also congeals norms, subjectivities, and social reality in realms that have little to do with consumption, and in that regard advertising publics are similar to any other media public. Importantly, advertising, like any address, is open to incidental and tactical misidentification (Butler 1993; Muñoz 1999). As with South Korea’s older generation complaining about kissing scenes in the coffee commercials, the fact that advertising speaks to subjects as desiring consumers does not guarantee that they will respond as such. Advertising publics recruit advertising into their own world making, often discarding ­consumption-related information and even the meta-message of advertising as a medium, as with campaigns such as “Toward People,” which was widely praised for its sentimental-humanist message that abandons commodities. Significantly, advertising publics also participate in constituting advertising itself as a particular media form and social institution. As I argue in the following chapters, the local parameters of advertising are shaped by how social actors respond to advertising—whether they pay attention to it at all; whether they treat campaigns such as “Toward People” as worthy of sentimental engagement or irony; and whether they choose to protest sexist advertising portrayals or to concede to sex appeal as an inevitable marketing strategy. In that regard, advertising belongs with other discursively mediated practices, such as ritual, magic, and exchange, that are “produced by their self-reflexive objectification” (Lee and LiPuma 2002, 193). Furthermore, though many accounts rightly critique consumer subjectivities as the pillar of capitalist ideological reproduction, consumers

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can also be agents of collective mobilization (Cohen 2004; Nelson 2000; Stole 2006). Such mobilization becomes politically disruptive when it escalates to demands on commodity producers and regulators to abide by consumer dictates as to what is produced, under what conditions, and how it is made available to consumers. “Consumers are simply members of the proletariat who have stepped into the site of circulation,” writes Kojin Karatani (2014, 290), arguing for activism that exploits the vulnerability in the process of commodity circulation, when capital depends on consumers to buy the product for realization of surplus value but has limited means to ensure that the purchase occurs. Consumerist subjectivization, in other words, does not guarantee docile subjects. In South Korea, the issues of consumer protection and consumer sovereignty (sobija chukwon, also referred to as consumerism, k’ŏnsyumŏrijŭm) often staged a confrontation between the public and the private. Historically, it was the middle-class consumers who seized the position of speaking for public interest. Their moderate success was perceived as earned through hard work, whereas their “consumerism” was understood as transcending social divides and articulating a universal position, for in capitalist societies everyone is a consumer. Since the times of military dictatorship, South Korean consumers accomplished mass-scale mobilization on ostensibly consumption-focused matters, which practically championed the interests of ordinary people against those of the ruling elites. In the 1980s, a consumer movement to demand cancellation of subscription fees for a propaganda-filled state TV channel challenged the authoritarian control of the mass media (Kim 2001). In the 2000s, consumer protests against the liberalized imports of US beef became an occasion to fiercely criticize the government’s neoliberal policies (Kang 2016). To speak as a consumer was to take a high moral ground above “partisan” interests of the left and the right and above “dirty” party politics, as many a consumer organization insisted (Moon 2010). On occasion, this entitled consumer sovereignty challenged advertisers’ demands for freedom to advertise—corporate sovereignty—and became leveraged to impose public oversight on advertising. While such interventions did not always succeed, they nevertheless contributed to keeping private advertising publicly accountable to a degree unthinkable in many other locales.



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Th e S o u th K o r e an Adv ertisin g I nd ustry in So u th K o r e a and in th e Wo r l d South Korean advertising followed the overall trajectory of the South Korean economy, which in the second half of the twentieth century demonstrated staggering growth. One of the world’s poorest countries in the 1950s, South Korea joined the Organization for Economic Co-­operation and Development in 1996, becoming the world’s thirteenth-largest economy. The advertising industry, despite prospering on the Korean Peninsula during the colonial period (1910–1945), was all but nonexistent in the war-ravaged 1950s and took off in the late 1960s, following South Korean manufacturing industries and rising disposable incomes. By the late 1970s, advertising expenditures reached 0.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), the lower threshold of advertising expenditures in advanced capitalist countries. From the late 1990s, South Korea was among the world’s ten largest advertising markets. Despite its relatively large size, the South Korean advertising industry remained at the periphery of international developments. Tracking the growing global connections and influence of the advertising industry, Armand Mattelart (1991) argues that advertising became “an essential actor within public space” and “a social network which enervates media, economies, cultures, political and civil society, international relations” (ix–x). Forerunners of the trend, British and American advertising agencies began their expansion in the early twentieth century by opening overseas offices to service their home-country clients, who were expanding into transnational markets. In the 1970s, transatlantic advertising agencies began pursuing aggressive overseas expansion independently. A frenzy of merges produced a concentrated market dominated by a handful of megagroups whose spiraling networks led to planetary concentrations of the advertising industry.23 Expanding geographically and diversifying their services, those megagroups were entangled in globalization of finance, telecommunications, and media buying. Their political influence grew especially in the 1980s, when it became commonplace for governments and politicians to hire advertising agencies. Advertising deregulation was among the effects of those developments all over the world.

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In most countries, the advertising industry was successful in lobbying for self-regulation. The pattern of mergers, consolidations, and growing concentration continued into the twenty-first century (Faulconbridge et al. 2011; Springer 2018; Turow 2018).24 South Korea, however, remained at the fringe of those transformations. While the first South Korean advertising agencies were started by entrepreneurial Americans in the early 1960s, they didn’t last. By the late 1960s, when South Korea’s advertising became a notable industry, it was dominated by a few “in-house” agencies affiliated with the chaebol, South Korean family-owned conglomerates. Originating in the parochial protectionism of the South Korean domestic economy in the developmental years, the situation continued into the twenty-first century. Starting as in-house marketing units, those agencies eventually gained relative independence and grew to handle both inside and outside accounts. The biggest agencies of postmillennial South Korea were affiliates of Samsung, Hyundai, LG, Lotte, and Doosan; they were better understood through their connections to local corporate culture and hierarchies of influence than through their affinity with the global advertising industry. The chaebol cast a long shadow on the advertising industry also because they were responsible for the lion’s share of advertising spending in South Korea.25 The largest advertising budgets were commanded by Samsung Electronics, SK Telecom, and KT (Korea Telecom). A nonKorean company, Procter & Gamble, joined the top ten South Korean advertisers for the first time in 2010 (Shin and Shin 2013, 83–84). The chaebol’s collective interests also shaped the advertising industry through the Korean Advertisers Association, a big-business lobby group founded in 1988. Since its establishment in 1973, Samsung’s agency Cheil Communications (to change its name to Cheil Worldwide in 2008) dominated the market. In the late 2000s, it handled about one-third of the total advertising expenditures in the country (Kwanggogye Tonghyang 2009, 2010). Its dominance mirrored Samsung’s influence in the South Korean economy, about one-fifth of whose total GDP was gained through the Samsung Group’s sales.26 As of 2009, Cheil was the world’s sixteenth-largest advertising agency by sales, and had twenty-nine offices in twenty-five countries. Most of its business, however, was related to Samsung: according to one estimate, half of its domestic business and 85 percent of its global



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business as of 2012 (Shaw 2012).27 In 2008, Cheil jumped on the global bandwagon of agency mergers and acquisitions by buying the Londonbased creative agency Beattie McGuinness Bungay and then acquiring a majority stake in a US digital creative and marketing company, the Barbarian Group. Those developments, however, reflected the global expansion of Samsung, not of the Korean advertising industry. This is evident, for example, in how Lee Seo-hyun (Yi Sŏ-hyŏn), a daughter of the Samsung chairman, was parachuted into the chief position at Cheil in 2009 despite her lacking a background in advertising.28 Other chaebol-affiliated agencies were small by international standards and did not venture beyond the key exporting locations of their parent conglomerates, and even there their job was perfunctory. A Southeast Asian office of the chaebol-affiliated agency where I was an intern in the winter of 2009–2010, for example, employed three people whose task was to mediate communications between the Seoul headquarters and local media buyers. Often Korean conglomerates assigned their accounts abroad to global agencies, seeking their cultural competence and connections. In parallel to South Korean agencies’ limited presence overseas, global advertising groups in South Korea worked at the margins. Most did set shop in Korea after the restrictions on foreign ownership were removed in 1991, but they generally limited their activities to handling the accounts of their international clients. The only remarkable exception was TBWA Korea, a subsidiary of global agency TBWA and part of the Omnicom Group. True to its parent’s reputation as a boutique agency, TBWA Korea claimed the niche of the so-called creative advertising and consistently ranked fourth through sixth in terms of its South Korean billings since 2002.29 Its joint venture partnership with SK Telecom (1998–2008), one of Korea’s biggest advertisers at the time, resulted in a hugely popular campaign themed around the 2002 World Cup, “Be the Reds.” “Toward People” was another one of TBWA Korea’s hits. The agency was lionized by South Korean ad practitioners, although international commentators noted the relative tameness of its local productions. The South Korean advertising industry saw few practical conse­ quences from the large Korean agencies being invested in, or even bought by, foreign investors, either after the initial market opening or in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis of 1997, when international groups took

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advantage of opportunities to cheaply purchase shares of local agencies. Kee Woong Lee (2013) reports on the disappointment of South Korean advertising practitioners employed at Diamond Ad, which was acquired by the international network WPP. They expected the new owner to train them into “global” advertising professionals and create the muchromanticized creative environment of foreign ad agencies; the changes, however, had primarily to do with ensuring transparent accounting and restructuring to cut employees while taking advantage of the “anachronisms” of Korean work environment, such as habitual overwork. At the in-house agency where I was an intern, the only noticeable influence of its international partner was the circulation of translated training materials. Assigned to new hires and useful for mastering the agency lingo, they were never used otherwise as far as I could tell. Furthermore, the postcrisis expansion of the international agencies in South Korea was reversed when several chaebol, which sold their in-house agencies in the early 2000s, established new ones in the late 2000s and withdrew their accounts from the foreign-owned agencies once the initial contracts expired (Shaw 2006). Besides its parochialism, the South Korean advertising industry was peculiar in how at the brink of the twenty-first century it was among the most stringently regulated advertising industries in the world. Advertisers’ access to the most prestigious and trustworthy advertising medium, terrestrial TV broadcasting, whose two public and one private networks took just under one-quarter of all advertising expenditures (24 percent), was mandatorily mediated by public Korea Broadcast Advertising Corporation (KOBACO) and conditioned on passing a before-the-fact review. Regulations of advertising in other media—newspapers (21 percent of advertising expenditures in 2008), cable television (11 percent), outdoors (8 percent), online (15 percent), and other new media (cable television, Skylife, digital multimedia broadcasting, and Internet protocol television; 12 percent) (Cheil Worldwide 2009, 135)—were also extensive. For most media, boards of representatives from industry, media, and civil society organizations reviewed content flagged by monitoring staff and were authorized to put a prompt stop to any campaign found problematic. In comparison to other countries, those regulations were unusually extensive, intrusive, and binding. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the South Korean advertising industry has been very much shaped by its historical public ideal and by lingering distrust of advertisers’ private goals.



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Unli k e ly A dv e rtisin g an d Hum anist C apital ism The ambivalent allegiances of South Korean advertising are revealed in how its most praised exemplars, such as “Feeling Unwell Today” and “Toward People,” were referred to as “unlikely advertising” (literally, “advertising-unlike advertising,” kwanggo tapchi annŭn kwanggo or kwanggo sŭrŏpchi annŭn kwanggo).30 An article in the newspaper Han’guk Kyŏngjae, for example, uses the expression (kwanggo tapchi annŭn kwanggo) to praise the winners of its advertising contest, one of them the above-­described “Hero” commercial.31 According to the journalist, those ads “win on emotions, they abandon the commercial message and differ from advertising that seduces consumers with direct techniques.” After mentioning that “advertising is often called the flower of capitalism,” the article contrasts the winners with advertising that “degenerates [chŏllakhage toenda] to simply a tool for coercing consumption.” This elaboration makes clear that such “unlikely” advertising is acknowledged as advertising, a commercial tool, but only to deny its commercial origin as defining it as a medium; rather, and paradoxically, its ultimate measure is how far it steps away from regular, “advertising-like” advertising. Other terms for such ­advertisements—“humanist advertising” (in’ganjuŭijŏk kwanggo or hyu­ mŏni­jŭm kwanggo), “sentimental advertising” (kamsŏng kwanggo), “public interest commercial advertising” (kongiksŏng sangŏp kwanggo), or simply “kind advertising” (ch’akhan kwanggo)—also place advertising within broader public culture and summon it for affective world making.32 If consumption and commodities are mentioned, it is usually for their conspicuous absence, as in in Pak Hyo-sin’s article for children. Among those many terms, humanist advertising is particularly telling because it invests advertising with the values that nationalist discourses have constructed as central to Korean ethnonationhood and that harbor imaginaries of an alternative modernity. The Korean humanism of hongikin’gan (弘益人間)—“devotion to the welfare of human kind”—is associated with the spirit of Korea’s mythic founder, Tan’gun, and is believed to encapsulate indigenous—pre-Buddhist and pre-Confucian—Korean values. The concept was developed as a part of the “One People” (ilmin) ideology of An Ho-sang (1902–1999), an intellectual and education minister who in the early days of South Korean nation-building p ­ roposed

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the doctrine “as the only way to overcome the predations of both ‘communist imperialism’ and ‘cruel Euro-American capitalism’ ” (Tikhonov 2010, 220).33 Hongikin’gan was declared the official principle of the South Korean educational system. Asserted as an innately Korean value, spontaneous humanism was also a galvanizing force for counterhegemonic struggle against the alienation of what Seungsook Moon (2005) termed the “militarized modernity”—capitalist industrialization under Cold War militarism (99–100). In democratized South Korea, humanism continued to be mobilized to combat social ills and garner support for such diverse causes as improvement of relations with North Korea, consolidation of democracy, and even promotion of the social economy.34 Characteristically, the designation of Korean-style advertising (han’gukjŏgin kwanggo) was saved for the ads whose “warm” humanist portrayals of ordinary people provoked allegedly unique Korean sentiments, such as chŏng, not for the ones that explicitly thematized Korean tradition (Ch’oe 2011, 273). This ideal of unlikely advertising is symptomatic of local imaginaries of capitalism. Korea’s embrace of capitalist modernity—in the guise of “civilization and enlightenment”—was a response to the mounting external threats Korea had faced since the end of the nineteenth century, which eventually culminated in its annexation by Japan in 1910.35 As Carter Eckert (1990) shows, capitalist ideological tenets were articulated not organically by the Korean bourgeoisie—which was virtually nonexistent until the colonial period—but by intellectuals, who were “steeped in a long neo-Confucian tradition that emphasized communitarian values and were interested in capitalism primarily as a way to augment the wealth and power of the country to save it from imperialist domination” (137).36 Those discourses hinged on a reversal of the grounding ideology of Western capitalism, that pursuing private interest automatically results in public good, as Adam Smith argued; for Korean ideologues, it was the pursuit of public interest, often synonymous with national interest, that would bring sustainable private thriving. As noted earlier, the historical notion of the private (sa) connoted partiality, selfishness, illicitness, and potentially moral failure (Lee 2006, 113–118). Consequently, capitalist profit seeking lacked moral-philosophical grounds, and the capitalist class had to legitimize its entrepreneurial activities in terms of communitarian values and nationalism (Eckert 1990; Janelli 1993, 81–88).37 South Korean ideologues, particularly during the developmentalist industrialization,



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continued to evoke this moral economy to mobilize both the capitalist class and the general population for economic growth and to win popular consent for immediate sacrifices for the sake of the future (Nelson 2000). South Korean industrialists complied by presenting their activity in terms of benefiting the nation well into the 1980s (Kim 1992; Janelli 1993), and in the new millennium the rhetoric of publicly minded corporations blended with the popular discourses about corporate social responsibility. Crucially, it was big corporations, such as Samsung, LG, Hyundai, and SK, that often opted for unlikely advertising, which both reflected and managed public ambivalence about corporate wealth and influence. On the one hand, those conglomerates were heroes of South Korea’s industrial modernization. Their profits and export figures were metonymic for South Korea’s national achievements and inspired much nationalist pride. On the other hand, the chaebol (chaebŏl, literally “money clan”) were also considered as near villains because of the widespread perceptions that their wealth was obtained and maintained via unfair means. It was well known that the origins of many chaebol fortunes were either in the founders’ collaborations with the Japanese during the colonial period, in the postliberation cronyist sellout of the colonizers’ resources, or in favors from the military dictators (Kim E. M. 1997; Lie 1998). In the 1960s and 1970s, the chaebol’s economic success was built upon preferential treatment by the government and at the expense of weaker compatriots—workers, subcontractors, small-scale entrepreneurs, and farmers— whose economic opportunities, social welfare, and often human dignity were sacrificed. Chaebol’s aura of corruption carried into the post-1987, post-dictatorship period, nurtured by frequent corporate scandals, which exposed bribery, embezzlement, disregard for the law, and abuse of power. Many a South Korean tycoon was found guilty on those grounds, but the charges usually neither interrupted their careers nor depleted their fortunes. An example relevant to advertising controversies to be considered later, in August 2009, Samsung’s chairman, Lee Kun-hee (Yi Kŏn-hŭi), was convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to a multibillion-won fine and a suspended three-year prison term; he received a presidential pardon four months later, and three months after that he was back at Samsung’s helm.38 South Korean popular-cultural productions relish unflattering caricatures of chaebol families: ruthless patriarchs who stop at nothing in their ambition for greater wealth; their conniving wives, preoccupied with

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plotting strategic marriages for their offspring to enhance family riches; and the younger generation of pampered brats (though often redeemed through romantic love for a poor Cinderella type). The hugely popular television drama “Boys over Flowers” (KBS, 2009) offers one instance of such portrayals. The phenomenon of unlikely advertising must be understood against this ambivalence about capitalist modernity and its winners. As a marketing tool, advertising is an obvious venue for corporations to legitimize their worldviews and directly pursue their material interests. But as a public-cultural production, it is also a venue to transcend those “selfish” private concerns and score in the moral-economic calculus. Sponsoring feel-good campaigns that promote humanism was popularly interpreted as corporate contribution to public interest. The appreciation for such campaigns was undisturbed by the paradox that unlikely advertising, by its very denial of commitment to private interest, was advancing it more effectively than an open declaration could do. Advertising publics relished those campaigns as if unaware of the chaebol’s pragmatic goals.39 Samsung perhaps was “another family,” to quote a title of the conglomerate’s long-running “humanist” campaign,40 and a slew of public controversies that erupted when the chaebol acted unfamily-like—from breaking unionization efforts (Chang 2006; ITUC 2016) to obstructing the investigation of unusually high rates of blood cancer at its manufacturing facilities (Lee and Waitzkin 2012)—were temporarily forgotten. As I suggest in the following chapters, awareness of advertisers’ moral lack sometimes even heightened the emotional pleasure of such campaigns by activating melodramatic “moral occult” (Brooks 1995, 5). This study interprets the make-believe of humanist advertisements as expressions of social aspirations that should not be dismissed as an ideological smoke screen. The ads discussed here harbor collective dreams, critical insights into social reality, and opportunities to weaponize corporate discourses. The above-mentioned “Another Family” campaign, for example, was appropriated by Samsung critics. It was recognizably referenced in the title of a South Korean film of 2013 (“Another Promise,” sometimes translated as “Another Family”), based on a real story of the death of a twenty-three-year-old Samsung plant worker from acute leukemia, believed to be caused by unsafe working conditions. In this vein, my analysis recognizes the utopianism of unlikely advertising, and of the



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unlikely humanist capitalism it dreams of, yet prioritizes moments when those utopian impulses energize demands and interventions to move beyond existing social forms and power relations.

S o u th K o r e an A dv ertisin g at a C r o s sr oad s The year 2008, which preceded my fieldwork, marked significant shifts in the regulatory structures of South Korean advertising. First, in July 2008, for the first time in Korea, the Constitutional Court ruled that advertising was protected by the freedom-of-speech guarantees. The before-the-fact review of terrestrial advertising, in place from the 1970s, was shut down as unconstitutional censorship. A few months later, in November 2008, the decades-old KOBACO’s monopoly on broadcast advertising sales was found unconstitutional as well, and the judge ordered the introduction of a competitive system for broadcast advertising sales. The two decisions of the Constitutional Court destabilized the long-established institutional infrastructures of the advertising industry. Their effects were amplified by the Broadcasting Act of 2009, which opened media to cross-ownership and enabled the emergence of new private “general” channels that, unlike regular cable channels, were allowed to combine news and entertainment and thus compete as equals with the three terrestrial networks. Moreover, the new channels’ advertising sales were governed by looser regulations, such as allowing in-program advertising and advertising for product categories (e.g., pharmaceuticals) that were forbidden on terrestrial channels.41 Though South Korean advertising remained more regulated than advertising in many other places, these developments shifted local debates about advertising by discursively and practically prioritizing the freedom to advertise and by undoing the infrastructures in which the cultural logic of public interest was materialized. Advertising infrastructures were shifting also because deepening media convergences were gradually undermining the medium-specific regulations and eroding the cultural logic of “public interest first” that informed them. Operators of new media platforms were demanding regulatory leniency, including for advertising, because, it was argued, entering an already crowded market, they were justified to prioritize profitability.

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At the same time, the traditional media quoted competition from new media operators to also demand deregulation, such as liberalization of product placements and allowing in-program advertising breaks. While the changing media environment was leveraged to subordinate publicness concerns to market competitiveness, it also enabled new mobilizations to enforce media’s public accountability. A global leader in Internet use per capita since the early 2000s, South Korea witnessed an emergence of the robust participatory culture of netizens, who took to online forums and personal blogs to share, discuss, and create their own content—but also to mobilize around resonant issues (Kang 2016). Deaf to arguments about advertising freedom, the advertising public relied on Internet publicity to compel advertisers to fulfill advertising’s public service potential—leveraging new media affordances to buttress the old ideals. In the following chapters I explore how advertising practitioners, audiences, netizens, censors, activists, and regulators navigated this shifting landscape. While attentive to their objective material interests, this study recognizes those variously positioned actors as inhabiting multiplex subjectivities—as advertising creators and parents, as censors and liberal subjects, as consumers and citizens of a liberal democracy, as feminists and subordinates in hierarchical relations, as aspiring entrepreneurs and social movement activists. I prioritize the actual social life of a­ dvertising— meanings actually ascribed to advertisements, affects experienced on their behalf, and social actions undertaken—as they can be revealed by ethnographic and other actor-focused methods, whereas my analysis bridges those often trivial everyday happenings with political-economic macroprocesses. I underscore that social actions on advertising have implications beyond particular campaigns, individual purchases, or corporate revenues. In aggregate, they shape advertising as a local media form and social institution, while interlocking with ongoing contests among the vested interests that advertising might be expected to serve—companies, audiences, mass media, and civil society. To capture these contests and negotiations was the purpose of ethnographic fieldwork in places of advertising production, reception, censorship, and activism. Throughout my pilot research in May through July 2007 and my main fieldwork in May 2009 through July 2010 in South Korea, I followed any instances in which advertising—kwanggo, whatever it signified under the circumstances—attracted public attention or pro-



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voked noticeable engagement.42 I attended countless advertising industry events, worked as an intern at a major advertising agency, mingled with advertising creatives, observed the meetings of an advertising censorship board, socialized with bureaucrats from KOBACO and a number of industry associations, partied at the Busan International Advertising Festival, met advertising monitors from a number of NGOs, frequented the Advertising Museum in Seoul, interviewed regular consumers of advertising, solicited diaries about daily encounters with advertising, and lurked in the Korean blogosphere.43 I also gathered what, following Richard Wilk (2002), could be termed “advertising talk”—interview data and snippets from informal conversations about advertising in which it is performatively constructed in locally specific ways.44 I also incorporated an analysis of advertising-related public texts, including popular advertising campaigns themselves and the public discourse they generated. This ethnographic and discursive data is situated against industry histories, sociological analysis of parties involved, and related political-economic and other interests. After historicizing South Korean advertising in chapter 1, my narrative arc follows the trajectory of an average advertising campaign. Chapter 2 explores the lifeworlds of South Korean advertising practitioners, from celebrity creative directors to regular advertising agency employees. Drawing on participant observation at a Seoul advertising agency, I examine how their discourses, their professional self-understanding, and their fraught relations with clients were major forces in constructing the public interest mission of South Korean advertising. Chapter 3 offers an ethnography of after-the-fact advertising review, which replaced beforethe-fact censorship in 2008. The chapter explores how advertising censors navigated the contradictory demands to protect the unwary public and to respect advertisers’ freedom. It argues that advertising censorship, though ostensibly limiting advertising discourses, in the end produced “smart” consumers, to use the censors’ parlance—subjects whose cynical distance toward advertising allowed for advertisers’ maximum freedoms. Chapter 4 considers how ads circulate. Drawing on advertising diaries, interviews, and media coverage, it portrays South Korean advertising publics and their world making. I explore culturally sanctioned responses to advertising—irony, sentimental identification, marketing analysis, and social critique—and foreground their social effects. The chapter ends with

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an example of an advertising public mobilized to challenge problematic gender portrayals. Chapter 5 continues the theme of advertising-related mobilizations as I turn to activists who contested advertisers’ control over their advertising budgets to redirect advertising flows toward oppositional media. Labeled as “advertising terrorists” by their critics, the activists appropriated dominant neoliberal discourses to articulate a radical vision of consumer citizenship and demand democratic accountability of corporate use of advertising. The epilogue sketches how South Korean advertising was transforming amid Internet-enabled media convergences and considers the lasting significance of its publicness ideals. While detailing the peculiarities of advertising politics and aesthetics in postmillennial South Korea, I hope that this research can also contribute to challenging the ideas of advertising as an unassailable, inviolable domain of capital’s interests—ideas that are naturalized in many places, whether that fact is deemed regrettable or not. As Inger Stole (2006) shows, in the United States, substantial debates about advertising have been off the table since the 1930s, when the advertising industry’s lobby succeeded in marginalizing American consumer groups that campaigned for advertising’s public accountability. Since then, advertising has largely been accepted as advertisers’ sovereign sphere. Stole writes, “To the extent that advertising is analyzed, discussions tend to focus on its excesses (its ability to project a certain set of images and values) and not its shortcomings (its inability, for example, to provide consumers with facts and information or, despite all its flag-waving patriotism, to serve as a truly democratizing force)” (vii–viii). This story of advertising’s surrender to the interests of capital was repeated in many other locales, where the advertising industry gradually won increasing liberties. The first step to rekindling change-inducing debates is to denaturalize the dominant concepts of advertising and be able to imagine it differently—and postmillennial South Korea offers such an imaginary.

C h a p te r 1

Historical Struggles over Advertising Freedom

I

n January 1975, the South Korean national daily Dong-A Ilbo published a piece titled “No Freedom without Freedom to Advertise,” a translation of an article from Advertising Age, a US-based trade journal of the advertising industry.1 The original piece, “Freedom Must Advertise,” by Tom Dillon, president of the US advertising agency BBDO, eloquently pre­ sents a case against advertising regulation. Dillon argues that advertisingfinanced media are independent from the government, and equates this with freedom of expression and other civic liberties. The piece contrasts the relatively large percentage of national income spent on advertising in capitalist countries—2.2 percent in Ireland, 2.11 percent in the United States, 1.14 percent in Japan, among others—with the zero percent reportedly spent on advertising in the Soviet Union, “Red China” (the People’s Republic of China) and the German Democratic Republic, to assert that “advertising and the freedom and dignity of man go hand in hand” (Dillon 1975, 128).2 Dillon’s Korean translator was Shin In Sup, the marketing manager at the Honam Oil Refinery Company and the future historian of Korean advertising. Shin, however, signed with his part-time ­affiliations— as the chief of the Korean branch of the International Advertising Association and a lecturer at Sogang University—to preempt a retaliation against his corporate employer and discourage personal persecution, as he explained to me in an interview thirty-five years after the events. In the South Korea of the military dictator Park Chung-hee (1961– 1979), the praise for American-style liberal capitalism could not be more in line with the official anticommunist propaganda. Yet translating “Freedom Must Advertise” was a potentially seditious act. If in the United States of the 1970s to demand advertising freedom meant to oppose government regulation, in the authoritarian South Korea it implied a protest 37

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against Park’s military dictatorship. The national daily Dong-A Ilbo, in which Shin’s translation appeared, had just witnessed its advertisers canceling their contracts en masse under pressure from Park’s intelligence service. The publisher was being blackmailed to fire journalists who protested Park’s crackdown on freedom of expression. That advertising choices were called upon to resist despotism, secure media freedom, and buttress democracy came out in the subsequent roundtable, in which Shin and two other participants, in addition to eulogizing market freedoms, agreed that Korean entrepreneurs must “awaken” and recognize that “corporations must expand their independence and place their advertising honorably [ttŏttŏsi].”3 Fearing arrest and torture, Shin did not return home for two days. The Dong-A Ilbo struggle is one of the pivotal events around which this chapter organizes the history of advertising in South Korea. My goal is not only to contextualize the peculiarities of South Korean advertising but also to demonstrate that local meanings and functions of advertising are neither overdetermined by its marketing purposes nor do they faithfully mirror those meanings and functions in transatlantic countries, where advertising cultures and institutions developed under different conditions. As Brian Larkin (2008) foregrounds the instability of media forms and their social uses, “We think we know what a radio is, or what a cinema is used for, but these phenomena, which we take for granted, have often surprising histories. What media are needs to be interrogated[,] not presumed” (3). In this vein, this chapter “interrogates” South Korean advertising and reveals how objective material interests, technological capabilities, sociocultural ideals, and political contests interlocked to bind it with public obligations. Advertising fundamentally privileges the material interests of advertisers, yet the state, media organizations, civil society groups, and various advertising publics pursue their own vested and contingent interests in and through advertising. Pushing against the frequent presumption that the functional capacity of advertising to promote the material interests of advertisers automatically translates in advertising effectively doing so, I underscore how the effects of advertising texts and money may escape the intentions of advertisers and advertising agencies, becoming rerouted toward goals whose alignment with maximizing capitalist profits is uncertain. The contentious milieu of South Korean advertising favors expla-



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nations that foreground power politics and political-economic struggles somewhat differently from Larkin’s emphasis on the structuring effects of institutional infrastructures that emerge from overlaying agendas and grow agentive. In South Korea, various social actors deployed moral-economic reasoning, legislative intervention, and at times collective mobilization to recruit advertising for extra-marketing tasks, such as promoting societal ideals with its images or supporting a particular media with its money. This chapter details how those contests shaped South Korean advertising and drew it into historical struggles over democracy and capitalism. “Advertising freedom does not just appear by itself. It is a precious thing obtained in struggles,” Shin In Sup (2006) would write many years after the 1970s events. Whereas Shin’s canonical histories of Korean advertising present a narrative of a fought-for gradual liberalization (e.g., Shin 1986, 1989; Shin and Sŏ 1998, 2011),4 I underscore the other side of those struggles for advertising freedom. This chapter foregrounds the efforts and contingencies that kept South Korean advertising tightly regulated and publicly accountable for as long as they did. In addition to Shin’s meticulous chronicles and archival sources, I also draw on personal anecdotes that Shin—called the “Rosetta Stone of South Korean advertising” in a blurb of his biography (Kim P. 2010), which celebrates Shin’s decades-long leadership in the professionalization of South Korean advertising—shared during our many meetings in 2009–2010, and occasionally after that. Proceeding chronologically, I demonstrate that, first, South Korean advertising became implicated in public interest politics as an effect of power struggles between Korean political and business elites, and second, that while the advertising industry was controlled for different reasons by different governments, the continuity of regulations grew deep roots that maintained advertising as a public medium. I also track how those constructions of publicness were dismantled in the first decade of the twenty-first century, setting the stage for the following chapters.

Fr om A dv e rtising De arth to A dvertising P o llu tio n (1945–1979) In South Korea, commercial advertising remained insignificant, economically and culturally, until the 1960s. Spotted on the Korean Peninsula first

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in 1886, advertising blossomed immediately before Korea’s colonization by Japan and during the colonial period, but virtually disappeared when Japan invaded the Chinese mainland in 1937 and mobilized the Korean economy for the war effort.5 After Japan’s defeat in World War II and the liberation of the Korean Peninsula in August 1945, print was scarce, disposable incomes were meager, and those few commodities available were sold without advertising. What required selling was political candidates, who vied for presidency in the new republic under US military tutelage. South Korea’s first election in 1948 also marked the birth of political advertising (Ma 2004, 112–121). The national division and then the Korean War (1950–1953) exacerbated economic problems and kept commercial advertising irrelevant. The paltry advertising scene was dominated by American movies and pharmaceuticals, in demand “to treat rampant diseases, especially tuberculosis” (Shin and Shin 2013, 44). In the poverty-ridden South Korea of the 1950s, advertising developments were propelled more by the initiative of oddball enthusiasts drawn to advertising as a sign of modernity, and by technological developments in the mass media, than by producers’ need to advertise. Broadcast television advertising started in 1956, when a private broadcasting station was launched in partnership with the Radio Corporation of America and sought to sustain itself via advertising revenues.6 But as of July 1957 there were fewer than six hundred television sets in South Korea, and only about fifty thousand people had access to television in public places (Chang 2013, 684). Advertising revenues covered only about 30 percent of the station’s operating expenses because advertisers, too, were few (684–685). Most entrepreneurs made their primary activity processing and reselling US aid (Lie 1998, 26–34). The companies that did begin local manufacturing—at first of toothpaste and other household items, and then of electronic goods such as radios and fans—hardly needed advertising.7 (Though the toothpaste manufacturer advertised its toothpaste to explain its uses because traditionally Koreans cleaned their teeth by rubbing them with salt [Ma 2004, 124]). South Korea was a sellers’ market until the 1970s. Beyond practical irrelevance, stumbling blocks for the advertising industry included its lowly associations with peddling, announcers’ resentment about having to read advertisements on air, and celebrities’ refusals to participate in programs sponsored by alcohol advertisers (Ma 2004, 161; Shin and Sŏ



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1998, 243–244). The advertising copy of those times is striking in its simplicity: “Exactly like the American product” (Lucky toothpaste, 1955); “Good whenever, wherever” (Jinro soju, 1955). The years of the military dictator Park Chung-hee (1961–1979) were path-shaping for South Korea in many ways, including for its advertising industry. Coming to power in a coup, Park imposed tight controls on the mass media. Among early measures to manage public opinion was the launch of the television broadcaster KBS (Korea Broadcasting System).8 Owned and operated by the state, the broadcaster was initially supported by government funds and by subscription fees collected from TV set owners. But with less than 1 percent of South Korean households owning a TV set, the station proved a burden on the budget. In 1963, KBS TV began accepting commercial advertising. Called upon to finance state television, advertising was thus somewhat released from its technical function of promoting the material interests of advertisers and was recruited into the function of supporting the mass media. Advertising’s residency on the state channel subjected it to sustained regulatory attention. New rules banned advertising that promoted illegal commodities or organizations, encouraged superstition, exaggerated facts, slandered competitors, or ran counter to public order and good customs. The length of the advertising breaks was limited, and mandatory preview of broadcast advertising was instituted. Those regulations set expectations for advertising in general, even though officially they concerned only advertising on the state broadcaster, and when private broadcasters were launched—such as the Samsung-affiliated Tongyang Broadcasting Company, established in 1964—their advertising remained by and large unregulated until the mid-1970s.9 Advertising was growing in importance as Park’s developmentalist industrialization was bearing fruit by the mid 1960s. The scope of available commodities increased, and so did incomes. The 1970s saw the last of the “barley hump”—a hunger period during which the previous year’s food stocks are depleted and new barley, the earliest crop, has not yet ripened (Ma 2004, 142–143). South Korea’s arrival at consumerist modernity was symbolized by Coca-Cola’s entry into the market in 1968. Its massive cross-media advertising campaign followed American advertising practices, which reportedly astonished South Korean observers. In 1968, the volume of advertising expenditures reached 0.56 percent of

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the South Korean gross national product, making it a notable industry. Its growth was also supported by increased ownership of media devices. In 1969, South Korea had 2.5 million radios and 224,000 TV sets (Hahn Bae-ho, quoted in Shim 2000, 102–103).10 The latter number increased sevenfold to 1.5 million by 1974, or one TV set for every four families. In terms of television ownership, South Korea was within the world’s top thirty countries.11 By the 1970s, Korean manufacturers were advertising their refrigerators, washing machines, and black-and-white television sets to domestic consumers, enough of whom could afford such appliances. The increased competition inspired advertising that went beyond announcing commodity availability. Among early favorites was a 1975 ad that launched the now famous brand Nongshim Ramen. In the ad, two well-known comedians have a politeness contest over a cup of instant noodles, ceremoniously offering noodles to each other but then changing their minds and scuffling over them. Promoting commodities, however, was a tricky endeavor in Park’s Korea, where the official ideology propagated thrift and austerity. As Laura Nelson (2000) details, Park’s propaganda piggybacked on traditional beliefs in the immorality of excessive consumption and subordinated individual purchasing decisions to the concerns with national economic development, prescribing frugality, saving, and import avoidance. Consumption was a space of ambivalence: it shone as a coveted way to partake in the triumphs of economic growth, but at the same time its excesses—in the eye of the beholder—were readily condemned as a lack of patriotism. As advertising saturated everyday life, the public voiced disdain at the so-called advertising pollution (kwanggo konghae), an umbrella term for advertising clutter and unsubtle ways of persuasion. Popular attitudes were revealed in a 1975 survey of 643 Seoulites, of whom only 17 percent had no complaints about advertising. Almost half (48.3 percent) pointed to exaggerated advertising as a problem; one-third (30.2 percent) complained that advertising mentioned only the good sides of commodities; over a quarter (28.9 percent) disliked that advertising urged consumption.12 The categories of the survey suggest that it was not only discontent with advertising clutter but also a gap in the expectations and realities of advertising that fostered complaints. The survey’s categories—suggesting “urging consumption” as a problem, for example—reveal unease about advertising’s primary task, to sell commodities. Annoyance with commer-



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cialism was also fueled by the common understanding of the mass media as bound by a publicness mandate and of broadcasting wavelengths as a common resource. Such ideas were reproduced in many media codes and mission statements, which all declared public interest as the obligation of mass media. Whether due to popular frustration with “polluting” advertising or to Park’s strategizing for public opinion, the regulation of broadcast advertising was continually tightened. The 1973 revisions to the Broadcast Law limited the permitted advertising airtime, and in 1974 in-program advertising was banned. From 1976 on, all broadcast advertising had to be externally approved before airing, and print advertising was monitored after its publication. The era of comprehensive advertising censorship had begun, to last until 2008. Tellingly, the advertising reforms were discussed in the language of “advertising purification,” a term that implied a moralist critique of unpurified advertising, which presumably could “dirty” the public spaces of broadcasts and broadsheets. Amid complaints about “polluting” advertising, the growing chaebol were pioneering an advertising aesthetic that anticipated the ideal of unlikely advertising. Expressing the business-state symbiosis of the developmentalist years, some of their advertisements were barely distinguishable from the propaganda posters of the time. This blending of national and business goals is exemplified by an ad for Honam Oil Refinery that appeared in Time magazine in 1973. Its copy, composed by Shin In Sup, tells the story of the Korean alphabet, educating American readers and illustrating Honam’s slogan “Serving Korea in the superlative tradition” (Shin 2009, 190). In the “capitalist realism” of South Korean developmentalism, such ads portray the chaebol as patriotic heroes and celebrate their international expansion as national achievements. Reservations about consumerist advertising culminated in a reform of advertising censorship, which paradoxically enlisted commercial advertising to promote frugality. In March 1979, the Broadcast Advertising Ethics Committee adopted Resolution 313, “On Review Standards for Advertising for Realizing Wholesome Living.” Four out of seven points in the resolution banned advertising that showcased luxuries and incited their consumption. The number of rejected broadcast advertisements almost doubled. Some ads (sixty-four cases, or 9 percent) were rejected because of “expression that stimulates the propensity to consume” (Shin

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and Sŏ 2011, 364)—which leaves one wondering what it was that the allowed advertising was stimulating. The committee also advised that all broadcast advertisements insert one of the twelve recommended slogans, which praised thrift and saving: “Let’s look for thrifty virtue, rather than for wasteful richness,” “Each happy family is a thrifty family,” or “When mommy and daddy are thrifty with things, the household is strong and the country is strong” (363, 365).13 These interventions affirmed advertising as a public medium that put national goals above the commercial interests of advertisers—an obligation that had already been created for advertising in the course of the Dong-A White Pages Incident of 1974–1975.

Th e D o ng -A I lb o W h ite Page s I n c id e n t ( 1974 – 1975) A decisive moment in forming the identity of South Korean advertising, the Dong-A Ilbo White Pages Incident saw advertising first become a tool for suppressing freedom of expression but then reclaimed as a medium for advancing democracy. To sketch the events leading to this controversy, in 1971, Park Chung-hee, already having served two terms as South Korean president, was elected president for the third time, despite dwindling popular support. In October 1972, Park declared a state of emergency to quash widespread dissent, quoting threats from North Korea as a pretext. The National Assembly was dissolved, and the new Yusin Constitution granted Park unconstrained powers and created conditions for prolonging his presidency indefinitely. Among measures to control the opposition was the revised Media Law of 1973, which entitled the president to censor all media and enhanced organizational control over newspapers and media channels via consolidation. Any criticism of Park’s regime was likely to be framed as procommunist propaganda and could have severe consequences for the critics, from loss of employment to torture (Kim C. 2009, 140–147). Critical of the political power until then, the press “was reduced to a public relations agency for the government” (Choi 2005, 131). Nevertheless, enclaves of dissidence persisted. Journalists, who traditionally saw themselves as public intellectuals and promoters of enlightenment and modernization, spoke out against Park’s authoritarian ways. They reported on instances of popular unrest and signed collective



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declarations to demand restoration of press freedoms. To gag the critical media, Park’s regime resorted to so-called advertising suppression (kwanggo t’anap), or putting pressure on companies to withdraw their advertising from critical media outlets. The tactic was first applied against the national daily Chosun Ilbo in 1973 (Kim C. 2009, 263–265), but it was the 1974–1975 Dong-A Ilbo case that became a symbol of anti-Park resistance. The Dong-A Ilbo was a national daily of the media conglomerate Dong-A, which also published periodicals, ran a broadcast channel, and operated movie theaters. In October 1974 two hundred Dong-A Ilbo journalists issued a declaration that advocated freedom of speech and called for opposition to censorship. Park told his Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) to “rebuke the Dong-A Ilbo” (Tonga ilbo rŭl hon naejura), and the KCIA tried to starve Dong-A off advertising income. Owners and advertising managers of businesses that advertised in Dong-A were summoned to the KCIA’s Namsan office, where they were forced to sign an oath that they would halt their advertising (TRC 2010; Kim C. 2009, 290–291).14 In December 1974 Dong-A saw an exodus of advertisers, including businesses with long-lasting ties to the company. When canceling their advertising contracts, managers would quote orders from their company presidents and refuse to elaborate. With Christmas season being one of the peaks of advertising expenditure, this was a major blow. On December 25, the newspaper filled the newly cleared advertising space with advertisements for the January issue of Dong-A Yŏsŏng magazine—which had already sold out. On December 26, the newspaper covered the unfilled pages with articles and advertisements for Dong-A’s other publications and announcements of future broadcasts. On the 27th, the advertising space on four pages was left conspicuously blank, and these dramatic “white pages” ( paekchi) gave name to the incident. By the end of the year, all major advertisers terminated their contracts, and the advertising pages of the New Year’s issue carried Dong-A’s company anthem, Dong-A group advertising, classifieds, and so-called encouragement advertisements (kyŏngnyŏ kwanggo). The newspaper lost its usual advertisers, but found new ones. Critical civic groups ran support advertisements, and so did anonymous readers, transforming advertising into a medium of protest. The first such ad was published by veteran journalist Hong Chong-in: “Even though advertisements, necessary for publishing the Dong-A [Ilbo], can be ­temporarily

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canceled with force, such an act is very dangerous and self-injurious for the power and should not be committed” (Kim C. 2009, 268–269).15 In January 1975, “movement to help Dong-A” took off, and encouraging advertisements poured in. Some directly condemned media suppression and asserted civil rights, similar to Hong. Others posted ambiguous poetic messages, such as “Light shines brighter in the dark” or “Could not watch quietly any longer . . . ,” and a newlywed couple even printed an advertisement promising to call their child “Dong-A” if it were a boy (271). Sympathizers sent money gifts to the Dong-A office and paid for subscriptions in advance. Koreans abroad also sent in their advertisements with generous donations. At the peak of the movement, those who wished to pay for an advertisement formed a long line in front of the Dong-A office downtown (Sinnott 2006, 437). Even though the advertisements were anonymous, placing them was a courageous act because the KCIA attempted to identify “advertisers,” and when successful, called them in and threatened with tax audits (TRC 2010, 88–89). “The white pages advertising became a festival of brightly blooming democracy,” wrote Ma Chŏng-mi (2004, 185). In January, the newspaper ran 2,943 encouragement advertisements, and by May 1975 that number grew to 10,352.16 In aggregate, these anonymous ads commanded a moral authority unattainable by regular regime critics, such as journalists, who could be discredited by accusations of corruption and North Korean sympathizing. The fact that thousands of people chose to pay money for advertising space to voice their opposition testified to the authenticity of their voice as the voice of the people. It was with the first wave of the encouragement ads that Shin In Sup’s translation of Tom Dillon’s piece was published. Renamed “No Freedom without Freedom to Advertise,” the article resonated not so much as an ode to the free market but as a lament that South Korean society was deprived of the benefits bestowed by advertising—and therefore as a call to empower South Korean advertising to enable the liberties of economic choice, politics, and religion. It was particularly evident in the following roundtable at the newspaper office that in the context of the 1975 South Korea the notion of advertising freedom was sliding from a passive “freedom from”—the liberal notion of freedom adopted in Dillon’s piece—to a social democratic, enabling “freedom to.” The three ­participants—Shin himself, the Dong-A advertising manager, and a com-



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munications professor from Yonsei University—called on corporations to fulfill their “social responsibility” by actively supporting media freedom with their advertising.17 In other words, they designated advertising as a space for political interference to realize the ideals of freedom against the authoritarian regime. Their “freedom to advertise” paradoxically shared the spirit of Park Chung-hee’s measures that constructed advertising as a public resource in private hands. Yet the publicness was interpreted as being located in the general public, and accountability to public interest was equated with democratic freedoms. Shin did get a house call from a security agent about three weeks after the roundtable, for what he described as a surprisingly amicable conversation. The high-ranking officer asked Shin if he would publish such ideas again, and Shin readily said no. When recalling those events in the summer of 2009, eighty-year-old Shin let out a sharp chuckle, “It was already published, what else was there to add?” He wondered, however, whether it was his positions as the chief of the Korean branch of the International Advertising Association or as a lecturer at Sogang University that had protected him, for, he reasoned, the authoritarian government could not risk the bad publicity of ruffling an officer of an international organization or a professor of the university from which Park’s own daughter had just graduated. In the end, Dong-A’s owners caved in. Despite all the encouragement advertisements and donations, the newspaper’s revenues plummeted by 50 percent by January 25, 1975, further dropping by 70 percent by February 25. The overall advertising revenue of the Dong-A broadcasting channel decreased by 98 percent (Kim C. 2009, 267–268). In March 1975, the Dong-A owners fired or indefinitely suspended over 130 journalists and agreed to have the newspaper censored by the KCIA (TRC 2010, 89). After the purge, the Dong-A Ilbo restored its advertising revenues by July 1975 (Kim C. 2009, 294) and has since been complicit with the agenda of Korea’s mainstream conservative elites (even though over the years their orientation has evolved from authoritarian developmentalism to globalizing neoliberalism). The White Pages Incident is usually narrated as a chapter in the history of South Korea’s pro-democracy struggles and as the story of the taming of the press, yet it also had significant consequences for advertising. It was a decisive moment in shaping how advertising has been

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c­ onceived and acted upon in South Korea. Even though the scale of the financial flows that supporters directed toward the newspaper was insufficient to keep it afloat, the encouragement ads in the resisting Dong-A Ilbo established advertising as a space where critical opinions could flourish when other venues of expression were blocked. In authoritarian South Korea, it was in the Dong-A Ilbo’s advertising section that the notes no one dared to author as articles appeared. Far from being dismissed as a profane, trivial mouthpiece for commercial interests, advertising became implicated in realizing a democratic public sphere and in protecting civic freedoms. This blurring of the struggles for democracy and advertising freedom intertwined freedom to advertise with political freedom, and any interference with advertising would be susceptible to the damning accusations of “advertising suppression.” Yet rather than becoming an automatic argument for deregulation, as in Dillon’s piece, in South Korea the reprehensibility of “advertising suppression” came to support claims on advertising as an enabler of democracy and critical media. The White Pages Incident is an important piece of the puzzle of why in South Korea advertising resisted being surrendered to business interests for a long time, whereas in many other capitalist locales the veneration of private enterprise, private property, and free markets crippled the claims that could hold advertising accountable for its societal effects.

Pr i vate A dv e rtisin g, P ubl ic Du tie s , and th e E mer gen c e o f K OBA C O ( 198 0 – 1987) The public responsibilities of advertising congealed into institutional infrastructures under South Korea’s next military dictator, Chun Doo-hwan, whose reforms would define South Korean advertising for the next thirty years, lingering into the new millennium. Also coming to power through a military coup, Chun, unlike Park, commanded little personal charisma and was hugely unpopular; his presidency was marred by his ruthless suppression of the 1980 Kwangju Uprising. It did not help that his family was embroiled in financial scandals; his wife in particular was reviled as vain, greedy, and corrupt. Seeking legitimacy by reviving economic growth



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amid stagnation, Chun also secured his power by eliminating his critics and rivals, from politicians and senior KCIA agents to government bureaucrats and journalists (Lie 1998, 123–124). Advertising overhaul was part of Chun’s draconian media reform, which is usually narrated as a heavy-handed attempt to squash dissent by silencing critical voices. My interpretation complicates the picture by linking those developments to ambivalence about advertising and to apprehension of the growing influence of advertisers—South Korean capital. Chun’s reforms radically changed the media landscape in South Korea. Under Chun’s Basic Press Act of December 1980, the existing twenty-nine broadcasters were consolidated into three. Commercial broadcasters were absorbed by the public KBS TV, except for Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC), which was transformed into another public broadcaster. The only remaining private broadcaster, the religious Christian Broadcasting System, was banned from airing news and information programs. The seven existing private news agencies were merged into one, the state-run Yonhap News. Print media was also consolidated: 172 periodicals were shut down (Lie 1998, 123); publishing licenses were issued to only six national dailies and one local paper per province, with the exception of the Seoul area (Shin and Sŏ 1998, 417). Almost two thousand journalists were fired and laid off (Shim and Jin 2007, 164), censors were put in newsrooms, and detailed coverage guidelines were issued. Significantly, the changes were legitimized through evocations of publicness and public interest,18 and Korean scholars argue that it is from the time of Chun’s mergers that the concept of public interest became heavily used in relation to mass media (Chŏng 2011).19 As beneficiaries of the oligopolization, the remaining media outlets reaped handsome advertising revenues, in addition to privileges in taxation, loans, and finance, which also incentivized their complicity. The three national dailies—the Chosun Ilbo, the JoongAng Ilbo and the Dong-A Ilbo—not only accumulated riches but also developed an alliance with Chun’s government. The “power-press complex” tied politicians, media owners, publishers, editors, senior journalists, and chaebol families (Kang 2005; Park, Lee, and Kim 1994). In the words of Choi Jang Jip, “The press became the most vested among vested interests under the old system” (2005,131). Controversially, broadcasters continued to air commercial advertis-

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ing despite becoming public and noncommercial. The contradiction was formally resolved by delegating their advertising sales to the newly established Korea Broadcast Advertising Corporation (KOBACO), a public corporation (kongsa) whose mediation was to shield public broadcasters from corporate influence. As consignee of all terrestrial broadcasters’ advertising airtime, KOBACO sold airtime to advertisers while retaining a legally set commission. Transactions for broadcast advertising that bypassed KOBACO were banned. Advertising agencies received a stipulated portion of the commission, which supported KOBACO’s own operations, financed a public fund for advertising-related research and various welfare programs for broadcast media and media workers, and paid for the public service announcements that began to be produced in South Korea. KOBACO also took over advertising censorship duties, previewing television and radio advertising and monitoring print advertising. Called upon to materialize the ideal of public accountability of broadcasting and advertising, the corporation would remain the linchpin of the South Korean media system for decades. While this story is usually told as Chun’s ruthless assault on the freedom of press, it is worth noting that, regardless of Chun’s well-­ deserved reputation as a power-hungry venal dictator, the media system he set up was remarkable in how effectively it curbed capital’s control over media. During Park’s rule, the chaebol were nourished with preferential treatment and grew into oligopolists in South Korea’s major industries, and their increasing wealth was gradually converted into political power. As owners of broadcasters, newspapers, and news agencies, the chaebol also secured their sway over the South Korean mediascape. By the 1980s, they had become international companies, whose dependence on the state for financing and assistance had eased. On a few occasions they even dared to defy the government, something unthinkable earlier (Kim E. M. 1997, 194–198). It is in the 1980s that critics began to refer to South Korea as the “Chaebol Republic.” The tension between the chaebol and the political establishment is an important context of Chun’s presidency in general and of his media reforms in particular. Chun continued to protect the chaebol’s interests insofar as wage restraint and labor controls were concerned, but he also attempted to discipline the conglomerates with tighter credit control, the introduction of antimonopoly laws, and forced mergers and consoli-



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dations (Moon 1988, 77–80). A firmer stance on the chaebol was how Chun attempted to differentiate himself from Park and win legitimacy. The chaebol were blamed for the economic crisis, in the midst of which Chun came to power, and their alleged inefficiency and uncompetitiveness were traced to their reliance on political power under Park’s Yusin regime. Chun’s drumbeat on free market competition resonated with the neoliberal doctrine, which was gathering steam in advanced capitalist democracies. It was also in line with domestic market liberalization, which was demanded by South Korea’s trade partners, notably the United States, whose policy makers grew alarmed by the increasing trade deficit with East Asian countries. Chun was generally unsuccessful in limiting the chaebol’s sway over South Korean economy, but nevertheless drastically limited their control over the mass media. The largest of the consolidated broadcasters and newspapers were previously affiliated with the chaebol, which thus lost an important vehicle for circulating their worldviews. The Tongyang Broadcasting Company (1965–1980) had been owned by Samsung; Dong-A Broadcasting Station (1963–1980) belonged to Dong-A Group, also the publisher of the Dong-A Ilbo newspaper; MBC was owned by the Kyunghyang newspaper, which was managed by Shinjin Motors; regional MBC stations were licensed to LG, SsangYong, and other conglomerates (Kim 2016, 19). In other words, despite narratives that set up the dichotomy of a fettered public press and a free private press, the privateness of those media companies hardly meant that they were independent of vested interests. The Basic Press Act also banned media cross-ownership, breaking up Korea’s emerging media empires. However self-serving Chun’s public interest discourses were, they nevertheless addressed the real antagonism between the capital’s interest in using media as a tool for advancing material interests, on the one hand, and, on the other, public interest in mass media as a provider of balanced information and an arena for achieving common mind on matters of shared concern. Banished from the mass media, the chaebol, however, took over the advertising industry. At first, when the KOBACO system was introduced, the dramatic reduction in agency commission threw advertising agencies into a panic, to the point that at least one major agency, Samsung’s Cheil, considered exiting broadcast advertising altogether (Cheil Kihoek 1988, 136). Yet it soon became clear that the new system in fact benefited the

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chaebol’s in-house agencies. First, they were the only ones that could meet KOBACO’s financially prohibitive licensing criteria, thanks to their access to the chaebol coffers. Second, the commission that KOBACO withheld for its media representation services was lower for in-house agencies (Shin and Shin 2004, 65–66). As a result, independent operators disappeared, whereas more chaebol established in-house agencies to meet their growing demand for advertising services. Those developments were significant for limiting the advertising industry’s independence within South Korea’s chaebol-dominated economy and for preempting the influence of international advertising networks. While the emphasis on the publicness of the mass media allowed for its subordination to the state at the time, it also encouraged public scrutiny of advertising. Broadcast advertising in particular drew much critical attention because it inhabited the medium whose public duties and vulnerability to commercialism were the ideological pillar of Chun’s media reforms. How could a broadcaster remain true to its public mandate when supported by private advertising? Proposed solutions revolved around limiting advertising airtime and elevating the quality of advertising content. In February 1981, in the course of a “Public Broadcasting and Advertising” seminar, it was argued that KBS should avoid the traditional “persuasive and defiant” advertising and air advertising that matched the regular programs on a public broadcasting channel—advertising that “maintains publicness and dignity” and “contributes to wholesome society, elevation of morality, and development of Korean economy.” A new category of advertising was proposed, “public advertising” (kongkong kwanggo, different from noncommercial public service announcements [kongik kwanggo]), also referred to as “life advertising” (saenghwal kwanggo) and described as edifying “minidramas.” A hybrid of corporate image advertising and public service announcements, such ads were to be produced by commercial advertisers and to display their logo at the end but to forego an actual commercial message.20 Though declared the official course for KBS, this project died away, and KBS advertising remained a cause of “advertising pollution” and a trigger for many an advertising critique, which continued to construct advertising as a suspicious trespasser on public airwaves. Criticism of advertising-infested broadcasting and particularly of KBS’ double-dipping between subscription fees and advertising revenues



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was championed by the national dailies, which were in direct competition with broadcasters for advertising money. Many a newspaper article in the 1980s argued for the incompatibility of public broadcasting and commercial advertising. A typical example, a Dong-A Ilbo editorial from April 26, 1985, under the title “Public TV without Ads, Please,” asserted that “viewers demand clean broadcasting” and critiqued the contradiction between viewers paying subscription fees and being subjected to advertising.21 Consumer organizations and academics also partook in critiquing KBS advertising, often advancing the position of “consumerism,” or the championing of consumer interests. Some of those critiques expanded into critiques of advertising in general. For example, on September 17, 1982, Dong-A Ilbo reported on a KOBACO seminar on advertising review (under the telling title “Public Interest of the Consumer Must Come First”), in which one of the presenters, professor Yi Tae-yong, argued that advertising regulation and review should be understood as a system for defending the publicness of advertising (kwanggo ŭi kongiksŏng) and consumer sovereignty, because, he explained (incidentally very much in line with Marxist theorist Wolfgang Haug [1986]), there is a contradiction between a seller’s profit seeking and the preservation of consumers’ interest, and therefore there can be but a constant struggle about advertising.22 The complaints about advertising overlapped with complaints about the poor quality of television in general, for the two broadcasting networks refrained from critical programming on public affairs and focused on sensationalist entertainment in a ratings race. By the mid-1980s viewers began to refuse to pay KBS subscription fees because they perceived the channel as a mouthpiece of government propaganda riddled with an excessive amount of advertising. In 1986 the sporadic protests developed into a full-blown audience movement initiated by the National Council of Churches and soon joined by Catholic and Buddhist organizations as well as by women’s organizations; the boycott of KBS subscription fees continued until 1989 (Kim 2001). Foreshadowing post-1987 civil society politics, the participants understood themselves as a consumer movement, distancing themselves from political groups. Yet despite their consumer allegiances, their denunciation of KBS was inherently political because their demands were for democratic control over the mass media, so that it would be neither a conduit of government propaganda nor a playground for advertisers. Articulated in the language

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of public interest, those visions asserted the social democratic ideals of media. Paradoxically, the ideal of commercial advertising that embraces public interest and abandons commercialism came closest to its realization in the corporate image advertising of the chaebol, which in the 1980s pioneered the already discussed subgenre of unlikely advertising. Such ads employed a sentimental aesthetic, celebrated the ordinary lives of regular people, and waxed nostalgic about traditional values. “Feeling Unwell Today,” the 1984 ad presented in the introduction, was an exemplar that inspired unending praise. Shin In Sup, for example, compared its resonance with the famous poem “Azaleas” by Kim So-wŏl (Shin 1992, 40). Another celebrated example was a corporate advertising campaign by Sŏnkyŏng Group (renamed SK Telecom in 1998) from 1983. It called on Koreans to use the original culture, excellent workmanship, and creativity that they had inherited from their ancestors to launch an new era of technological development under the slogan “Let’s awaken the wisdom of the sleeping nation” (Chamchago innŭn minjong ŭi sŭlgi rŭl ilkkaeupshida) (Ko 1996, 163). As the decade progressed, a popular theme of chaebol advertising was reassuring audiences that technological development was serving people. The “Human-Tech” (1983–1993) campaign by Samsung, for example, was launched a robot shaking hands with a man to a voiceover assuring the audience that the goal of corporate development was universal happiness. Though a minority in South Korea’s overall mediascape, such advertisements were highly visible because of their frequent airing and because the same media that ripped apart the commercialism of regular advertising doted on them as models of what advertising should be. There is no question that Chun deserves his legacy as a reprehensible dictator. The self-serving instrumentalism of his media reforms was obvious enough. There is little doubt that in practice, Chun’s media reforms worked to gag critical media and buttress Chun’s insecure grip on power. Well-documented is the intensification of media censorship, when the news media had to comply with daily reporting guidelines and essentially surrendered editorial authority to the government. In relation to the new advertising system, most glaringly, the public fund that KOBACO amassed did support various media-related public interest projects, from academic research to the construction of facilities. But a



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considerable part also went to financing advantageous loans for home purchases, tuition for complicit media workers’ children, and for journalists’ overseas trips (Shin and Sŏ 2011, 388–389). Later investigations would show that Chun’s feuding with the chaebol did not prevent him from receiving bribes or raking in a massive slush fund (prosecutors claimed it to be between 450 and 460 billion won, and Chun was ordered to repay over 220.5 billion won).23 Nevertheless, cynically or not, Chun’s regime institutionalized a vision of the mass media, including advertising, that was premised on asserting national airwaves as a commons and media outlets as public institutions, even though their public management was usurped by the authoritarian state at the time. The circulating public discourses about media and its public duties might have been a smoke screen, but they were clear about the contradictions between media ownership by “an individual or a profit-seeking legal entity” and the “democratic formation of public opinion.”24 Though silent on the dangers of state control over media, they systematically debunked the arguments about public interest being served by having mass media compete for advertisers’ money—the corporate ideology that was deployed to dismantle public controls over media and enhance the capital’s control over it elsewhere (e.g., Pickard 2013). Specifically for advertising, the ideas of its public duties were materialized as lasting infrastructures: multiple government, quasigovernment, and nongovernmental advertising censorship boards; a ban on media cross-ownership; and KOBACO’s mediation of advertising sales. Those measures were ad hoc solutions to reconcile the tensions between the public service mandate of mass media and its dependence on commercial advertising. They promised to shield the publicness of media from unholy private interest, all while surrendering the media to state control. Yet those discourses, practices, and institutions also acquired an agentive independence that shaped South Korean advertising for decades. Whatever the instrumental ends of Chun’s media reforms, they enacted advertising as a medium with public duties, against which advertisers’ choices were judged—and when found lacking, subjected to corrective intervention. This intense scrutiny of commercial advertising was even more remarkable considering that Chun’s efforts to rein in the chaebol largely failed and South Korea’s big conglomerates were even more powerful by the end of his rule.

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N e w Fr e e d om s a mid O l d R e g ul atio ns ( 1987– 2 008) The fall of the military dictatorship in 1987, combined with the liberalization effects of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, dramatically transformed the South Korean media landscape. The “Declaration of Democratization and Reform,” which was proclaimed in June 1987 after nineteen days of protests, guaranteed civic liberties, including the freedom of the press. Security officials withdrew from newspaper offices, the notorious Basic Press Act was repealed, and so were Chun’s tight rules for licensing mass media. The number of newspapers tripled from thirty in 1985 to eighty-five in 1990 and rose to 126 by 1994. Iconic of South Korean democratization became the new daily Hankyoreh, launched in December 1987 by dissident journalists and financed through a nationwide donation drive, in the course of which twenty-seven thousand subscribers jointly contributed five billion won (about US$8 million at the time). Also growing was the number of broadcasting channels. A private terrestrial broadcaster, Seoul Broadcasting Station (SBS), was launched in 1990 by Taeyong Group, a minor conglomerate specializing in construction and civil engineering. The first commercial television station to be established since 1980, SBS was significant also because it broke the public broadcasters’ monopoly on comprehensive programming of news and entertainment—in other words, attracting a nationwide audience and shaping public opinion. In the early 1990s, a number of regional private channels began broadcasting local content, whereas cable television (started in 1995) and satellite television (launched in 1998) were relegated to niche programming, such as the news-only cable channel Maeil Broadcasting Network, owned by newspaper Maeil Kyŏngje, or to various sports or foreign movie channels. If in Chun’s South Korea there were only four television channels, a decade later there were almost 130 (Shim and Jin 2007, 161). The sheer number of media outlets forced them into fierce competition, incentivizing subservience to the interests of advertisers. The newspapers in particular were found to withhold stories critical of advertisers, to cover advertisers’ news favorably and extensively, as well as to tailor their special sections to attract maximum advertisers, sometimes even letting the advertiser’s staff write relevant section articles (Kim 2003, 74–75).25 South Korea’s biggest dailies—the Chosun



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Ilbo, the JoongAng Ilbo, and the Dong-A Ilbo—were themselves wealthy conglomerates and organically championed a pro–big business agenda while undermining unions and critical civil society groups. At the heart of the right-wing power-press complex, they remained passive onlookers when South Korea was swept with nationwide demonstrations for democracy and later helped muffle the demands of the labor movement, whose agenda included reforms beyond procedural democracy. In the words of Choi Jang Jip, “After democratization the press became the fortress of Cold War anti-communism, and it played the central role in sustaining the hegemony of vested interests” (2005, 131). This role became ever more important after former dissident Kim Dae-jung came to power in late 1997, when South Korea was hit by the Asian financial crisis. The conservative press consistently “criticized government policies protecting laborers, human rights, social welfare, and the reform of conglomerates as obstacles to market competitiveness” (Kang 2005, 80). Newspaper advertising consequently consolidated as a vehicle for expressing ideological allegiances and forging political alliances. The three right-wing dailies were popular with advertisers not only because of their large readership but also because of the opportunities to tap into their influence and vast connections in the right-wing camp. Advertising in the Hankyoreh, conversely, was avoided by right-wing entrepreneurs, even when it made marketing sense. However, Korea’s largest chaebol, such as Samsung and Hyundai, often advertised across the ideological spectrum— a practice that was popularly interpreted as fulfilling the corporate obligation to foster national democracy and rarely linked to marketing calculations. Even when desired, a carefully targeted media buying strategy was not an option because of the absence of media circulation data, the systematic gathering of which was resisted by the newspapers until 2012.26 Public broadcasters, by contrast, were somewhat shielded from the pressures of the saturated media market by KOBACO, although they were vulnerable to political power changes.27 The new broadcasting channel, private SBS, was also required to sell its advertising via KOBACO, on the grounds that terrestrial wavelengths are a public resource. The public corporation bundled less popular advertising slots with highly demanded ones, making smaller stations commercially viable. Notwithstanding those compulsory bundles, KOBACO generally accommodated advertisers’ preferences, hence the competition among broadcasters, which

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often pursued ratings through sensationalism. Frustration with lowbrow terrestrial broadcasting even provoked audience protests, such as the “Turn Off Your TV” campaign in 1993. Cable channels, while not nearly as popular, contributed to competition for advertising. Their advantage was in slacker regulation, which tolerated content that would not pass the still mandatory before-the-fact review of terrestrial advertising. Regardless, such was the prestige of terrestrial channels among advertisers that the demand for the primetime slots surpassed the supply. Media liberalization also enabled advertising to expand its repertoire of “unlikely” topics by venturing into political controversies of the day. A 1994 campaign for sports shoe maker Pro-Specs deployed the difficult issue of “comfort women” (which had only recently entered public consciousness in South Korea) to promote its sneakers with a nationalist appeal. “Are we to be conquered? Will we conquer? History can be repeated,” read the copy. Whereas some commentators disparaged the campaign for sensationalism, most praised it. Another new frontier was North Korean themes, which previously would have been considered inappropriate for advertising. A 2000 TV commercial for the Internet portal Daum, for example, illustrated the power of the Internet to bypass barriers: it showed a frog crossing the border between the north and the south, provoking a faint smile from a North Korean soldier on duty. Because of their relevance to broader social issues, such ads were perceived as belonging with “public interest commercial advertising,” which blossomed throughout the 1990s.28 Representative ads celebrated the traditional value of filial piety (“Filial Piety” campaign for Kyongdong Boiler), the national sentiment of chŏng (Orion Choco Pie), the hard work of regular people (the “New Koreans” series for the energy drink Bacchus), and the sentimental joys of family life (Samsung’s “Another Family”).29 Many ads, however, have exercised their expressive freedoms in more conventional ways. The year 1994 witnessed the first Korean ad with a nude—a lathered naked model with her or his (in different editions) back turned toward the viewer, to promote body care products in mainstream newspapers. Also in 1994, women’s magazines ran explicit Calvin Klein ads, and 1995 saw an upsurge in ads using nudity and sex appeal. Such ads were critiqued by some as cultural imperialism and welcomed by others as liberalization. The latter discourses blurred freedom of commercial speech—freedom for capital—with freedom of political expression and



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freedom for exercising democratic citizenship, a conflation that legitimated advertising’s release from external controls and was symptomatic of consolidating neoliberal hegemony. Indeed, while the Chun-era structures persisted, they were not uncontested. In 1988 the Federation of Korean Industries, a decades-old lobbying organization of the chaebol, founded the Korea Advertisers Association (KAA), a unit dedicated to championing the interests of big business as advertisers and buyers of media time and space. The organization lobbied to deregulate advertising and media industries, particularly to undermine the influential public broadcasters and dismantle the buffer structures, such as KOBACO. The KAA Journal was a platform for expert opinions that criticized the inefficiencies of the KOBACO system and the bottlenecks of before-the-fact review, and advocated relaxation of crossmedia ownership. From 1994 onward, the KAA sponsored several attempts to challenge the legality of advertising review in the Constitutional Court, but those interventions did not get traction until two decades later. In the 1990s, the primacy of public interest in broadcasting remained a compelling argument to ward off deregulation. KOBACO, which grew into its role of public steward of the airwaves, evoked it most persistently. “Public interest” was the corporation’s rebuttal to the relentless charges of obstruction of competition and interfering with free trade that were voiced by broadcasters and their unions, the KAA, chaebol-affiliated think tanks, the Fair Trade Commission, international observers, and particularly the American Chamber of Commerce. Among the defenders of the KOBACO system were, unexpectedly, advertising agencies, which now praised KOBACO for stabilizing advertising prices, and newspapers, which were wary of competition for advertising from broadcasters. The public interest arguments even withstood the neoliberal restructuring in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which triggered the deregulation of many South Korean industries. “Greed at the expense of public interest?” was a rebuke by KOBACO’s representative to the demand of twenty-eight TV broadcasters, including public MBC and private SBS, to sell their advertising without KOBACO’s mediation in the face of advertising supply that had plummeted.30 Nevertheless, the IMF Crisis—the meltdown following the deregulation undertaken to satisfy the conditions for receiving an unprecedented US$57 billion bailout package from the International Monetary Fund

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(IMF)—triggered renegotiations of public and private controls over mass media. The already loud chorus of KOBACO critics was joined by the South Korean government. The privatization of public enterprises was an item on president Kim Dae-jung’s list of measures to overcome the exigency, and attempts to further deregulate media, including advertising, gained momentum. The Broadcasting Act of 2000 was modeled after the US Telecommunications Act of 1996, which favored media oligopolies in broadcasting and telecommunications (Hackett and Carroll 2006). The South Korean law allowed the establishment of “media reps” to compete with KOBACO, thus technically terminating KOBACO’s monopoly. Some regulatory barriers, however, held. As a compromise on the KAA’s demands, advertising censorship was preserved but was transferred to the civic organization the Korea Advertising Review Board (KARB), financed by the KAA and other associations related to the advertising industry.31 Media cross-ownership over terrestrial broadcasters was still banned but significantly liberalized for cable broadcasting (Nam 2008, 655–656). Broadcasters, entertainment media conglomerates, and the Joongang Ilbo newspaper went on to set up their own cable channels, which could sell their advertising bypassing KOBACO. Cable channels, however, were still prohibited from offering general programming, which meant that they were no match in influence and attractiveness to advertisers for the terrestrial broadcasters with their comprehensive coverage of news and entertainment. Indicative of the complex crisscrossing of interests that advertising mediates, negotiations about formulating and implementing these new regulations once again made strange bedfellows. The “progressive” government and “progressive” broadcasters were on the side of the prochaebol “conservative” KAA pushing for deregulation. The publicness of broadcast advertising was championed by the “conservative” dailies and advertising agencies, both normally aligned with the chaebol, as well as by regional and minority broadcasters, who were associated with the “progressive” camp. The oddness of the alliances of critique and their ideological unworkability put the brakes on the legislated changes. The abolition of KOBACO’s monopoly remained unrealized because there was no consensus on the desirable number of media reps, while many still held that they were not desirable at all. The hoped-for greater leniency of the new censor, the KARB, also proved elusive. Staffed with mostly elderly



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representatives of advertising-related associations and consumer nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the board turned out to be exacting in its judgments, and soon enough the KAA Journal was back at critiquing the absurdities and inefficiencies of advertising review. The scrutiny of advertising even intensified because consumer and media NGOs proliferated and eagerly undertook projects of “advertising monitoring” in relation to their particular concerns, such as portrayals of women, children’s nutrition, and consumer credit. They challenged problematic ads, prepared detailed reports, and developed policy recommendations. Not only did NGOs campaign in the media, they occasionally staged consumer boycotts against defiant advertisers. If institutional intervention, such as by the KARB, could be dismissed as suppression of advertising freedom, civil society activism was welcomed as a sign of maturing democratic culture. Civil society groups were particularly empowered during the “progressive decade” of Kim Dae-jung’s and Roh Moo-Hyun’s presidencies because the mainstream Left saw civic participation as a key to enhancement of democracy and a remedy for economic inequality. These groups legitimated their intervention with advertising—­ pressure on advertisers and the regulatory institutions that govern them— by blurring consumer claims on private corporations with citizens’ claims on public culture and at times economic democracy. Consumer needs and judgments were elevated to a binding moral authority and equated with the “pure” position of public interest, the defense of which was entrusted neither to political parties nor to market forces but to self-organized civil society itself. Despite general sympathies with the “progressive” camp, such civil groups rejected mainstream politics as “dirty” and partisan, as Seungsook Moon (2010) detailed for members of the People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, one of the leading civil society groups in South Korea. This apolitical consumerism seemingly fits with Choi Jang Jip’s (2005) diagnosis of the “conservative democracy” in millennial South Korea, as a symptom of the failures of South Korean democratic institutions to represent popular interests. Yet, as I show in chapter 5, this consumer citizenship hardly surrendered advertising to corporate will but rather sought to subordinate corporate sovereignty to consumer sovereignty. A new lens for assessing advertising—and new leverage for putting public claims on it—appeared in corporate social responsibility (CSR)

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­ iscourse, which entered South Korea in the 1990s (KAIST 2006). Gend erally, CSR describes corporations taking into account the broader social consequences of their business activity, such as environment and livelihoods, and taking a proactive stance in mitigating harm and seeking public good beyond pursuing their immediate business objectives. While enthusiastically embraced in business administration circles, CSR has many critics, who see it is a tactic for legitimizing capitalism by presenting it as compatible with the ethical values of contemporary consumers and corporate employees (Hanlon and Fleming 2009).32 In South Korea, quite unusually, CSR at first was picked up by corporate critics, not corporations themselves. Despite referencing the English-language expression, the early local interpretation of CSR departed little from the almost century-old local moralistic rhetoric of how capitalist enterprises should subordinate their profit seeking to nobler concerns, such as public interest, which at the time was primarily linked to environmental responsibility and avoidance of bribery, following a series of major corporate scandals.33 In the wake of the IMF Crisis, CSR became reinterpreted as adopting “global standards,” such as transparency of accounting practices and ownership structures. Advanced by the IMF and aligned intellectuals, that discourse was also eagerly appropriated by civil society groups and linked to the advancement of democracy and social justice in South Korea. Corporate advertising became recognized as another venue for pursuing corporate social responsibility and welcomed evidence of corporate receptivity to criticism from “public interest groups” (Im 1996).34 Corporate service, for example, was found in the nationalist-themed advertising that proliferated after the IMF Crisis, such as the 1998 campaign for a soft drink launched under the slogan “Cola Independence 815,” referring to the day of Korea’s liberation from Japan on August 15, 1945. The Korea Association of Advertising Agencies commends such ads not only for their savvy marketing but also for their self-conscious attempt to lift the damp national spirit, an expression of patriotism and commitment to public interest (KAAA 2000, 86).35 “Toward People,” discussed in the introduction, was also interpreted as an example of CSR (Kim 2007, 227). The CSR framework was thus reinvigorating the well-established aesthetic by subsuming the old rhetoric of public interest, yet it also masked the antagonism between advertisers’ private interests and the interests of the public, ultimately preparing the ground for advertising deregulation.



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A dv e rtising Unfette r ed (2 008– ) It was not until the presidency of the “conservative” Lee Myung-bak (2008–2013) that the KAA finally succeeded at a constitutional challenge to the advertising censorship—in the fifth attempt, and fourteen years after its first try. Of the right-wing “conservative” camp, Lee was elected on the platform of prioritizing economic development through improving the business climate and privatizing the public sector, including public corporations, such as the broadcast advertising steward KOBACO. In line with the new priority of deregulation of the media industry, the Constitutional Court ruled advertising to be subject to the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of expression in July 2008. The court decided that the articles of the Broadcast Law that stipulated before-the-fact advertising review were unconstitutional and ordered the review practice to stop.36 As the chief justice explained to journalists, “Advertising transmits ideas, knowledge, and information to an indeterminately great number of people, and as such it is subject to protection of freedom of the mass media and publication” (cited in Chŏng 2008). The KARB’s review ceased in August 2008, and terrestrial broadcasters became free to run advertisements without external approval. It might seem that the changes benefited the broadcasters but in fact they favored advertisers and advertising agencies. For media outlets— neither advertisers nor advertising agencies—remained legally responsible should advertising they permitted violate any regulations. The KARB’s censorship abolition notwithstanding, another quasigovernmental agency, the Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC), continued to review media content, albeit after-the-fact, and could slap broadcasters with disciplinary action and penalty points, the accumulation of which could lead to the loss of their broadcasting license. Retribution from advertisers could be sought through the Fair Trade Commission, consumer NGOs, or court, but it was a time-consuming endeavor attempted by few. The new frontline in advertising scrutiny, broadcasters scrambled to set up in-house before-the-fact advertising review procedures to make sure that the advertising they aired did not violate the barrage of regulations. Businesses, however, no longer had to absorb the risks and the expense of producing a commercial that might be rejected before seeing the light of day, as in the past under the KARB

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system. While the criteria for advertising scrutiny remained the same, the after-the-fact nature of the review ensured that even problematic ads, if accepted by broadcasters, circulated for some time before being stopped by the KCSC. Broadcasters’ in-house review boards had to walk a fine line between protecting broadcasters from penalties and not losing advertisers to stringency. The latter consideration was gaining priority as the deregulatory measures unleashed during Lee’s presidency intensified competition for advertising. Advertisers’ sway over broadcasters strengthened when five months later, in November 2008, the Constitutional Court ruled that KOBACO’s then twenty-seven-year-old monopoly infringed on the right of freedom of occupation (of private advertising agencies).37 The court commended the role of KOBACO in securing diversity and public interest in broadcasting but advised that other measures be devised to ensure the public interest in advertising, such as providing subsidies. The verdict granted regulators thirteen months to design an alternative system of media representation—and provoked heated debates about advertising and broadcasting, and about their desirable role in South Korean society. The KOBACO decision did not simply abolish the long-lasting institution; it also undermined the very logic that put public interest in broadcasting before advertisers’ commercial freedoms. Even before the KOBACO decision was reached, the oppositional parties, the left-wing press, and broadcaster unions criticized the plan to privatize media representation, prognosticating that an intensified competition for advertising would result in more sensationalism, a decline in critical reporting, and an increase of advertisers’ influence, particularly the chaebol. Rallies were held by media workers’ organizations and progressive civil society groups to defend the KOBACO system. Impassioned protests came from minority broadcasters, who stood to lose their advertising income with the disappearance of KOBACO’s bundling practice, and from the groups that depended on those broadcasters to publicize their views. The co-chairman of the Association of Regional Broadcasters, Lee Young-hoon, for example, commented, “I’m disappointed because the Constitutional Court, in a careless decision, overturned the social consensus on the KOBACO system, which has been maintained for the past twenty-seven years. Regional broadcasters will become like dandelions in the face of a typhoon.”38



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What Lee refers to as “the social consensus on the KOBACO system” was also a social consensus on the desirable role of advertising in South Korean society. The abolition of the major structures in which the public interest logic of South Korean advertising was externalized—KOBACO and the KARB—undermined the hegemonic status of that logic. The publicness of advertising circulation was no longer a sufficient reason to subordinate commercial advertising to public concerns. Freedom to advertise was prevailing, albeit with no obligation for advertisers to support democratic mass media, in contrast to the bold imaginaries for advertising freedom from the 1970s. In the course of these transmutations, the right-wing press and traditionally left-wing mainstream broadcasters were caught in a bind between their material interests and their political allegiances. The former gave limited attention to the issue, dryly summarizing the arguments on both sides, emphasizing the inevitability of a transition to a competitive system, and calling for policies to mitigate the likely race for advertisers’ favor and the effects on other media. Broadcasters SBS and MBC, however, welcomed KOBACO’s abolition—and were criticized for “irresponsible” and “selfish” reporting by Midiŏ Onŭl, an organ of the National Union of Mediaworkers, which normally would be among the broadcasters’ allies.39 The same article commended KBS, which also stood to benefit financially from advertising deregulation, for its critical assessment of the decision as making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Somewhat reminiscent of the situation in the aftermath of the 2000 Broadcasting Act, though the old structures were outlawed, there was no consensus about the new configuration. Proposals for a successor system to the KOBACO monopoly varied widely, from introducing just one private media rep to compete with KOBACO to opening the media representation market to any interested operators. NGOs and media organizations held public debates, seminars, and conferences to search for solutions. Participants also critiqued the failures of the ad hoc advertising review structures instituted by broadcasters. Many defended the pre-2008 arrangements—the mandatory and binding before-the-fact review and KOBACO’s compulsory representation. Overall, however, the mood among critics was defeatist—despite articulating many critiques of the commercial media model, they perceived deregulation as inevitable. Indeed, the advanced capitalist countries that South Korean policy makers

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habitually look up to—the United States and the United Kingdom—long adopted the market-centric models of media, and their very trajectory commanded more weight than many of the exposed deficiencies of those media privatizations. A sign of retreating public interest discourses, deregulation, though recognized as riddled with many problems, was seen as the only way forward. This inevitability of media deregulation in general and abolition of the KOBACO system in particular was further compounded by the new Broadcasting Act of 2009. Railroaded through the National Assembly with a brawl, it legalized cross-media ownership between print and broadcasting while for the first time allowing cable channels to offer general programming and thus presumably reach the national public, not just niche audiences. The new law was widely interpreted as a kickback to the three right-wing dailies, whose presidential election coverage facilitated Lee’s victory in 2007. They were the only ones among the existing media organizations wealthy enough to meet the financial requirements for the license to operate a general cable channel. By then, the Chosun Ilbo, the JoongAng Ilbo, and the Dong-A Ilbo, often referred to by critics with the collective name ChoJoongDong, were widely recognized as having become a right-wing political institution in their own right. Left civil society groups critiqued the ChoJoongDong for obstructing the “progressive” government’s policies and setting public agenda rather than reporting on current affairs. That in the 2000s the ChoJoongDong commanded over 70 percent of Korean broadsheet circulation (Kwak 2012, 54) was argued to be a reflection not of public opinion but rather of the ChoJoongDong’s aggressive incentivization of subscriptions and of the extensiveness of their entertainment and lifestyle sections. The affluence that enabled those strategies was an effect of their favor with advertisers, earned through restraint from negative coverage, critics argued.40 So noxious was the ChoJoongDong’s influence perceived to be that there sprouted whole organizations dedicated to their abolition, particularly the biggest of the three, the Chosun Ilbo: “Beautiful World without the Chosun Ilbo” (Choase, established in 2002), the Citizens Alliance Against the Chosun Ilbo established in 2000), and the protagonist of chapter 5, the National Campaign for Media Consumer Sovereignty (Ŏnsoju, established in 2008). The prospect of ChoJoongDong-owned



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general channels caused fears that broadcasting would fall prey to the right-wing forces. The new channels also stood to effectively break KOBACO’s monopoly over advertising for general broadcasting. With an alternative system of media representation for terrestrial broadcasters still being debated, the new channels were to handle their advertising directly, similar to the existing cable channels—and conspicuously unlike existing general programming channels, which were tied to KOBACO’s representation by their public service mandate. South Korean broadcasting was entering a new era, and broadcast advertising was seemingly released from its public interest mission. Collectively, the two Constitutional Court verdicts and the new broadcasting law undid the decades-old institutional infrastructures, where public interest commitments were materialized, and debilitated the narratives that put advertising’s publicness before its instrumental functions. Advertisers scored not only an institutional but also an ideological victory as the arguments for realizing the publicness mandate of broadcast media, and by extension mass media in general, were rendered residual. As the judge implied with the KOBACO decision, public interest was important, but its pursuits should not interfere with market competition. What’s more, the KARB decision effectively linked any external interference with advertising texts to censorship of the illiberal military dictatorships. Advertising was being reconfigured as a sovereign domain of advertisers.

C o n c lusion In the second half of the twentieth century, South Korean advertising transformed from virtual irrelevance into an influential industry. By outlining the social and institutional history of South Korean advertising, I have underscored that local advertising is an embedded social phenomenon rather than a distorted integration of the global industry, and that its social contract is an outcome of local politics, not an effect of advertising marketing functionality. As the advertising industry developed within the South Korean milieu, the systemic imperatives of capitalist advertising

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were complicated by local struggles for democracy, institutional inertia, and the contingent alliances of interests, which often prioritized shortterm gains to one’s immediate group over broader class interests. Power struggles compounded by historical contingencies consolidated the cultural logic of South Korean advertising that subordinated its marketing purposes to its potential social contributions and fended off the global trend for advertising deregulation until the new millennium. In the course of the 1974–1975 White Pages Incident, freedom to advertise, the usual rallying call for advertising deregulation and corporate empowerment, became subverted to mean advertisers’ obligation to financially support critical mass media with their advertising placements, whereas citizens’ encouragement advertisements further modeled such a use of advertising for democratic participation. In the 1980s, advertising money flows became openly politicized to limit corporate sway over the mass media as a part of Chun Doo-hwan’s power struggles with the chaebol. Though the discourses of commercial advertising securing media publicness were deployed to legitimize Chun’s despotic media controls, their ideal of truly public media—serving audiences before the state or the capital—outreached and outlived the dictator’s purposes. The publicness of advertising became practically prioritized in institutionalizing stringent oversight over advertising texts and money by regulatory organizations, such as KOBACO, and by developing the unlikely advertising aesthetic, which pulled commercial advertising toward promoting public service messages. The two decisions of the Constitutional Court in 2008 broke the decades-old structures wherein the publicness ideal of advertising was externalized, yet the vernacular meanings and institutional habits lasted, and the resulting clash of the old and new advertising logics rendered advertising-related practices a frontline in contests over private freedoms and the public obligations of corporations and individuals in postmillennial South Korea. In the spring of 2009, when I started my fieldwork, the effects of advertising liberalization were palpable, and not only in the many seminars and conferences held about the present and future of South Korean advertising and broadcasting. Risqué and otherwise controversial campaigns were on the rise, as was noted by many an observer. Kissing couples were shown, swear words were used, family values were mocked, and regional accents were derided—it seemed advertising was breaking a new taboo



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every week. Advertising audiences were often incensed by those new advertising freedoms, and the Internet buzzed with critical posts about advertising that made one want “to throw away one’s TV,” to quote a complaint about a pesky private loan commercial.41 The cultural logic still demanded publicness, and how those ideals were reasserted and undermined in the course of advertising circulation under the liberalized regime is examined in the following ethnographic chapters.

C h a p te r 2

The Dreams and Realities of Advertising Practitioners Advertisements are oxygen cities emit. City dwellers breathe in ads around the clock . . . . For those of us who live in the cities, advertisements are seduction, consumption, and art . . . . And to some of us, ads are also a dream. —Ad Genius Yi Thae-baek Advertising that encourages consumption gives poor people the feeling of relative poverty and inferiority. I don’t want to make advertising for the minority, but public interest advertising for the majority. —Yi Jeseok, prototype for Ad Genius Yi Thae-baek

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hile cable television audiences all over the world were mesmerized with the glamour of the advertising profession as portrayed in the seven seasons of Mad Men (AMC, 2007–2015), a popular series about an American advertising agency in the 1960s, South Koreans were treated to a fictionalized depiction of their own advertising practitioners. The TV miniseries Ad Genius Yi Thae-baek (KBS 2TV, 2013) was based on the life of a local adman, Yi Jeseok (Yi Che-sŏk, b. 1982), winner of many international competitions and the author of the autobiographical Ad Genius Yi Jeseok (2010). Both shows offer captivating glimpses into the world of advertising, yet how they present advertising work could not be more different, and not only because Mad Men was set in New York in the 1960s and Ad Genius in Seoul in the 2000s. The contrast between the two TV series offers a window into the social constructions of South Korean advertising by the people who create it, and who, this chapter shows, have 70



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been among those most invested in aligning commercial advertising with public service, albeit rarely realizing this dream. Mad Men portrays advertising as a cynical profession that panders to human follies, albeit with cleverness and style. The series’ suave protagonist, creative director Don Draper, pronounces, for example, “Advertising is based on one thing: happiness. And do you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of a road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing is okay. You are okay” (S1E1). Draper and his advertising colleagues are at the top of the world. They wear tailored suits, frequent oyster bars, savor three-martini lunches, and indulge in extramarital affairs. While giving a window into the glamorous world of Madison Avenue in the 1960s, the TV series also invites the viewer to appreciate how admen, and occasionally adwomen, sold their clever advertising campaigns to clients, many of those stories inspired by actual advertising campaigns. In the first episode, for example, Draper “comes up” with the famous “It’s Toasted” tagline for Lucky Strike cigarettes. The ads and people celebrated in Ad Genius Yi Thae-baek would be out of place in the posh world of Mad Men. Consider a pithy pronouncement by Draper’s South Korean peer and the titular character’s mentor, Ma Chin-ka: “We are admen [kwanggojaengi]. That grievance, that unfairness, pour it into an ad, sublimate it into an ad, and show it to the whole world. Why? Because it’s the mission of an adman” (E6). The quote would perhaps resonate more intuitively if said not about advertising but about poetry. Unlike Mad Men’s irresistible womanizer Draper, Ma is an avuncular type: overweight, unshaven, usually in a baseball hat and a sloppy checkered shirt. Throughout the series, Ma preaches about how the job of an adman is to tell the truth. His own advertising career short-­circuited when he blew the whistle on an unscrupulous client. Shunned in the mainstream advertising world, Ma resigns himself to the job of neighborhood sign maker, and his creative talent makes any business whose sign he designs boom. The plot revolves around Ma’s young apprentice, Yi Thae-baek, who is negotiating his own ambitions and principled stance on advertising, in competition with an established agency, which incidentally employs Yi’s former girlfriend, Yi’s current romantic interest, and his rival for her affections. While the melodramatic plotline follows the conventions of K-dramas, Ad Genius features actual advertising campaigns

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by Yi Jeseok, the real-life inspiration for the Yi Thae-baek character, and commends his commitment to public service advertising. The TV series foreground pro bono work that facilitates fundraising for the homeless, encourages amenities for the disabled, and blocks the construction of a polluting plant. When the commercial effects of advertising are acknowledged, it is usually for low-budget advertising that reverses the fortunes of a struggling small business. More than marketing communication, advertising is shown advancing social justice and rewarding the worthy. It was such noble aspirations that inspired South Korean advertising workers, from celebrity creative directors to regular advertising agency employees. By fleshing out their lifeworlds, this chapter begins to unwrap the contests over advertising in postmillennial South Korea from the site of advertising production. I examine advertising practitioners’ professional self-understanding and ambivalent relations with clients to uncover synergies and clashes among marketing, cultural, and situational logics that bring about much-admired “unlikely” humanist commercials, such as “Toward People,” as well as unimaginative celebrity endorsements and hard-sell ads. Advertising practitioners are approached here as cultural producers and public intellectuals within their milieu. It is true that there are significant points of collaboration between ad makers and their clients. However, to reduce ad makers to unequivocal champions of capital— which is commonly done even by ignoring to distinguish them from advertisers terminologically—is to simplify the processes in the course of which particular advertising campaigns are produced.1 Furthermore, just as advertising itself needs to be grasped as an embedded social phenomenon, so local advertising workers and their practices must be understood through the local history of advertising, industrial relations, and occupational hierarchies, as well as the broader cultural-historical context, as illustrated by the contrast between Mad Men and Ad Genius. South Korean ad makers, though undeniably inspired by the global discourse of advertising as a creative artistic medium, developed their own ideal of good advertising. This ideal reflects the cultural logic and lionizes advertising that approximates socially engaged art. While few South Korean ads live up to such standards, the discourse on advertising from Ad Genius is not that far a cry from media interviews of accomplished creative directors, my own conversations with regular advertising workers,



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and discussions in advertising students’ online groups. Incidentally, South Korean ad people were among the harshest critics of mainstream South Korean advertising. Detailing and historicizing these dispositions explains how they have contributed to upholding the publicness ideal of South Korean advertising. After sketching the local history of the advertising profession in the next section, I show that the professional aspirations and occupational ideologies of South Korean advertising practitioners uncertainly aligned with the commercial interests of their clients, by expounding the advertising philosophy and career of the star creative director behind many classics of South Korean humanist advertising, Park Woong-hyun (Pak Ung-hyŏn, b. 1961). In the second half of the chapter, I explore how junior and midcareer advertising professionals assert and concede the dreams that brought them to advertising amid the prohibitive realities of advertising work, based on my participant observation from December 2009 to January 2010 at a major South Korean advertising agency (hereafter, the Agency). In conclusion, I return to Yi Jeseok and his unusual career, the real-life inspiration for the Ad Genius Yi Thae-baek TV series, to underscore the ultimate impossibility of the advertising ideal that drives South Korean advertising practitioners—that pursuing it to the logical end implies nothing short of transforming advertising into a noncommercial public service genre.

Fr om Huck ste r to A dv e rtising Ad d i ct Historically in South Korea, advertising had been held in low esteem. Advertising agents were linked to merchants, the lowest class in the traditional social hierarchy, and referred to as kwanggojaengi, or huckster, a name formed by combing the word for “advertising,” kwanggo, and the suffix jaengi or chaengi. The suffix connotes low esteem for someone’s personality or occupation—for example, a stubborn person is kojipchaengi (stubborn-jaengi) and a hack writer is kŭlchaengi (letter-jaengi). “The one who in the previous life gathered bad karma, or betrayed one’s country, or has committed crimes in three generations is born a kwanggojaengi,” a saying went. John C. Stickler, American founder of one of the

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first advertising agencies in South Korea, recalled during the fifth AsiaPacific Regional Marketing Conference in 1971, “When I began in the advertising business in Seoul in 1964, I immediately learned two things: first, that advertising is a bad word here (about the worst name you can call someone is ‘kwangojangi’ [sic])[,] and, secondly, that businessmen I spoke to had no concept of what advertising is or how it works.”2 According to common logic, if a commodity needed to be advertised, it was an indicator of a flaw—why did it fail to sell naturally? Shin In Sup recalled how in 1965 he, hired as an advertising editor for a Seoul newspaper via an acquaintance, thought advertising to be a kind of editorial work and was stunned to be told that kwanggojaengi were not allowed to the newspaper’s editorial office without an invitation. As Shin reminisced, “An educated man was ashamed to admit that he was in advertising” (Shin and Sŏ 2011, 340). Arguably this lowly status was among the factors that motivated South Korean admen—few women were in advertising at the time—to take a proactive role in advancing the respectability of their profession. Shin himself was among advertising’s advocates. Fluent in Japanese and English, he liaised with his counterparts at advertising associations abroad and participated in the founding of the Korean chapter of the International Advertising Association in 1968. He translated works on advertising into Korean and penned Korea’s first books on best advertising practices. Since 1969, winning advertisements from international competitions were screened in Seoul, dazzling the public and stirring creative ambitions in South Korean advertising practitioners. The industry’s credibility was also enhanced when international companies began advertising in the South Korean market in the late 1960s and the chaebol established their own (“in-house”) advertising agencies. Toward the end of the 1970s, the neutral term kwanggoin (“advertising person”) replaced the derogatory kwanggojaengi. Still, advertising was far from the top choice of employment for university graduates, because of its lasting associations with hustling and its structurally subservient position vis-à-vis clients and managers from other divisions of the same chaebol. Reluctance to work in advertising was particularly acute for those who were entering the job market in the 1980s, the so-called 386 Generation. The number, a play on the Intel 386 computer chip popular in the mid-1990s when the term was coined, sig-



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nified that, at that time, the 386 Generation were in their thirties (“3”), after being radicals during their student days in the 1980s (“8”), having been born in the 1960s (“6”). In their student days, many of the 386ers were involved in anti-authoritarian activism and espoused the values of social democracy—some even Marxism-Leninism.3 Versed in critiquing capitalism, they experienced advertising work as a painful compromise. Such was the initial attitude of creative director Park Woong-hyun, the advertising guru of twenty-first-century South Korea. In his many media interviews, Park described himself as a typical 386er, who, though not an active participant in the underground struggles, absorbed enough of the 1980s zeitgeist to see advertising as unworthy. He graduated from the Newspaper and Broadcasting Department at Korea University, which is known for its politically active student body. Editor of the campus newspaper during his student days, Park wished to be a journalist. Yet he failed recruitment exams at newspapers and broadcasting companies multiple times and eventually took an advertising job for lack of other options. In December 1987 Park joined Cheil Communications, an affiliate of Samsung and one of South Korea’s oldest advertising agencies. The position likely came with rather agreeable conditions of employment, as most white-collar chaebol jobs did at the time. Yet, Park recalls, “as someone who went to the university in the 1980s, I was embarrassed to go into advertising,” his shame reminiscent of Shin’s twenty years earlier.4 As Park told his story, for three years he was in denial about the fact that he became an adman. He frustrated his colleagues with intentional ineptness and socialized primarily with former classmates who got jobs as journalists. Park’s attitude radically changed, however, after he had an epiphany: advertising, too, was “media content” and, if he did not think about things narrowly, at an advertising agency he was producing media, just as he had dreamed. As he told it, “But one day it hit me. Advertising, too, is a force that can penetrate to the very essence, it is a job that requires analysis and logic.”5 Park’s other move to make peace with being an adman was to reconceptualize advertising as a medium with a potential social impact and in that regard not that different from journalism, his dream job. He recalled, “I thought, ‘Let’s make advertising with social values.’ So I set the course on value-focused advertising. At times a journalist cannot do better than an adman.”6 Journalism for Park was a means to the end of becoming a public intellectual. Once he realized that the medium of ­advertising

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allowed for that too, he turned into an advertising zealot and went on to produce a dozen of South Korea’s favorite advertising campaigns. Though Park himself presented his advertising philosophy as born out of his generational sensibilities, his take on advertising was not that different from the public discourse of the early 1980s, which advocated public interest commercial advertising, as discussed in the previous chapter. The admen even of the previous generations—notably Pak U-dŏk (b. 1953), who famously declared, “One good advertisement can change the world” (Pak and Yi 2001)—also waxed lyrical about advertising’s potential for progressive social intervention. The 386ers who landed in advertising rediscovered that conceptualization and, driven by their ambivalence about the commercial side of the endeavor, took it to a new level. Generation 386’s entering the advertising profession was an important factor in consolidating the cultural logic of South Korean advertising. Park’s new infatuation with advertising coincided with it becoming a glamorous, desirable job in the mid-1990s. There were multiple reasons for the turnaround. The industry’s trend for humanist, sentimental campaigns drew attention from the media,7 and advertising professionals being interviewed took the opportunity to present advertising as an artistic form and paint themselves as mavericks whose creative sensibilities were miles ahead of the mainstream. Reimagined as a cultural endeavor, advertising work began to appeal to artistically inclined people who fancied the advertising industry as the space where they could make a living off their creative talents. Among the midcareer ad makers I interviewed (who entered the profession in the 1990s), many came from other creative professions, turning to advertising after getting frustrated with the difficulties of making a living as an artist, an independent filmmaker, a poet, a novelist, a rock musician, or an orchestra conductor. Advertising also began to draw young Koreans who wished to pursue individuality and self-realization, rebelling against stifling corporate discipline. Starting from the generation who entered the profession in the 1990s, many advertising workers presented themselves as unfit for regular corporate employment because of their impulsive temperament, or, as one interviewee put it, “emotional style of communication,” or their disregard for a structured work environment. Advertising’s other attraction was that it promised more meritocratic success than the usual office occupations—one either had good ideas or not, so talent could help bypass the usual corporate hierarchies.



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The new fascination with advertising was also fueled by the rise of discourse on creativity. If South Korea’s early economic growth was ­industry-based and relied on the export of manufactured products, by the 1980s the competitive advantage of cheap labor was being diluted. Economic planners prescribed a switch to a knowledge-based economy, and creativity was the key to enter it.8 Insofar as TV productions are a barometer of societal attitudes, a hallmark of advertising’s metamorphosis into a hot occupation was the 1994 TV series Coffee, Copy, Nosebleed (k’ŏp’i, k’ap’i, k’op’i), which portrayed a group of young ad workers as rebels against the system (Lee 2013, 91). Far from provoking uneasy soul-searching, by the twenty-first century employment at advertising agencies became furiously competitive, especially after the 1998 labor reforms, a part of restructuring imposed by the International Monetary Fund, spelled the end of almost-guaranteed lifelong comfortable employment for university graduates. Open recruitment calls became fewer and drew hundreds of enthusiastic, qualified candidates. In 2003, such a call by the advertising agency Phoenix Communications attracted a record 467 applicants for each entry-level position (Lee 2013, 81). In 2008–2013, the competition rate for well-established agencies usually exceeded one hundred applicants per spot. Advertising was no longer an occupation to be embarrassed of. Nevertheless, the new popularity of advertising jobs did not completely cancel out the sense of inferiority that the profession inspired in its early adepts. In a sociological account of the globalization of South Korean advertising in the 2000s, Kee Woong Lee (2013) explains that, while advertising workers all had university diplomas, they often hailed from arts and humanities majors, which were decidedly less prestigious in strict Korean hierarchies than those of law, engineering, or business. The humanities usually attract those who have not scored high enough in placement tests to enter more prestigious departments. Lee goes so far as to declare that in Korea “the arts and humanities emerge as disciplines with built-in marginality since they contribute little, if anything, to upward mobility” (78). However passionate about their jobs, advertising people had to negotiate those lingering prejudices as they interacted with their clients and media, whose decision makers were often older, from business or engineering backgrounds, and not buying into the legend of the creative. Associated status anxiety likely contributed to South Korean

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ad makers’ penchant for grand pronouncements on advertising’ creative power and social contributions. A symptom of this self-conscious glamour, the term kwanggojaengi returned in the late 1990s as a proud self-designation for advertising professionals. A kwanggojaengi was no longer a lowly huckster but an eccentric driven by obsessive passion for advertising, someone who could not help making advertising. The new discourse around the kwanggojaengi asserted the mesmerizing nature of advertising, whose affective aesthetics produced not docile consumerist subjects, as the usual critiques of advertising have it, but rather obsessed ad makers who hunger to master advertising powers. Many advertising workers talked about their occupation as a destiny and their relation with advertising as an addiction. Some thirty years after discovering his interest in advertising, Park Woonghyun wrote, “Just like a bird that through no will of its own was born to live flying, so I, through no will of my own, was born and live making advertisements” (Park and Kang 2010, 269). For “advertising genius” Yi Jeseok, addiction is a necessary condition for strong advertising: “In boxing, if you hit the temple from the chin, the brain is shaken. I want to make advertising that is as shocking as that . . . . To make such advertisements, one must become an advertising addict. Because people who do it for fun can’t bear it.”9 The irresistible pull of advertising work dominated the discourse of South Korean advertising professionals in their forties and younger, who often presented their occupation choice as a sudden recognition of a calling. I heard many renditions of the narrative that hinged on the moment when the teller was confronted with an overwhelmingly impressive advertisement—the winner of an international competition they incidentally saw on TV or an emotionally intense Korean advertisement— and then resolved to enter the advertising profession. A frequent trope in those stories—which reminded me of the “relentless sense of inevitability” in the accounts of becoming a shaman (Kendall 2009, 74)—was about the teller trying to work in another industry and failing to fit in. The pride in the obsessive-compulsive relation to advertising is clear in a call for new members of an online café for advertising students that invited “advertising addicts who cannot hold back advertising, even if they can hold shit.”10 This zealotry for advertising was conveyed by the English name of the advertising professionals’ association, Advertising Is All. As the official



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website introduced it, “AIA is a gathering of advertising professionals for whom ‘advertising is all’ [in English] literally, who love advertising, for whom there is nothing to do without advertising, for whom advertising is all.”11 Such pronouncements were reproduced on many a blog by advertising practitioners, regular netizens, and particularly advertising students. It was not advertising’s capacity to sell commodities and make profits for advertisers that inspired the fanaticism of kwanggojaengi. Rather they were drawn to the raw affective power of advertising as a creative medium and intoxicated by the opportunity to harness this power, often downplaying the question of what that power was a means to. When the question did arise, many kwanggojaengi highlighted public service announcements or praised commercial campaigns that approximated them. While overlapping with the global ideologies of creative advertising that valorize creativity, South Korean discourse, rather than celebrating creativity for creativity’s sake, tended to subordinate it to a grand cause, be it a particular social intervention or a general sentimental education through humanist messages. Characteristically, many a participant of an online advertising student café I monitored in 2009–2010 declared in their selfintroduction that their heart’s desire was to make noncommercial public service announcements. This lack of interest in advertising’s key task was modeled by none other than Park Woong-hyun, who transformed from an unwilling adman into arguably the most vocal champion of South Korean advertising in the new millennium.

A dv e rtising a s “C ommuni c atio n w i th th e M a sse s” Creative director Park Woong-hyun was a larger-than-life figure in South Korean advertising of the 2000s. Classics of the humanist advertising genre, his commercials were known and loved by almost everyone. He mastered the sentimental aesthetic of warm, sweet attention to everyday life while often addressing pertinent social issues. Departing from the mainstream of South Korean advertising, Park rarely deployed celebrities, nor did he attempt to endear advertised brands by forcing associations with luxury and prestige. Rather than stirring consumerist desire for a fetishized commodity and exploiting status insecurities, Park indulged

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his audience with strong emotions and often neglected to talk about the advertising product altogether. Among Park’s celebrated campaigns were a series of ads for Korea Telecom FreeTel in 2001–2002 that challenged hierarchies and stereotypes. For example, one episode, under the slogan “Age Is Just a Number,” showed the story of how university students mistook a middle-aged man, a fellow-student, for a professor—the point driven home when a relatively young (but still male) professor entered the auditorium. Another commercial celebrated the first woman admitted to the South Korean army with the tagline, “I acknowledge the difference. But I challenge the discrimination.” Park’s signature humanist aesthetic comes off in the “Toward People” series, whose award-winning “Hero” episode opened the introduction. In addition to producing one hit campaign after another, Park penned several general-audience books, one of which, cowritten with a journalist, Advertising through the Humanities: The Techniques of Creativity and Communication of Creative Director Park Woong-hyun (Park and Kang 2010), became the bible of South Korean advertising practitioners. Park’s pronouncements on advertising, also voiced through his many media interviews, were admired, studied, scrutinized, memorized, and repeated by many a South Korean advertising practitioner and student. The cult-like following Park inspired is reflected in how advertising students referred to him as Pak Ung-hyŏn-nŭnim, loosely translated as Lord Park Woong-hyun—a pun that added to Park’s name the respective suffix nŭnim usually saved for god (hanŭnim) (Kim C. 2013, 10). An example of the eccentricities Park provoked, in the fall of 2010 one student made the news by attempting to ride his bicycle around Seoul to draw the logo of Park’s employer, TBWA Korea, with his itinerary, which he charted with a GPS-tracking phone app. (After seventeen years at Samsung, Park moved to the foreign-owned “hot” independent agency.12) The student told the journalists that his dream was to work alongside Park because, formerly a physics major, he resolved to become a kwanggojaengi after seeing the “Hero” episode of Park’s “Toward People” campaign.13 Park’s fans were said to frequent the part of Seoul where he was known to take strolls when coming up with ideas, to get a glimpse of him and to emulate his creative process.



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At the heart of Park’s advertising philosophy was a desire for sentimental communion with his audience. As he explains in his book, Advertising is the diary of the century. Advertising that cannot read the spirit of the times does not provoke emotional identification [konggamdae], and there is no reason to exist for advertising without emotional identification. Moreover, advertising is a personal diary. It must know the desires and realities, the hopes and despairs of all people, from babies to elders. Only then it can open their hearts [maŭm] by conversing about the truth with them. The worst is the advertising that fails to open the hearts of advertising recipients [suyongcha] . . . . Successful advertising has used the insight from being the diary of the century and the diary of a person to communicate with the world. (Park and Kang 2010, 52)

In this quote, the marketer’s dream, to know the desires of all people, appears as a means to a communicative and affective goal, not a commercial one. For Park, advertising was an exercise in grasping human nature and expressing it back in ways that revealed something poignant about everyday life and stirred emotions. Tellingly, replacing “advertising” with “journalism” or even “novel writing” would not disrupt the coherency of the paragraph, whereas replacing it with “marketing,” or “PR,” advertising’s closest kin in the business world, would. Indeed, literature came up frequently in Park’s media interviews, as he often advised aspiring ad people—and anyone interested in creativity—to look for insight into human nature in classics, such as Albert Camus’ The Stranger and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Journalists noted that Park’s office was full of notes and books and would have been more appropriate for a professor than for an adman.14 While most of Park’s campaigns were quite successful in terms of sales and other marketing metrics, he rarely commented on their business results. Corporate bottom lines, marketing niches, consumer research—those topics were hardly ever mentioned. Park’s priorities manifest when he writes in the book, “My interest is always not in [winning] advertising festival prizes but in communication with the masses [taejung], with the Korean masses” (Park and Kang 2010, 90). This pronouncement echoes Pak Hyo-sin’s article for children through which I explained the metaphor of “advertising, the flower of capitalism” in the introduction. Park does not even consider selling

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c­ ommodities as a possible motive for doing advertising work. By rejecting festival prizes as a goal, Park also rejects the ideal of creative advertising, which the transatlantic ideologies of the advertising profession lionize and reward through awards at industry competitions such as the Cannes Lions (cf. Nixon 2003). Park does share in the vision of advertising as an artistic endeavor, yet his vision is not of creativity for creativity’s sake. By asserting his philosophy of advertising as speaking to the masses about the truth of the times, Park likens advertising to socially engaged art. Park’s evocation of “the masses” is telling of the ambition and ambivalence of South Korean advertising. “Masses” is a broader category than “consumers,” the usual addressee of advertising campaigns. Mass collectivity could be depoliticized and channeled into consumption, as critiques of mass society would have it. But masses could also be mobilized into political subjectivity and social action. For student activists of Park’s youth, Korean masses—though termed as politically charged minjung, not neutral taejung—were the subject of history, whose awakening was the path toward toppling the military dictatorships and overcoming South Korean post / neocolonial predicament (Lee 2007).15 What Park attempted, however, was the sentimental education of those masses, as his campaigns cleared away antagonistic politics and emphasized everyday humanism as a remedy for social ills. Speaking to the masses, Park positions himself as a somewhat patronizing public intellectual, who uses “analysis and logic” to diagnose “desires and realities, the hopes and despairs of all people, from babies to elders,” and to intervene through affective advertising. The above-quoted interview phrase—“At times a journalist cannot do better than an adman” (An 2011)—is telling of this ambition, which, I suggest, is central to the advertising profession in South Korea. Rather than individual predisposition, I read Park’s sentimentalism and intellectual noblesse oblige as indeed conveying “the spirit of the times,” namely the transformations of the 386 Generation, in many spheres the most influential group in South Korean society since the 1990s. As Young-a Park argues, in post-authoritarian South Korea “the moral authority of those who participated in the 1980s social movement [Generation 386] began to emerge as an important form of symbolic capital, especially in cultural institutions” (2014, 20). The generational critical orientation transformed from a weapon to challenge oppressive social structures into a means of career advancement. While the 386ers



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continued to profess leftist values, they took mainstream middle-class jobs and made careers in mass media, universities, civic organizations, and the government. In a sense, Park’s advertising philosophy brought the contradictions lived by 386ers into advertising, where, as in many other spheres in the 2000s, that generation was a defining political and aesthetic influence.16

Th e A spir atio ns of Re gul ar A dv e rtising Pr acti tio n er s Among the first things that I noticed at the Agency on my first day as an intern was a portrait of Karl Marx. About the last thing I expected to encounter, a page-size printout was pinned in a cubicle of one of my teammates-to-be, at the place where other employees placed posters of completed projects, particularly if those included celebrities, or a barrage of Post-it notes, or photos of their families. The owner of the cubicle, Director Ryu, explained that Marx was there to help him come up with ideas for advertising campaigns—and thus began our many conversations about advertising, in South Korea and in general, but also about cultural studies, which Director Ryu studied while earning a master’s degree in communications. I detail Director Ryu’s professional path and worldviews to ground my discussion of the lifeworlds of regular South Korean advertising practitioners. While celebrity creative directors play a disproportionate role in articulating occupational ideologies and fixing aesthetic canons, it is junior and particularly midcareer ad makers, such as Director Ryu, whose everyday negotiations of corporate hierarchies, professional values, and personal commitments play the key role in reproducing the cultural logic oriented toward public interest, on the one hand, and, on the other, allowing for the crass commercialism of mainstream South Korean advertising. When we met in December 2009, Director Ryu was in his late thirties and had worked in advertising for about a decade. He was an account executive (AE), not a creative. The main job of account executives is to liaise with clients and steer advertising campaigns from conception to completion. Internationally, it is creatives who occupy the romanticized imaginary of the advertising profession, and animosities between artistic

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creatives and prosaic AEs is a common plot in advertising workplaces all over the world (e.g., Nixon 2003, 54–55).17 In South Korea, however, the divide between the two advertising occupations was not that stark. South Korean AEs not only schmooze with clients but also contribute to developing concepts, make suggestions for creatives, and direct the overall creative process. Neither Director Ryu nor other AEs I got to know thought of themselves as lesser kwanggojaengi because they were not creatives. Director Ryu’s was a typical story for South Korean advertising professionals who entered the industry in the 1990s. He resolved to become an adman when a first-year undergrad, after incidentally seeing a collection of advertisements that won the Cannes Lions Awards. Director Ryu knew right away that he wanted to make a commercial as mesmerizing and win an international prize himself, he recalled. Having worked in advertising for most of his professional life, he still was fascinated by it, and avidly followed international developments in the creative field. So deep was his commitment that, when on overseas trips, he would try to visit the offices of famous advertising agencies. He told me how in Paris he sneaked into the building of an advertising agency whose campaigns he admired, and almost got arrested for trespassing. But Director Ryu was also steeped in the local advertising ideologies that demanded that creativity be subordinated to a social message. A fan of Park Woong-hyun, Director Ryu quoted by heart from Advertising through the Humanities. He held dear a memory of seeing Park in person, when Director Ryu’s agency and Park’s TBWA Korea were competing for the same account. Director Ryu did not think his own agency stood a chance, but he considered it an honor to run and lose against Park. As with other South Korean ad makers I interviewed, Director Ryu’s investment in the local cultural logic of advertising stood out when we talked about the most memorable advertising campaigns in whose creation he had participated. The campaign that Director Ryu was most proud of was for rice snacks produced from Korean-grown rice by one of the chaebol. By and large indifferent to the economic performance of the advertiser, Director Ryu saw the campaign as his chance to help rice farmers, whose hard lives are notorious in South Korea. In another interview, Director Ryu talked about how he felt an enormous responsibility when he was working on an account for an ice cream franchise because he felt it was up to him to make or break the livelihoods of small entrepreneurs:



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In the case of Hongbok Confectionaries, there is a [franchise] brand of premium ice cream, Märchen. I have a particular attachment to this brand in comparison with other items because, in the case of Märchen, regular people set up a franchise shop . . . . Each ice cream café is a property of regular people [ilban saramdŭl] . . . . So depending on how I do [advertising], the livelihood of these people can go in or out. For these people, it took a lot of money to set up an ice cream café. Some people could have invested all their retirement package into this. They need to earn a lot of money from their café, if they do a franchise. They also need to pay Hongbok Confectionaries. So depending on how well I do, it can be decided whether those people earn money and live well or whether they don’t. For research purposes, I dropped by a few franchise shops and introduced myself, “I am the one in charge of Märchen advertising,” and the owners pleaded with really honest, really desperate expression, “Please make advertising well so that our business goes well.” So I could not help feeling responsible. “I should try even harder,” I thought. “It is not just about the sales of the Hongbok Confectionaries, but I can definitely have an influence on people like that.” When I think that, I cannot be lazy.18

This lengthy quote illustrates how for Director Ryu advertising was a means of intervening on behalf of people with unstable livelihoods, and how an opportunity for such an intervention turned into a responsibility. Where Park Woong-hyun was making advertising to communicate heart-to-heart with abstract “Korean masses,” Director Ryu started with a calculus of whom his advertising could help live better, and he was motivated to harness creativity for the benefit of the underprivileged. Superficially, this logic overlaps with the usual justification for advertising, which asserts that selling more commodities is good for businesses, therefore it is good for the economy, therefore it is good for everyone. However, the emphasis on helping the disadvantaged—not making money for the franchise owner or for the rice snack manufacturer—frames advertising as a tool for helping those who are not doing well in the market competition rather than for the enrichment of particular entrepreneurs or companies. Almost all advertising workers I talked to had such a story about advertising that pursued a greater social good, either helping the underprivileged or promoting emancipatory social values. Perhaps the most controversial one was by a team of female creatives from Daehong

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­ ommunications who fought patriarchy with sex-appeal advertising. C They were proud of their work for the “Cool” soju campaign, which featured a young singer performing a sexually suggestive dance and became controversial for its copy, which implied that it was okay for women to “think casual” (the slogan of the campaign) about sex. The women behind the campaign aspired to challenge patriarchal values and assert agentive female sexuality as a new norm. The Cool soju itself was not particularly successful, but the topic picked by the creative team provoked online debates about gender and sexuality, something that female creatives saw as desperately needed (Fedorenko 2015). However self-serving, these stories of advertising improving the world align with the cultural logic of South Korean advertising and also elucidate how the occupational ideologies of South Korean advertising workers compel them to glorify their job as contributing to something grander than corporate profits. Their investments in social justice were in stark contrast to those of British admen, who, as revealed by Nixon (2003), justified their work by its artistic, creative contributions to society. It would be a misrepresentation to say that it was only the opportunities to address social issues that compelled kwanggojaengi, of course. I already noted the perceived coolness of the advertising occupation among young people. Perhaps as importantly, the creative part of advertising work was satisfyingly challenging on its own terms, and the discourse of advertising as addiction lives on the “axis of pain and pleasure” characteristic of creative jobs in general (McRobbie 2004). As many of my interviewees mentioned, the pleasure also came from being able to see the products of one’s work out there in the world—aired on TV, for example—and point them out to one’s family and friends. Few whitecollar jobs offer such opportunities for seeing the results of one’s efforts. Still, in my interviews those private joys of advertising work tended to be subsumed by grander narratives about advertising improving the world. This emphasis on advertising’s social contributions among regular ad makers also needs to be situated against the burdensome conditions of advertising work and the decidedly subordinate position of advertising people in their interactions with their clients—the realities that are detailed in the following two sections. If for Park “Korean masses,” the addressee of his advertising, were to a great degree “others,” Director Ryu and his junior and midcareer colleagues themselves identified with



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“regular people” for whom, and for whose sake, they were making their ­advertising—young white-collar employees whose ideas were rejected by senior “neckties,” ambitious women whose aspirations were blocked by societal sexism, salary men dreaming of becoming franchisees after retirement. It is by detailing these conditions and hierarchies that I explain why ad makers were often reluctant to identify with either their corporate clients or the global ideologies of the creative.

Th e E v e ryday R e al itie s o f A dv e rtising Wo rk The advertising agency of my internship was decades-old and affiliated with a chaebol. It occupied three floors in an office tower in downtown Seoul and employed about two hundred people. Before my internship, I had visited the offices of other agencies in Seoul, mostly outposts of international networks, and it was surprising to me that the Agency’s space did not convey the cult of creativity that was so obvious in other places. No pianos in the reception room, no fancy artwork, no house plants decorated with thank you cards from grateful clients, no framed quotes from legendary admen—not even a decorated reception area with which to mesmerize the visitor with the best creative work of the Agency. Some of the trophies were displayed in the CEO’s office, but many others collected dust in one of the meeting rooms, together with old reports, books, and unwanted stationary. The Agency looked like any other office—a land of cubicles, organized into aisles occupied by teams of five or six people. Some aisles had a big, usually cluttered, table in the middle for holding meetings and for browsing newspapers and the Agency’s newsletter. I was assigned to an AE team of five people, one woman and four men, one of whom was Director Ryu. Advertising practitioners’ everyday was no different from the usual grind of office work. The tempo was often frantic because of frequent competitions for accounts and the tight deadlines habitually imposed by advertisers. Rather than courting creative insights, advertising workers invested significant energy in supplicating before clients and navigating internal hierarchies, which, despite the popular image of the advertising industry as a domain of meritocratic opportunity and a haven for

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nonconformist types, were not that different from regular South Korean offices.19 Perhaps the biggest difference was that kwanggojaengi wore casual—and often rather eccentric—clothing when no meetings with clients were planned. The legend of the iconoclast creative was mostly hype for outsiders. The exhausting demands of advertising work are captured in an essay by a former copywriter (Pae 1996). Written as the diary of a kwanggojaengi, the piece follows him through the day as he wakes up at 5:54 a.m., gets to the office through Seoul traffic jams by 7:30 a.m., and starts his morning by taking headache medicine. The reader follows the kwanggojaengi to a meeting with a client at 10 a.m., when his proposal gets rejected and the advertiser demands a new campaign idea within a day. Back to the office by 1 p.m., the kwanggojaengi gets scolded by his boss for not being assertive enough with the advertiser. In the afternoon the protagonist stops by his house only to leave again to prepare for a shoot with a celebrity who could fit it in her schedule only between 9 p.m. and 9 a.m. After everything is set up for the shoot at 10 p.m., the protagonist goes home again to rest for three to four hours and then heads back to the office to the editing room. The soul-crushing realities of advertising work are emphasized by the protagonist’s asides about how much he craves the company of his wife, whom he does not see much because of the demands of his job. The essay would not be a true description of the Agency’s routines, but such packed schedules would occur at least a few times a month. My acquaintances in the Agency habitually worked (unpaid) overtime but rarely talked about it, perhaps accepting it as a standard work practice at an advertising agency, and, for that matter, in most South Korean offices. Officially the workday lasted from 9 a.m. until 6 p.m., but even on regular days those in the office would stay until about seven. Some of this overtime was indeed necessary. But staying late was also often a performance to demonstrate one’s zeal to the superiors, who might be staying late to work on their own unfinished tasks, or to impress their own superiors, or to kill time before after-hours meetings with clients and colleagues.20 Once when I was having lunch with Director Ryu, he was eating uncharacteristically little, and when I asked, he said that he was not hungry because he had had a really big breakfast, since he had slept in a nearby sauna, having stayed in the office until dawn trying to come up with ideas.



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On another occasion, the head of our team, when sending me home at 6 p.m., sighed deeply at the prospect of having dinner with clients in the evening, saying that it would be his third night of work-related drinking in a row and he would rather go home and sleep. The normalized crunch time was balanced by occasional lulls, when Director Ryu, for example, could take off to watch a movie at a theater nearby after the lunch break. To me the office culture at the Agency came off most vividly during the lunch hour. There was a food court in the basement, but most people went to one of the myriad mom-and-pop restaurants that had mushroomed at the back of the building. As most businesses had their lunch between 12 and 1, it was of strategic importance to get there early in order to secure a spot, so the lunch exodus started around 11:30. During my internship, I usually had lunch with my team. Even though I consider myself a fast eater, I struggled to keep pace with the male employees, who gulped down their food within ten minutes so that we were back in the office around 12:20. They could spend the rest of the lunch hour napping in their chairs with headsets on—to block out noises as well as their coworkers’ snoring. Occasionally the slumber party was interrupted by a ringing phone, which often provoked profuse swearing about the caller being thoughtless enough to disturb people during the lunch break, the only quiet time in the day. As much as the Agency’s employees relished their lunch hour, when things were busy, the team would order takeout or even have instant ramen at their desks, forgoing the lunch nap. Entertaining clients was an important aspect of advertising work, about which I learned only anecdotally. I was never invited for those outings, perhaps due to a number of factors—my gender, my foreignness, and confidentiality of information exchanged. As I pieced from conversations and interviews, mostly with people from other agencies, such gatherings involved a few rounds of drinking and often ended in salons with female entertainers. Such practices are typical of South Korean business culture. At the same time, the exclusive masculinity of such events also echoed the scripts of socializing among advertising workers elsewhere (Nixon 2003, 139–159.)21 I was told by advertising workers at the Agency and other advertising companies that, in comparison with independent agencies, which do not have a mother-chaebol client to fall back on, the Agency was not busy at all, they had few late-night meetings, and what seemed hectic to me was

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leisurely in comparison with other advertising workplaces. Many told me that the Agency was “very traditional” because it was old and affiliated with a chaebol; following its chaebol’s corporate culture, the Agency “oldfashionably” valued long-term employment and stressed teamwork over individual competition. As one of the copywriters told me, praising the values of the Agency, few people got fired even if they were not particularly good at their job, yet her colleague, who was present at the conversation, objected that because of that many young talented recruits found the Agency boring and moved to hotter agencies, such as TBWA Korea. Despite the reputation of advertising agencies as meritocratic workplaces, office hierarchies were in plain sight during my internship. Office power dynamics were laid bare, for example, during preparation meetings for competitive presentations on prospective clients’ accounts, where the task force of eight to twelve account executives and creatives proposed individual ideas for the competitive pitch and debated them. I observed two such meetings during my fieldwork: one for home water purifiers, whose manufacturer wanted to increase its market share, and one for a funeral insurance company, whose main problem was public mistrust in such services. During both meetings, the ideas of my coworkers were evaluated, dismissed, and rejected by the division head, who did not mince his criticism. In his fifties, the division head always wore suits becoming to his senior-managerial station (though he was spotted in neckties of the most extravagant colors and patterns). He was rarely seen in the office. When he did appear, it was usually in relation to competitive pitches or client visits. To get to his private office in the corner, he paced in a kingly manner by our cubicles, apparently not registering the existence of anyone below the team-head level in the office hierarchy. During presentations, he oozed impatience: he would quickly glance at a power point slide as it appeared and then turn his back toward the screen, staring at the wall with the most bored look as the presenter was explaining. During the discussion, even though the floor was open, the division head dominated the debate, and only one or two members of the task force, who, all men, were the closest to the division head in age, volunteered their opinions, mostly paraphrasing what the division head had said—which he himself pointed out with irritation on a few occasions. The glass ceiling for women was somewhat cracked by the spread of gender equality discourse in South Korea, the creative demands of advertising work, and the impossibility of faking good ideas, but it certainly had



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not shattered. Most visibly, at the time of my internship, even though the Agency employed many women, all senior positions were held by men, and while some women held above-entry-level ranks, none of them were team heads, the first managerial position. I was told that was because the gender equality policies had started not that long ago, and women simply had not had enough time to progress through the ranks. Indeed, about three months after I finished my participant observation, some women were promoted to managerial positions.22 In any case, those promotions were linked to years of service, not creative achievements, contrary to the popular discourse of advertising careers built on brilliant ideas. My data corroborates Kee Woong Lee’s (2013, 10) conclusion that for South Korean big agencies “creative competitiveness is less important than maintaining order, the familiar practices for all parties involved.” At the Agency, much of the advertising work was about producing safe and dull campaigns, supplicating before superiors, and gradually moving through the ranks. These working conditions hardly encouraged elitist identities in South Korean advertising practitioners, which sets them apart from their international counterparts. Nixon (2003), for example, reports on the UK creatives who cultivated uppity identities above and beyond the oppressive routines of corporate employment, and the Indian admen in William Mazzarella’s (2003) account also positioned themselves as a cultured, sophisticated upper crust, invested in their difference from the consumers they marketed to. South Korean junior and midcareer kwanggojaengi more readily identified with office employees and small-time businesspeople— the so-called sŏmin, sometimes translated as “grassroots,” as opposed to elites (e.g., Chang 2019)—whose economic well-being depended on the whims of often authoritarian bosses and capricious contractors from big companies. Of the latter, advertising people saw perhaps a disproportionate share, which undoubtedly contributed to their taste for advertising that swaps consumerism for public service messages and champions those who have been subordinate, disadvantaged, and underappreciated.

Th e D i ffe r e nc e s bet w een A d M a k e r s and A dv ertiser s That clients interfere and prevent agencies from doing their best work is perhaps the greatest lament of advertising workers all over the world. In

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Korea it is aggravated by the habitual kap-ŭl (master-servant) relationship between agency and client. Kap-ŭl implies a near-absolute power on the part of kap, the master, and demands subservient, self-denigrating obedience from ŭl, the servant. Kap-ŭl is a way to describe any relations in which one party wields power over the other and exercises it arbitrarily, excessively, and abusively. An exploitative kap-ŭl dynamic is common in South Korean business culture and is often found in subcontracting situations, when small and medium-sized companies have little bargaining leverage against bigger ones, particularly chaebol.23 Because the advertiser pays the agency and provides livelihoods for its employees, the advertiser assumes the master role and treats the agency as servants, not as professionals. South Korean clients exercise their kap position by putting burdensome demands on the agency: holding frequent competitions for their accounts and thus wasting agencies’ resources; pressuring agencies to deliver extra services for free; not providing the agency with sufficient information for developing an advertising campaign and thus burdening the agency with the need to do marketing research on behalf of the client; not getting involved in the ad development process, only to criticize or reject the final product; and imposing unrealistic deadlines and abrupt changes in the campaign direction.24 In transatlantic contexts, since the 1990s advertising agencies have positioned themselves not as makers of advertising but rather as marketing consultants and business partners, with differing degrees of success (Nixon 2003). Switching to a “business partner model of the agency” (41) remains a remote dream for the Korean advertising profession.25 Complaints about advertisers’ despotism are a huge part of the industry talk. Many are versions of the story about an advertiser calling a competition for its account, only to award it to the preselected agency while stealing the ideas offered by the agencies that lost in the competition (in Korea, only the winning agency gets paid for its time and effort). I was told a story about a client company’s senior manager vetoing an excellent campaign because his wife did not like the celebrity suggested for the leading role. Another time I heard about a client tearing off the storyboard from the stand, tossing it on the ground, and stomping on it, saying that he expected a new campaign idea by the noon the next day. As “advertising genius” Yi Jeseok expresses the common frustration, “If a kwanggojaengi is to talk about all the nonsense that clients do, the con-



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versation will last till morning, no, even a month won’t be enough” (2010, 151). Advertisers thus are talked about as willful despots whose abusive whims make it difficult for agencies to do their jobs well. For ad makers, the practical meaning of advertising freedom is freedom from advertisers’ autocratic whims. While much of the dynamic between agencies and clients can be grasped by focusing on power inequality, tensions between the two parties are also fueled by their diverging material interests and tastes. I already described that while advertising workers do strive to please the clients, they also are socialized into occupational ideologies to seek windows for artistry and social intervention; they often wish to impress peers and the general public, and to feel good about their work. Clients, by contrast, see advertising as a burdensome expense, and are compelled to choose safe solutions rather than gamble with innovative campaigns. These considerations hold not only for smaller companies but even for big advertisers because it is usually their relatively junior managers who oversee the campaign development. Should the campaign be unsuccessful, it would be the manager who liaised with the agency who would be blamed. Thus conservative solutions such as getting a popular celebrity endorser were preferred. The “celebrity” route offered the additional advantage of the manager having the opportunity to meet the chosen entertainer in person, as an acquaintance working in a marketing department of an energy company told me. As she recalled, when one of the advertising agencies they were considering offered to cast actor Lee Min-ho, a star from the recent TV series Boys over Flowers, there was no question whose bid she would support. Other approaches to avoid risk included pushing agencies to copy successful advertisements by the advertiser’s competitor or even plagiarizing visuals provided as reference.26 Insofar as liaising managers were primarily interested in keeping their jobs, the safest strategy was to go for proven solutions rather than take chances on creative advertising. What advertising workers presented as the prejudice and ignorance of advertiser managers was a reflection of their different stakes in the situation. Even when it was not insecure junior managers making decisions and the company could afford to take risks with an advertising campaign, between agencies and their clients there are significant differences in tastes, understood, via Pierre Bourdieu (1984), as grounded in class affiliations. As discussed above, advertising workers identify with the global discourse

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of advertising as a creative artistic medium but also one steeped in Koreaspecific ideas about good advertising becoming socially engaged art. Most South Korean clients, by contrast, are “essentially conservative manufacturing industrialists” (Lee 2013, 35); as producers of commodities, they naturally prefer their advertising to highlight the advantages of those commodities. Moreover, most Korean companies are family firms, and top decision makers are company owners who likely take pride in the industrial accomplishments of their business. In other words, they are very different from the usual patrons of creative advertising—companies that subcontract manufacturing and focus on building brands, such as Nike or Benetton.27 Perhaps the most famous story about diverging tastes and goals in advertising comes from Park Woong-hyun, who failed to sell the commercial he was particularly proud of. The campaign, a fine exemplar of sentimental, socially engaged advertising, was inspired by the anti-American protests sparked by a tragic incident in June 2002, when two schoolgirls were run over by a US military vehicle north of Seoul. The voiceover told the story of a single netizen posting online that he was going downtown to have a candlelight vigil for the two girls, even if only by himself. The message became viral and soon downtown Seoul was taken over by ­candle-holding protesters who demanded punishment for the US servicemen. The advertisement was executed as a slideshow of photographs from the events and was accompanied by traditional Korean music. “That year one candle lightened up the world brightly. All thought it was impossible. Impossible is nothing,” the narration went. The advertisement was for Adidas, which, however, refused to buy it, likely concerned about the potential anti-­American implications of the ad. Despite this rejection, the commercial was one of the easiest to find on the Korean Internet at the time. Thanks to a whole chapter devoted to it in Park’s Advertising through the Humanities, it was recognized as Park’s masterpiece, whereas Adidas was critiqued by bloggers for its narrow-mindedness. Park’s public profile allowed him to “save” the advertising campaign as a public-cultural artifact despite the advertiser’s lack of appreciation, but for most advertising workers, ideas disliked by the advertiser were abandoned. As I was told many times, as much as it hurt to give up an idea that one had worked on really hard, there was nothing to be done but let it go. Director Ryu once showed me a thick folder full of his rejected ideas. He recycled some of them for other campaigns and, overall, seemed to be



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satisfied just to keep an archive. Other advertising workers entered rejected ads in advertising-industry competitions as speculative campaigns.28 For actual advertising, on most occasions, advertising workers ended up making run-of-the-mill commodity-centered advertising that relied on celebrity endorsers. Director Ryu and his colleagues, too, often trafficked in the most stereotypical “solutions”: a girl group de jour having a catfight over the fried chicken; a popular female celebrity endorsing an alcoholic drink in a sultry pose; members of a hot-ticket boy band expressing overblown pleasure after tasting a particular snack. A pathetic failure at finding an interesting creative solution was my own experience from working on an account for a chocolate cookie when I was an intern at the Agency. I offer this autoethnographic vignette to illustrate the practical challenges of advertising making, which are usually hidden behind the glossy finality of an advertising campaign. Our team had to develop a “key insight” based on the manufacturer’s brief, which stipulated that the commercial had to show a close-up of the cookie, mention the qualities of the cocoa used, and describe the manufacturing technology. The team was thus left with little room for creative play and ended up developing a campaign based on casting a celebrity endorser admiring and then eating the said cookie, praising its taste, and attributing it to the superiority of cocoa beans and the manufacturing technology. For me, it was particularly difficult to work on this campaign because I did not like the product. To my taste, the cookie was too sweet and lacked the gustatory richness that makes chocolate so satisfying. Trying to earn my keep as an intern, however, I did my best to come up with some kind of creative insight. I was disturbed by how soon I caught myself jotting down phrases about pleasure, indulgence, and other advertising clichés. I was frustrated at how my mind tricked me into thinking along the most unimaginative advertising lines, such as linking cookies and primal i­nstincts—something I would critique if looking at advertising from my normal vantage point, that of a critical advertising viewer, not a desperate advertising producer. I was embarrassed to present my “idea” at the team’s creative meeting and was relieved when it was killed. A lasting outcome of my creative fiasco was a new tolerance for banal advertisements. When encountering uncreative creative solutions, I could not help imagining their maker as someone like myself during my internship: trying to enhance the appeal of a commodity that one finds unappealing,

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having to come up with a “key insight” that might convince others to buy it—or at least convince bosses and the advertiser that a reasonable effort was made in that direction. In an oft-quoted passage from his memoir, acclaimed creative David Ogilvy wrote, “I . . . resign accounts when I lose confidence in the product. It is flagrantly dishonest for an advertising agent to urge consumers to buy a product which he would not allow his own wife to buy” (1963, 65). Few advertising practitioners can afford such a luxury. The advertising industry is so competitive that agencies can hardly ever turn down clients, even when they wish to advertise subpar products and abuse the power inequality of kap-ŭl. It was against these structural obstacles—amplified by the above-considered demanding conditions of advertising work—that advertising workers were negotiating spaces for creative openings and socially engaged intervention. More often than not, their ambitions had to recede, giving way to banal advertising that neither dazzled with creativity nor stirred affects nor provoked identification—in a word, failed to leave any significant impact on the world. Advertising that amazes the imagination and facilitates social justice is a fantasy from TV melodramas.

The “A dv e rtising Gen ius” i n P ur suit o f K ind A dv ertisin g Not all advertising practitioners were willing to compromise on the beautiful ideal of advertising that serves society, however. Yi Jeseok, whose career and creative work inspired the Ad Genius Yi Thae-baek, pursued the ideal in earnest, and arrived at the decision to forsake commercial advertising. His unusual path illustrates the ultimately irreconcilable tensions between South Korean advertising practitioners’ aspirations for advertising as a social mission and the instrumental logic of advertising as a marketing tool. Like many other would-be advertising workers of his generation, Yi Jeseok was smitten by advertising creativity. An art graduate from a provincial college, Yi, however, could not even get an interview with, let alone get hired by, South Korean advertising agencies, whose recruiters wanted only graduates from top universities in Seoul. The fictionalized portrayal of a job interview that Yi’s alter ego gets in the TV series underscores the



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importance of alumni ties: the favored candidate studied under the same professor as his interviewers. “Ad genius” is greeted with ridicule for his lack of academic credentials, and, though his original pitch impresses the panel, he gets rejected. To make a living, the real-life Yi settled into a job as a sign maker in his hometown of Daegu. Yet, as he narrates in his book, one day a disparaging comment from a local business card printer provoked Yi to change his life. He learned English by teaching drawing at a nearby US military base, and at the first try got accepted to the prestigious School of Visual Arts in New York. In the United States, Yi at first lived in poverty, but soon enough his proposals for advertising campaigns began to win one prize after another. In less than two years not only did Yi land a job with a reputable advertising agency in New York but he also won more international advertising awards than any other Korean ad maker—that at the age of twenty-eight. Korean advertising agencies now showered him with employment offers, and Yi’s international successes won him a lot of attention from the media. In the end, Yi returned to South Korea, but, rather than working for the established agencies, he opened his own company, Yi Jeseok’s Advertising Research Lab, in May 2009. His autobiographical book Advertising Genius Yi Jeseok: A Sign Maker’s Killer Ideas That Surprised the World came out a year later, and the TV series that followed in 2013 secured his legendary status. Yi’s advertising philosophy becomes clear in a 2009 interview, when he identifies two prerequisites for good advertising, originality and “concern for the masses” (taejung e taehan paeryŏ),29 the latter reminiscent of Park’s “communication with the masses.” In his book, Yi recalls how, when he had his job in New York, he kept questioning whether he was truly happy with what he was doing and what constituted good advertising. “Of course, an advertisement that makes people buy beautiful shoes, slightly larger apartments, or new dresses could make one happy. But would it not bring much more happiness if an advertisement could give homes to the homeless and clothes to people who are cold? Is not advertising more meaningful when, rather than making successful people more successful, it saves dying people and revives people who are struggling?” (Yi J. 2010, 169). Yi’s earnest wrestling with these issues led to his disillusionment in commercial advertising, hence his establishment of his advertising lab, which specializes in noncommercial public service announcements. In

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the epigraphical quote he presents this choice as “making advertising for the majority,” which does not instill “feelings of relative poverty and inferiority” in poor people.30 While most of Yi’s clients are government agencies and nongovernmental organizations, he did take commercial accounts if advertisers respected his commitments. This resulted in some curious campaigns, such as one for Fair Trade chocolate, advertised as “Honest Chocolate.” True to his vision of advertising as first serving the people, Yi created commercials and posters that drew attention to the “honest” drawbacks of the chocolate: some of the advertisements apologized for the expensive price, mediocre taste, and simple packaging, whereas others warned that if one eats too much chocolate, one’s teeth will rot and one will get fat. The South Korean public likely picked up on how the campaign engaged in an intertextual play, mocking the classic of Korean advertising, the ambient commercials for Ghana chocolate, which had positioned chocolate as a prop for a dreamy romance. I particularly admired Yi’s tongue-in-cheek strategy after having struggled to say something meaningful about a chocolate product as an advertising intern. Yi was two decades too young to share the generational experiences of the 386ers, with their desire to be doing something other than advertising and making peace with advertising after rediscovering it as a medium with a social impact. Yi’s book suggests that perhaps it was his own rough start, which included rejection, poverty, and likely humiliation by those in power, that made him a staunch advocate for the have-nots. His fictional alter ego in the series becomes enamored of advertising at high school, after creating a campaign to gather money for a sick friend, a story that unsubtly delivers a message of the powers of advertising for public good. Toward the end of his book, Yi declares, “I will go on dealing with social issues through advertising. I will have a positive influence on society by actively reacting to those issues. Even if mine is a small talent, isn’t it good to contribute it to society?” (2010, 208). This pronouncement is resonant of Park Woong-hyun’s commitment to “communication with the masses,” though Yi’s stance is more activist than intellectual, and he is emphatic about his desire to fix social ills, not just articulate them evocatively. Incidentally, Yi is one of the few critics of the humanist aesthetic in South Korean commercial advertising. He finds fault with Park Woonghyun’s campaigns for not talking about commodities, which, Yi insists,



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is what commercial advertising is supposed to do if it is not to waste clients’ money (2010, 158–159). Yi confronts the inconvenient fact that, with commercial advertising, communication with the masses must be a means for serving clients’ interests, and that advertising can prioritize either profits or human needs, not both. “The system may have the most to fear from those subordinates among whom the institutions of hegemony have been most successful. The disillusioned mission boy (Caliban) is always a graver threat to an established religion than the pagans who were never taken in by its promises,” James Scott (1990, 107) notes. Yi is a challenge to the system because his literal identification with the public interest logic of South Korean advertising leads him to publicly renounce the usual trade-offs and expose their hypocrisy. The logical realization of the unlikely advertising ideal is advertising that is truly noncommercial—a qualitative change that reconstructs advertising as a media form. Perhaps it is because of those “impossible” advertising politics that the media’s adoring frenzy about Yi was short-lived. His campaigns—such as for the Busan Metropolitan Police or Seoul Metropolitan Fire and Disaster Management ­Headquarters—do receive praise for their stunning originality, yet Yi himself is often treated as an eccentric.31 An extreme case Yi might be, but he lives the dream of many kwanggojaengi, who, while dealing with taxing deadlines and external and internal hierarchies, are always on the lookout for creative openings and opportunities for socially resonant messages. On a day-to-day basis, they might be selling the “happiness . . . [of ] the smell of a new car,” but ultimately they find meaning in using their artistic imaginations to make a positive social impact, however rarely that actually occurs, and however whimsical the rationalizations required to present their work in such a vein. As Yi writes, “Kwanggojaengi always worry about this. Though their fate is to be led by clients, media, and budget, at the bottom of their hearts there is a stewing desire to make kind advertising” (2010, 201).

C o n c lusion South Korean advertising practitioners have been a major force in orienting commercial advertising toward publicness. Their occupational

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i­ deologies constructed advertising as a socially engaged art, normalizing the “unlikely” advertising ideal, and trained aspiring admen and adwomen to seek creative solutions in the everyday lives of ordinary people and to strive for a public service impact. However difficult to actualize in the advertising industry, those dreams were at the heart of the professional identity of kwanggojaengi. Those “unlikely” advertising ambitions were shaped by local developments that integrated advertising into social life in particular ways, namely the drive for professionalizing advertising work against its historical marginalization, as well as the sensibilities of the generation that entered the industry when it matured. In addition, the advertising practitioners’ lived experience of subordination created powerful incentives to identify with “regular people” and other subordinates (ŭls) within South Korean kap-ŭl hierarchies. Rather than an unequivocal tool of capital, their advertisements harbored ambivalent ideological commitments, often elevating the worldviews of those regular people with whom kwanggojaengi sided due to shared lifeworlds and professional socialization. Unlike other accounts of day-to-day of advertising work, this ethnographic sketch of the lifeworlds of South Korean advertising practitioners emphasized that their practices and negotiations were implicated in constructing the local meanings and functions of advertising as a genre, as a media form, and as a social phenomenon. My research did confirm with the South Korean case the previous findings that advertising agencies are in the business of selling their services to corporate clients, not commodities to consumers, and that specific advertisements are the result of many contingencies and compromises. Yet I also attempted to reveal what is at stake in those choices and negotiations for advertising itself—how individual aesthetic solutions congeal into generic norms and affirm or challenge the social contract for advertising as an institution. The next chapter continues with this critical anthropology of advertising by turning to advertising censors, whose decisions about individual advertisements further determine the conditions of the integration of advertising in social life.

C h a p te r 3

The Quandaries of Advertising Censorship Advertising plays such an important function in the market economy that it is called the flower of capitalism . . . . That advertising would be designated as an exception to freedom of expression is already a matter of the yesteryear. —Pak Sŏng-yong, Chŏng Yong-su, and Song Min-su, A Study of Comparative Advertising and Competition Policy

I

t was not the visuals of the commercial for Hyundai Tucson IX SUV that provoked the complaint that the Special Advisory Committee of the Korea Communication Standards Commission (KCSC) spent the greater part of its two-hour biweekly meeting deliberating in late fall of 2009. The campaign featured a sleek car racing through urban landscapes, evoking the standard associations between driving and escaping the everyday. Neither was there an issue with the creative decipherment of SUV as “Sexy Utility Vehicle” (in English in the original), the advertising slogan for the Tucson IX model. Rather, what invoked a grievance—and also provoked criticism on the Internet—were the tantalizingly ambiguous captions: Now as you are waiting for a TV drama, [Tucson] IX is dramatically stealing her lips. That’s life [“Lips”] Now as you are thinking about her in front of the TV, IX is running with her toward climax. That’s IX [“Climax”] Now as you are waking up in front of the TV, IX has already welcomed the morning with her laughter. That’s life [“Good morning”] Now as you are turning in bed, IX is getting ready for a fabulous night with her. That’s life [“Fabulous night”]. 101

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In this manner, the campaign’s nine episodes suggested that “[Tucson] IX” was enjoying life with “her,” while “you” were missing out. As in English, in Korean “her” (kŭnyŏ) could refer either to a woman or to the car, and though the visuals showed only cars, the captions alluded to the idea that the commercials might be about more than the joys of car ownership. According to one anonymous complaint, because the captions made associations between women and sexual imagery, the commercials were a harmful influence on children. Public representatives that included professors, nongovernmental organization workers, and bureaucrats— six men and two women—gathered to decide whether the commercials (and the broadcaster that aired them) breached the “Dignity” ( p’umwi) article of “Regulation about Broadcast Advertising Review,” which banned “obscene and suggestive expressions,” as the KCSC staff operationalized the potential violation in the meeting agenda. The racy SUV commercials were a part of a trend in provocative television campaigns that mushroomed after the disappearance of the official before-the-fact review in the summer 2008, when the Korea Advertising Review Board (KARB) was shut down. The KARB, an association of advertising regulators, advertisers, and advertising agencies, had been in charge of the mandatory preclearance since 2001 and had issued approval certificates without which advertising was ineligible for airing by terrestrial broadcasters—an unconstitutional act of censorship, according to the Constitutional Court ruling (chapter 1). After the KARB’s disestablishment, the South Korean mediascape became flooded with commercials that used rude expressions, disseminated risqué jokes, broke taboos of public display of affection, and aggressively exploited sex appeal. In a soju ad, a K-pop starlet was endorsing casual sex and telling her date to be cool about such matters (“Think Casual” campaign for Cool soju). A soft drink commercial made a visual analogy between opening a can and unbuttoning a blouse (“Hot Six”). A corporate image ad for a telecommunications company suggested that for a family man, sending his wife and son to a summer camp was a cause for ecstatic celebration (KT’s “Olleh” campaign). Nongovernmental organizations held public seminars to condemn this “new normal” of advertising, and many online commentators echoed those sentiments. Despite this explosion of controversial advertising, there was little



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change to the regulations on advertising content, which was speckled into the laws on broadcasting, competition and fair trade, medical care, environmental protection, and other spheres. Moreover, the implementation of those regulations remained assured, though now it would occur after the ads were aired. The new frontline in advertising review, the KCSC monitored all mass media content upon its release and investigated complaints from the public. The KCSC’s disciplinary “­recommendations”—varying from critical opinions to stipulations for public apology and penalty points against renewing media licenses—were almost guaranteed to be promptly enforced by a government agency and for most practical purposes were legally binding, government-backed verdicts. As before, broadcasting channels remained legally responsible for the content they aired, and the abolition of the KARB-issued approval certificates prompted them to launch internal before-the-fact advertising review boards, either individually or through trade associations. Paradoxically, after the official abolition of advertising censorship the number of advertising reviewing organizations increased. Those new censorial agents sought to hire former KARB staff for their expertise in navigating byzantine advertising regulations. Despite a reorganization of censorial institutions, there were considerable continuities in terms of the rules and the agents of their application. Even after the abolition of the mandatory preclearance, South Korea’s was still an extensive system of advertising review that could block problematic advertising, particularly broadcast advertising, at many of its stops, and certainly at the KCSC. But it rarely did. What did change drastically were the moral-philosophical grounds for silencing problematic advertising. The 2008 Constitutional Court ruling, which extended the freedom of speech protection to advertising, concerned only before-the-fact review by government agencies, but it made it difficult to justify any intervention with advertising content, whether conducted before or after an ad was circulated, whether by a government or a nongovernmental organization. In its essence, any review became perceived as an illiberal act of limiting others’ freedom—a reprehensible dictatorship-era anachronism in liberal-democratic South Korea. That was the quandary of South Korean advertising censors, who found ­themselves negotiating the new freedom to advertise against yesteryear’s beliefs in advertising publicness.

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Advertising censors, similar to advertising practitioners from the previous chapter, are considered as intellectuals and social actors whose discourses and practices constitute advertising as a social institution and align it with local social realities in specific ways.1 Yet whereas South Korean advertising workers were unlikely champions of advertising that resisted instrumental commercialism and aspired to public interest, advertising censors were the ones chipping away at the public service logic, this chapter demonstrates. Those censorial dilemmas and their resolutions are drawn out through an ethnography of an advertising review at the KCSC whose Special Advisory Committee meetings I observed in November–December 2009 and March–June 2010. In addition to offering an ethnographic window on a rarely captured aspect of advertising’s social life in bureaucratic structures, the chapter advances a critical anthropology of advertising by laying out how the minutiae of censorial decisions normalize a particular distribution of freedoms and burdens among the social actors whose interests advertising mediates.2 The censorial debates, such as the one that unfolded around the “Sexy Utility Vehicle” commercials, determine more than the permissibility of particular campaigns or particular behaviors. The underlying decision is whether to validate those audience members who find such campaigns offensive and discipline advertisers, or to honor advertisers’ freedom and compel audiences to suffer what they perceive as advertising transgressions and to cultivate a detachment toward advertising, and, by extension, toward mediated public culture in general. Advertising censorship is thus posited as a critical node in producing dominant “structures of feeling”—patterns of thought and sentiment generated by everyday lived experience (Williams 1977)—that shape individual and collective social action. Before presenting an ethnography of advertising censorship through three detailed vignettes from my observations at the KCSC, I historicize censorial infrastructures and their legitimations in South Korea and also overview the censorial challenges that arise from commonly accepted advertising generic conventions—that its persuasion relies heavily on images and associations, not verifiable facts, and that its portrayals beautify commodities and project aspirational “capitalist-realist” versions of social life. The chapter concludes by tracing the wider implications of censorial decisions and reflecting on the paradoxes of lenient censorship.



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A dv e rtising C e nso r sh ip Censorship, both inside and outside of South Korea, tends to be understood as oppression and is thus vilified. It is critiqued for violating freedom of expression and for silencing dissenting voices. For many, the natural impulse is to side with the ones being censored and to mock censorial absurdities and rigidities. Yet advertising censorship troubles a neat distinction between good freedom and bad oppression. Even when liberal ideologies that treasure freedom are a point of departure, advertising could be seen as a profit-driven infringement on individual freedom and consumer sovereignty. While advertisers present advertising as information for consumers, it is well known that, in its rhetorical strategies, advertising omits the factual data necessary for rational consumption decisions and latches on to consumers’ anxieties and follies. Its very purpose—to influence someone’s behavior to help advertisers make a profit—is suspect. Therefore, one can argue that some advertising censorship protects individual autonomy and restores conditions for free rational choice. By curbing deceitful and manipulative advertising, censorship produces conditions under which those protected by censorship “are free to be free” (Foucault 2008, 61). In addition, the censorial interventions that limit the freedom of advertising expression often uphold agreeable ideals, such as gender equality, which, according to many, take priority over freedom of commercial speech. Advertising censorship, in other words, immediately connects to practical questions about whose freedom gets to be prioritized, on which grounds, and for what purpose. For example, advertisers’ freedom to objectify women or sell dangerous commodities is less defensible than the freedom to criticize a government. Historically in South Korea, distrust of advertising suppressed freedom-of-expression considerations. South Korean advertising, as discussed in chapter 1, was subjected to much scrutiny and stringent regulation, which were justified by the evocation of public interest, critiques of the corruptibility of mass media, and hints at the unwholesome motives of advertisers. By the late 1970s, all broadcast advertising had to be c­ ensored—“preapproved”—whereas all print advertising was monitored and stopped immediately if issues surfaced. Such practices were euphemistically termed “before-the-fact review” (sajŏn simŭi). Demands for freedom to advertise were voiced by private broadcasters, who were

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important media actors before their forced consolidation and nationalization in 1980, but they were overwhelmed with arguments about how advertising must be accountable to principles of publicness because of its use of public airwaves. Popular annoyance with “advertising pollution” hardly helped the broadcasters’ case. The obligatory advertising review was performed by the ethics boards and self-governance commissions of media industry associations. Formally independent, such organizations were in practice one degree of separation from the government: their creation was often legislated, their decision makers were approved if not directly appointed by the government, and their recommendations were implemented by government agencies. Nevertheless, these organizations rejected censorship accusations, insisted that they performed only “review,” and claimed the moral authority to intervene on behalf of the general public because of their official extra-political status and their reliance on an advisory board of public representatives, similar to the one that was presented with the complaint about the “Sexy Utility Vehicle” ad in 2009. Arguments for advertising freedom had little cachet in South Korea also because the legal category of “commercial speech” was absent, and advertising was treated as “marketing communication,” which fell outside of the provisions for free expression.3 The 1975 roundtable in the course of the Dong-A Ilbo White Pages Incident (chapter 1) was representative of how arguments for freedom to advertise needed to evoke American practices, because there were few compelling local arguments for such freedoms. Not only was commercial communication unprotected, but freedom of speech guarantees in South Korea were never absolute to begin with. Though civic liberties, including freedom of expression, were written into the South Korean Constitutions, they were subordinated to the 1948 National Security Law, which criminalized vaguely defined “anti-state” activities. While the law’s primary target was political criticism, the provocative treatment of sensitive topics, such as North Korea, could get advertisers in trouble, too. Even the new postdemocratization Constitution of 1987, while guaranteeing freedom of speech to all citizens and banning censorship, stipulated that free expression should not “violate the honor or rights of other persons nor undermine public morals or social ethics” (Art. 21). Arguably, the strongest claims for advertising freedom



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were rooted in the historical meanings of the Dong-A Ilbo White Pages Incident of 1974–1975, when freedom to advertise was positioned on the side of democracy and against authoritarianism, though those advertising freedoms were understood primarily in terms of the freedom to choose media outlets for advertising and to exercise that choice responsibly to support critical media and the democratic public sphere (as discussed in chapter 1). Though the legal basis for advertising freedom was lacking, there was a certain coyness about the censorial nature of advertising regulations even before advertising was ruled to be subject to freedom of expression, because of those associations with illiberal dictatorships. When I used the word “censorship” during my pilot research in the summer 2007 (thinking of “censorship” as external and legally binding control over expressive content), it often provoked rebukes from my interlocutors. They would point out that censorship had occurred under Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan, but that now South Korea was democratic. What I was referring to as censorship was not external control (t’ayul) but self-regulation (chayul), a welcome sign either of a growing sense of social responsibility among Korean corporations, in the case of industry boards, or of vibrant civil society, in the case of monitoring nongovernmental organizations. South Korean actors referred to all advertising policing practices as “review” (simŭi, sometimes translated as “deliberation”); before-the-fact review was sometimes glossed as “preclearance.” The word “censorship” (kŏmyŏl) rarely entered those conversations, even on the pages of the KAA Journal, which, as the publication of the advertisers’ lobby, was the loudest advocate of advertising deregulation.4 As I interpreted it then, the evasive terminology was about making socially acceptable the illiberal structures of advertising control, which otherwise would be hard to justify in post-authoritarian South Korea. In retrospect, it also was a symptom of the crumbling of moral justifications for subordinating advertising freedom to public interest in a neoliberalizing society. Sensitivities about terminology aside, outside the advertising industry and corporate lobby, there were few objections to tight advertising scrutiny. If anything, online discussions and articles in the media would deplore particular advertising campaigns, condemn irresponsible advertisers, and reprimand censors for being too lenient. In the summer

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of 2007, for example, the KARB was criticized for allowing commercials for private moneylenders, whose aggressive advertising was believed to trick the gullible into indebtedness (Fedorenko 2008). Such critiques only multiplied after the de facto loosening of advertising standards after 2008, and the general public seemed unattuned to the radical changes in advertising status conferred by the Constitutional Court. What was registered were the many controversial campaigns that were discussed, mocked, critiqued, and objected. In the spring of 2009, for instance, negligent advertising review was cited by many critics of a series of commercials for a KT’s home entertainment package, Qook, which playfully announced, “When you leave home, it’s dog’s suffering. At home, there is Qook.” In Korea, any expression modified by “dog” is perceived as swearing. That the rude phrase “dog’s suffering” aired on public TV was scandalous. The advertiser and its agency clarified that, while many “dog” words were indeed indecent, according to the dictionary, “dog’s suffering” was not. But many remained unconvinced. Critical discussions popped up online, and complaints were posted to the websites of advertising-related organizations. A complaint to the KCSC expressed concern about children picking up the expression: “I don’t know if dog’s suffering is not such bad a word, but I am sure that to a growing youth it is definitely not a good word to use.”5 A complaint posted to the Korea Broadcast Advertising Corporation (KOBACO) website objected to the values implied, “Isn’t it entirely incomprehensible what kind of message is conveyed by the commercials that tell [us] to stay at home and watch Qook because the outside is dog’s suffering? The current state of global economic crisis calls for encouragement to find a job and work diligently.”6 Some of those critiques were directed at the ineffectual censorial bodies. An online comment to a newspaper article stated, “How could a commercial using the expression dog’s suffering openly come out . . . ? Abolish this dog-like committee for broadcasting ethics.”7 In addition to displeasure with the campaign, those reactions reveal popular ignorance about the roles and responsibilities in advertising review, such as imagining that KOBACO, which had abandoned its censorial duties two decades earlier, in 1989, was in charge, or a nonexistent broadcast ethics committee. Conspicuous were the convictions that ensuring advertising ethics is the responsibility of those agencies and a lack of concern for advertising freedoms.



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A mbi vale n t C e n so r s Those expected to police and discipline advertising—administrators at censorial boards, public representatives of advisory councils, frontline monitors, and even NGO activists—were, however, hesitant to exercise their authority to curb controversial advertising. After the 2008 Constitutional Court decision, assuming a censorial role created quandaries, at the heart of which was how to reconcile the historically influential ideas about the primacy of public interest with the newly legislated advertising freedom. Advertising reviewers I met were far from the stereotype of a repressive, elitist censor eager to silence others. As Dominic Boyer notes about censors in general, they are usually subjected to “a certain chauvinism” and dismissed as “relatively mindless agents of power” (2003, 513). He demonstrates with a historical study from German Democratic Republic that censors are anything but the “anti-intellectuals” imagined in such critiques and are best understood as engaged in “a complex of intellectual practices in social-historical context” (515). Indeed, rather than being self-righteous, judgmental, and eager to silence, South Korean advertising censors—from freelance monitors to full-time staff to appointed public representatives—were reflexive about their role and anxious about how their activities interfered with the principles of freedom of expression. For example, the advertising team manager of the KCSC shared bitterly in an interview that he hated his organization’s repressive role. He disliked being resented by advertising agencies, but, he explained with many sighs, someone had to ensure the legality of circulating advertisements and protect consumers and companies from unwholesome competition, and it happened to be his job. He presented his censorial work as one step short of a self-sacrifice for the sake of ungrateful advertisers. The censorial ambivalence was compounded by South Korean politics at the time. In the late 2000s, freedom of expression frequently entered public discourse in critique of president Lee Myung-bak’s gagging of critical voices and resurrection of authoritarian methods to squash dissent. Incidentally, the KCSC (which, established as a nongovernmental consultative organization to facilitate the convergence between media and communications, oversaw all media since February 2008) became embroiled in a slew of conspicuous cases that targeted journalists, reporters, and Internet pundits who criticized Lee’s government. Many of the advertising

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censors were sympathetic to, if not actively supportive of, Lee’s opposition, the “progressive” camp that claimed the legacy of antiauthoritarian, prodemocracy struggles. Some of the advertising reviewers arrived at their NGO work and policy making from the student movement of the 1980s— the 386 Generation whose commitments to critique were discussed in relation to advertising practitioners’ orientations in chapter 2. Those “progressives” aspired to liberal open-mindedness (kaebangjŏk), opposed to “conservatism” ( posujŏk) which connoted Korean right-wingers but also overall backwardness, parochialism, and an affinity with military dictatorships. “Conservative” were thus President Lee and his supporters but also critics of the excessive use of “sex appeal” in advertising—hence the ambivalence of liberal advertising censors. The term “conservative,” which was associated with reactionary forces and dated ideals, was precisely what most advertising reviewers did not wish to be. One of the common threads in my interviews was censors distancing their “real” liberal selves from their illiberal censorial tasks. For example, a public representative reviewing advertising at the KCSC, a woman in her late thirties nominated by a media-education NGO, explained her reservations about censorship in an interview: “The review can be requested by anyone, so we have all these conservatives requesting reviews saying that those things [advertisements] are too sexual. From our own point of view, it is normal.” Such contrasts with the “conservatives” were evoked frequently to emphasize censors’ own commitment to everything enlightened, advanced, and forward-looking. This dismissive attitude toward public complaints made intervention difficult because it blurred right-wing politics and intolerance for certain social behaviors. The representative’s own example was kissing in public, whose sudden appearance in advertising, and soon after in the streets, was much criticized in the summer of 2009. The question of the desirability of public display of affection aside, she was conflating the censorial task of policing advertising depictions with policing people’s actual conduct, the latter being unjustifiable within liberal ideologies. This conflation left little room for challenging advertising’s exploitation of controversial content as a marketing tactic. As another KCSC affiliate and an activist of the feminist NGO WomenLink articulated this dilemma when faced with members complaining about a blatantly sexist campaign: “Don’t we need to recognize freedom of expression even in advertising these days?”



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WomenLink did eventually intervene—but only after hesitating for over a month, during which time the campaign ran most of its natural course and firmly entered popular culture, as I detail in chapter 4. In addition to the allegedly unrefined tastes of the South Korean public, the unease about censorial tasks was also displaced onto a critique of advertisers’ moral failures, which made such an anachronistic practice as advertising censorship necessary. My interviewees among censors painted advertiser opportunism as a uniquely Korean problem, reminiscent of the postcolonial logic of never measuring up to the mythologized West. Such arguments were repeatedly made by Kim Min-ki, a professor of advertising who in various capacities participated in many review boards, including the KCSC and its predecessor, KARB. He contrasted Korean advertisers, whose advertisements needed to be minutely reviewed, with US advertisers, who, according to Kim, voluntarily embraced the principles of corporate social responsibility and could be trusted to regulate themselves without external censors (e.g., Kim 2005). One interviewee, the head of the advertising team of the Korea Broadcasters Association, presented problematic advertising as an effect of South Korea’s “incomplete democratization,” by which he meant businesses not minding using deception to make money and the legal system being inefficient in stopping them. “Capitalists are still privileged over citizens,” he explained, and went on to present advertising censorship as a repair of a market failure. Collectively, such reflections somewhat resembled what William Mazzarella describes as the “censorship loop” of film censorship in India: when the immaturity of the masses is both blamed on censorship and quoted as the reason for the continuation of censorship (2013,15–18)—except for South Korean advertising censors the immature subjects were not only media audiences but also those responsible for media production. Concerns with advertising freedom and a gullible public had to be weighted on a case-by-case basis at the KCSC, the most influential site of advertising review after the 2008 Constitutional Court decision. With advertising as with the KCSC’s other charges, freelance monitors spotted potentially problematic content and KCSC staff reviewed it for clear violations (such as untruthful portrayals or use of banned expressions) and also considered public complaints. Unambiguous violations were immediately acted upon. The KCSC staff sanctioned factual ­misrepresentations either

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of commodities themselves (e.g., listing false ingredients or specifications) or of the terms of sales (e.g., promising a gift with every purchase but then running out of gifts). Other obvious transgressions included the use of folk songs and children’s songs (banned in advertising presumably so as not to sully cultural heritage and to avoid manipulation of the young, respectively), or of explicitly prohibited claims (e.g., “number one in Korea”). These rules have sedimented through decades of advertising regulation, carrying traces of the historical disdain for advertising as a profane, profitmotivated genre as well as mistrust of self-interested advertisers but also of the contingent reactions to specific advertising annoyances and abuses. Those cases that could not be decided simply by applying the rules of the 456-page in-house compilation of advertising-related excerpts from a multitude of relevant laws went to the Special Advisory Committee of public representatives. During my fieldwork, the committee was composed of three university professors, a lawyer, and three NGO delegates, as well as bureaucrats from business and media associations, most in their late forties or fifties. Public representatives were nominated by civil society organizations and then selected by the KCSC senior administrators for one-year terms, and the composition of the committee reflected their commitment to represent diverse interests—consumers, advertisers, and the public at large. Out of the seven to nine representatives, usually two or three were women, typically nominated by consumer or media NGOs. In South Korea’s neoliberal milieu, where freedom was posited as the principle for governing one’s self and others, the KCSC public representatives met their censorial tasks with ambivalence and strove to minimize intervention. Unlike advertising practitioners, who unequivocally declared their commitment to the public ideal of advertising, advertising censors were negotiating among the freedom to advertise, public interest, social norms, and their own liberal anxieties. In a paradoxical reversal, advertising practitioners were hired to advance interests of capital but often rooted for its antagonists, whereas the censors were called to represent public interest yet often ended up protecting capital’s freedoms. Among those involved in advertising review during my fieldwork, the most skeptical of advertising freedoms was an NGO activist whom I call Media Educator, an occupation-based pseudonym.8 An executive director of a civic organization dealing with human rights and media re-



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sponsibility, Media Educator specialized in programs of media literacy for schoolchildren. She reflected on her experiences at the KCSC: “Freedom of speech of course is very important, but I think that we need to be concerned about the publicness [kongkongsŏng] that comes with it. Freedom, freedom of expression, meets a sense of publicness [kongkonggam] at the Advisory Committee [of the KCSC], and we need to recognize the publicness of it [advertising] first . . . . ‘What do I want to tell people with this? Does it really belong to the public realm [kongkong ŭi yŏnngyŏk]?’ I think that advertisers should think about this as well.” As was typical of those involved in advertising review, she brought up freedom of advertising on her own accord. We were talking about an advertising campaign that had provoked disagreement at a recent KCSC meeting, and Media Educator’s point was to criticize her colleague, the senior public relations manager of a think tank whom she thought “extremely liberal” [kwengjang’i riberal] in his judgments on sexually suggestive advertising. Her own priority at the KCSC and in her NGO work was, as she put it, to do her part to prevent “capital from gobbling up culture”—language suggestive of her 386 Generation sensibilities and misaligned from the new discourses of freedom. She was involved in the NGO campaign to defend the before-the-fact review, and in our interview she repeatedly emphasized the dangers of capital controlling the mass media. Media Educator’s readiness to acknowledge the antagonism between capital and consumers set her apart from most advertising censors, who tended to present advertising censorship as an absurd legacy of authoritarianism or a measure against rogue advertisers whose opportunism was hurting themselves. Unwavering in her support for advertising censorship, Media Educator nevertheless assumed a resigned tone when talking about the dangers of boundless freedom to advertise. The ruling on the unconstitutionality of the before-the-fact review meant that the battle was lost, and, like many other NGO activists I met, she was skeptical that the new arrangements were capable of preventing advertising excesses. Still, Media Educator gave presentations at seminars that critiqued the new system and participated in critical research initiatives—while taking a tough stance on the campaigns that were brought before the judgment of the public representatives at the KCSC. During the KCSC debates, representatives who, like Media Educator, consistently prioritized the publicity of advertising circulation, were

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a minority. Public responsibility of advertising was also frequently urged by one of the two other female representatives, whom I call Labor Activist because of her involvement with the labor committee of a progressive civic group, though she was nominated to KCSC by the research institute where she worked. The two women were often sided with by Advertising Professor, a senior academic from the journalism and public relations department of a major Seoul university, who, thoughtful and eloquent, had authored countless books on advertising and wrote a blog that combined shrewd analysis of recent advertising developments with travel photographs, inspired poetry, and open exchanges with his students about living a meaningful life. The positions of the other representatives and participating senior KCSC administrators were less predictable. They generally leaned toward respecting freedom to advertise, though, as I learned through observation and interviews, not necessary because they wholeheartedly believed in it but for reasons that included the ambiguity of the rules, the reluctance to appear conservative, and fear of critiques in the mass media, as well as friendships and animosities among the representatives themselves. The debate around the “Sexy Utility Vehicle” campaign exemplified those dynamics.

Th e “ Se xy Utili t y V e h ic l e” To return to deliberations on the “Sexy Utility Vehicle,” after the commercials were shown, the head of the Advertising Review Team, a midcareer KCSC employee seated at the roundtable with the public representatives, summarized the complaint and introduced relevant regulations, all of which were included in the meeting agenda. Seven other KCSC staff— junior-rank young men and women—sat at the back, took minutes, and rushed to provide administrative support when necessary. After the case recap, an expert opinion was read out by the KCSC staff researcher, a serious man in his late thirties, who, similar to the head of the Advertising Review Team, kept quiet at the meetings except for this introductory part or when directly asked by debating public representatives about specific regulations or precedents. In attendance was also the KCSC’s executive director, who, of a senior career-level comparable to that of most public representatives, sometimes joined the meetings and actively participated



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in debates. The committee and its dynamic were typical of many postmillennial South Korean institutions, with few women in empowered positions and tangible seniority hierarchies. The KCSC researcher’s assessment dismissed the complaint about the “Sexy Utility Vehicle” commercials: “The expression ‘stealing her lips’ appears to be a rhetorical figure to convey the product concept of ‘sexiness, beauty’; appearing only in the caption, not in the composition of the scenes, it does not reach a level where it sexually appeals to consumers, so in my opinion there is no issue [munje ŏpta] [with the campaign].” If the complainant prioritized the advertising’s public circulation and presumed effects on the gullible (“children”), the assessment foregrounded advertising’s commercial functions, acknowledging the validity of the strategies and goals of the commodity aesthetics. It was this tension between advertising’s publicity and commercial imperatives, complicated by reviewers’ own ambitions and anxieties, that framed the deliberation on the case (and many other discussions at the advisory committee of which the Tucson IX deliberations were fairly representative). The introductory part of the meeting finished within less than ten minutes, and the committee chairman, a figure of some public visibility, opened the floor and invited opinions. The representatives who spoke first—two professors, Labor Activist, and Media Educator—echoed one another.9 They personally were bothered by the sexual allusions in the commercials, yet because there were no other images beyond those of a car driving through a city, they could not identify a specific violation of rules. Even the captions contained nothing directly obscene or lewd, the representatives repeated in different ways, expressing frustration at the elusiveness of the campaign’s meaning. As the KCSC’s executive director commented about that meeting in a later interview, “If there was a model who was performing something sexual, if there was such a scene, it would have been easy. But it is hard when sexuality is not direct but associative, in captions or in visuals. Even though it does not directly appear in advertising, everyone makes the association . . . . People feel lewdness, even though each particular scene is not lewd [ yahada]. After listening and seeing it, it is lewd. If a beautiful woman takes off her clothing in advertising, it is definitely lewd. But when it’s words that provoke associations, judgment varies from person to person.” It was unclear whether he was intentionally evoking the well-known criterion

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for o ­ bscenity from a US Supreme Court judge in the 1960s: “I know it when I see it” (Schultz 2010, 390). Labor Activist suggested imposing sanctions on the “Climax” episode, because, she argued, it encouraged dangerous behavior while driving. To sanction a campaign for a technical violation when social norms were at stake was a common strategy at the meetings, and the representatives often interpreted the guidelines creatively to punish problematic advertising for formal reasons, not for what they actually saw as a problem. In this case, however, this line of argument went nowhere. After a quarter of an hour of discussion, the representatives were about to clear the Tucson IX campaign and agree with the KCSC researcher that there was “no issue.” But one of them, Think-Tank Manager, who had kept quiet until that point, interfered. He said that the commercials clearly contained “sex code” (seksŭ k’odŭ) and sexually stimulating content. Unlike other representatives, who gingerly used euphemisms and dry bureaucratic language, such as “obscenity” and “lewdness,” ThinkTank Manager was blunt. He insisted that the background of the commercials implied sex (seksŭ). He referred to his experience living in the United States and said that it was obvious that people drove late at night to have sex in their cars. His point, however, was about South Korean realities, and referring to the United States was apparently a move to gain overall authority rather than to offer insight into the meaning of the commercial. (Nor did he miss an opportunity to bring up his American experience in other meetings or mundane conversations. He also flaunted it by wearing a jersey from his US alma mater, being the only casual dresser among the suit-clad representatives.) “What else would they be doing out there at that hour?” he asked rhetorically, referring to the episode that showed the Tucson IX parked at night in an empty parking lot against the background of skyscrapers—scenery suggestive of the Han River banks in Seoul. He reiterated that showing a car at night near the Han River had meaning because many couples went there to have sex. Think-Tank Manager had a reputation as an extreme liberal in all senses of the word, and the representatives chuckled as he made his so-incharacter comment. Someone inquired mischievously about how ThinkTank Manager, a long-married man, would know about such things. Without denying the joking accusations, Think-Tank Manager continued, “From a culturally informed position, there is a specific sexual message



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in those ads, and not everyone is supposed to get it.” Flaunting his own cultural prowess, he implied that, unlike the other meeting participants, he got it. The commercials were made for people in their thirties, he explained, and for them, there was nothing scandalous about what was shown—not only were they more open-minded, they actually did such things in real life. He insisted, contrary to the earlier speakers, that there was clearly identifiable sexual content in the commercials, such as the car parked near the Han River at night. Yet, he argued, they should not penalize the campaign, because its sexual content was culturally appropriate for its target audience. Advertising Professor objected, pointing out that the fact that the commercials targeted liberal people in their thirties was not a sufficient reason to be unconcerned about the message. The comment “this is life” at the end implied that “life is seducing women,” he opined, and that might indeed be a harmful message to send to watching youths. He reiterated the argument that even though there were no sexual visuals, “sex code” was evident, and that “for our society” the copy was overly stimulating. The Labor Activist supported him. “Just think about the ‘stealing her lips’ expression, that is clearly sexual,” she said indignantly. Whereas for Think-Tank Manager, as for the KCSC staff researcher, the advertiser’s marketing goal of reaching young car-shoppers took priority, Advertising Professor and Labor Activist, similar to the complainant, prioritized the general public of national terrestrial channels, whether or not those viewers fell under the advertiser’s target demographic. Another representative, Communication Professor, sided with ThinkTank Manager. He asked, “Aren’t we looking at this advertisement from a conservative position? Aren’t we looking at it from our own level?” He commented that perhaps there was some problematic content if they looked at it from the position of parents, but the advertisements were not targeting parents but young people in their thirties, and for these young people, there was nothing scandalous. In other words, he repeated Think-Tank Manager’s earlier argument, but placed himself, together with other representatives, not with the open-minded young people but with the “conservative” parents—yet he insisted that it was the liberal, openminded position that was to be prioritized. The national public was either to identify with the worldviews of the libertarian thirty-somethings or become non-subjects in advertising discourse.

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Communication Professor’s comment was representative of how in their eagerness to assert liberal subjecthood, public representatives rendered indistinguishable individuals’ freedom in private life from corporate freedom of expression. In this particular case, however, he was called to task by Advertising Professor, who disagreed with privileging “young people in their thirties” and insisted that they still should be thinking about “our society” in general. Incidentally, after the meeting I was in a car with the Communication Professor and the Advertising Professor, and the latter, senior in age and academic rank, scolded the former, saying that he should think carefully about whether he was participating in the meetings as a professor or as a consumer representative. As a professor he could express freely any opinions, argue for freedom of advertising, and so on, he said. But as a consumer representative he should think of the consumer, how to protect them. In a sense, this exchange summed up the clashing demands on advertising censors in neoliberal South Korea—a consistent commitment to consumer interest required nothing short of suspending one’s liberal identity during the meetings. In the end, Communications Professor and Think-Tank Manager were still in the minority. After about forty minutes of heated discussion, the representatives recommended legally binding sanctions that would result in penalty points for the broadcaster, on the grounds that the Tucson IX campaign violated the “dignity of broadcasting.” As one of the representatives, Legal Advisor, noted, the unusual severity of the verdict would likely make the news, so the advertising world would hear the message and hopefully refrain from brazenly pushing the boundaries of social norms. It was not unusual to bring up news reports, but generally they were invoked to argue for leniency, as public representatives anticipated critical coverage if they intervened too much. Atypically, the representatives’ recommendation was rejected at the next level, by the committee of KCSC senior administrators. As the public minutes of that meeting indicate, the senior bureaucrats also perceived innuendos in the commercials. One of them argued for sanctions. He reasoned that if one considered the slogan “Sexy Utility Vehicle,” removing just one letter made it into “Sex Utility Vehicle,” a car for sex. Yet others said that they saw nothing particularly provocative there, just an image of a cool car. Even though it was sexual, it was not that big of a deal. As another one of them put it, “Even ice cream ads use sexual codes these



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days.” One of the decision makers noted that among the public representatives were specialists on food and nutrition who could not be expected to grasp the storytelling strategies of advertisers. On that note, they cleared the commercials (KCSC 2009). This discussion foregrounds that competing views about the appropriate social action to take on advertising were implicated in the historical context of neoliberalization, particularly in censors’ self-conscious pursuit of progressive, liberal subjecthood. Even when desiring to curb problematic advertising portrayals, the representatives were wary of appearing conservative to colleagues and observers, and perhaps even to themselves. Their veneration of liberal values—their difficulty with distinguishing between individuals’ freedom to live their private lives as they please and advertisers’ freedom to advertise as they please—made it hard for them to take action that limited advertisers: it took forty minutes of bickering to agree on recommending sanctions for the campaign, which all but one of the representatives found problematic from the very beginning. In the case of the next-level decision makers, they opted to privilege the advertisers’ point of view and to dismiss public representatives as not sophisticated enough to appreciate advertising strategies. In other words, those subjects who failed to respond to advertising as the advertiser intended were rendered lacking, negligible, and invisible. Even public representatives themselves were disregarded as incompetent (“food specialists”) when adopting a perspective different from that of the advertiser. Common resolutions of censorial quandaries shape more than the trajectories of particular campaigns. The discussion also harbored a contest over advertising generic conventions and social contract— whether advertising is to portray reality as it is, however questionable (“life is seducing women”) or reality as it should be, an expression of collective dream images. The former view was implied in the censors’ inaction, advocated by Communications Professor and Think-Tank Manager—if young people already did it, there was no point in censoring it, even if censors disapproved of such deeds and values. The subjunctive creative vision of advertising was enacted when the representatives saw themselves as steering social norms by allowing or disallowing certain behaviors in advertising, the position of Advertising Professor and his allies. Those divergent visions of advertising’s desirable social role also informed contests over a regime of truth that governs advertising, another

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area of censorial quandaries in which the conditions of advertising publicity were reexamined.

Th e A mbig ui tie s o f A dv e rtising Tru th s I expected that the majority of advertising censorship cases would involve obscenity. Obscenity cases were most visible in the online discussions in South Korea and also attracted the most scholarly attention in other locales (e.g., Mazzarella 2003). However, most of the complaints and monitor reports that the KCSC received were about the truthfulness of advertising claims. For example, a company advertised their mops as being made with microfibre, while in fact the mops were made with a blend of various materials, including microfibre—was it an untruthful advertisement? From 2008 to 2010, the reason for KSCS sanctions in the vast majority of cases was violations against truthfulness (36.6 percent, or 181 cases), followed by problematic use of music (7.7 percent, 38 cases)10 and misrepresentation of sales and promotions (5.9 percent, 29 cases) (KCSC 2011, 92); only 3.5 percent (17 cases) of sanctions were laid because of “dignity,” a vague category that included everything from excessive bodily exposure and lewd expressions to discriminatory portrayals and offensive feelings (KCSC 2011, 100). In that sense, the “Sexy Utility Vehicle” campaign was a rare case, even though the dilemmas that the reviewers had to confront—predicting whether the advertising public would take the advertising message as a call to action, and whether issuing a moral judgment on an advertisement implicates the reviewers themselves as ­conservatives—surfaced in more common “truthfulness” cases. The factuality of advertising claims was sometimes no easier to establish than a presence of “vulgar associations.” To quote Michel Foucault, “Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint” (1980, 131)—though in the case of advertising, the truth is produced by tolerating certain liberties. On the one hand, false advertising is prohibited, violations against truthfulness are spelled out in different regulations, and one of the tasks of advertising review is to verify the truth claims of advertising. As the KCSC’s executive director told me at our first meeting, advertising review was a technical operation



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of evaluating evidence. The most common problem was lack of supporting documentation for advertising claims, and their main task at KCSC was to make sure that there were factual grounds for the statements that advertisements made. He offered the example of a commercial for a cosmetic product that was found problematic for claiming “deep sea water” among its ingredients when in fact underground well water was used. In that case, advertising censorship came down to a straightforward assessment of advertising claims for their factuality. On the other hand, advertising enjoys a certain creative license to play up the positive sides of the advertised item and is not expected to alert potential buyers to its drawbacks. As the legendary adman David Ogilvy put it, “I must confess that I am continuously guilty of suppressio veri [suppression of truth]. Surely it is asking too much to expect the advertiser to describe the shortcomings of his product. One must be forgiven for putting one’s best foot forward” (1963, 158). With specific commodities advertised or with advertising mise-en-scènes in general, advertising texts are expected not to document reality as is but rather capture imaginations with an improved version, an aspirational spectacle of “capitalist realism,” whether in its consumerist or humanist versions. Indeed, advertising portrayals that are too realistic invite their own share of complaints, for they are understood as endorsing, and thus reproducing, the problematic phenomena they depict, such as objectionable gender roles or violent behavior (Cronin 2004). Paradoxically, advertising representations are compelled to simultaneously tell the truth and embellish it. Moreover, it is this creative license that makes advertising sufferable, interesting, and sometimes inspiring. It is more exciting to fantasize about an outing with “her” than be informed about a vehicle’s horsepower and fuel economy, though the latter information is more practical for a rational consumer decision. Playful hyperbolic representations of satisfaction the buyer is to receive from consuming the product are accepted and often enjoyed. The “Olleh” campaign for KT, for example, one of the most popular of 2009, revolved around linking the service to outlandish scenarios to illustrate the concept of exceeding customer expectations— delivering noodles to the space station, winning a marathon running backward, or getting attention from scantily clad beauties by tossing an axe in a pond. While issues with the campaign’s sexism were raised (see chapter 4), no one thought of complaining about the untruthfulness of

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KT’s playful promise to deliver the impossible. The regime of truth that governs advertising implies a degree of make-believe, and the public readily cooperates with what Raymond Williams (1999) terms the “magic system” of advertising. Problems arise when it is ambiguous whether an advertisement “realistically” represents the qualities of the commodity or whether it beautifies them for the commodity aesthetics purposes. The question of the limit of acceptable exaggeration in advertising was posited starkly in relation to an infomercial for a cleansing spray, an agenda item at one of the meetings of the advisory committee. Appearing on a home shopping channel, the eight-minute infomercial claimed that the spray contained “absolutely no chemical elements.” It also promised that, after using the product, dirt would come off “like noodles” (kuksu ch’ŏrŏm) and showed different models peeling off thick “noodles” of dirt. The task of the committee was to determine the truthfulness of these claims. As with many other complaints deliberated by the committee, the question of truthfulness of a particular advertisement became the question of what counts as truth in advertising in general. At first, the discussion focused on evaluating the statement that the product contained “absolutely no chemical elements,” which most representatives found problematic. As Advertising Professor pointed out, all matter is made of chemical elements. For about half an hour the discussion focused on the precise ingredients of the spray, whether they were good for the skin, and whether a consumer was likely to be misled by thinking that the product used “pure ingredients” only. Eventually Communication Professor redirected the discussion by suggesting that the representation of the spray ingredients was a less important issue than whether it was realistic for viewers to expect that so much dirt would peel off as a result of the application of the spray. He and then two more representatives pointed out that it looked extremely unlikely that an average person would be so dirty. Think-Tank Manager, however, objected that it was not entirely impossible that someone could indeed be that dirty, and since the advertisement did not make any claims about the person who was using the spray, it remained ambiguous. If read generously, it was not misleading the viewers but inviting them to appreciate the potency of the spray in an extreme case. Legal Advisor agreed, noting that his wife used such products all the time, so the cleansing spray would likely do nothing for her, but if he himself tried it, he continued to



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the chuckles from the representatives, the first results would very much likely be noodles of dirt. At that point, a KCSC staff member brought out the bottles of the spray, and the representatives tested the product, spreading small amounts on the backs of their hands. For all but incidentally the Legal Advisor the results were nowhere near “noodles,” though the amount of filth coming off was surprising, and the meeting participants seemed embarrassed and disgusted. Still, even after testing the product, it was difficult to definitively assert either that it was misleading consumers or that it was not. The deliberations had been going on for about forty-five minutes at that point. Steering the representatives toward a decision, chairing Advertising Professor reframed their question from whether the infomercial was truthful advertising to “Can we recognize this exaggeration as [acceptable as] advertising?” (kwanggo rosŏ injŏng hal’ su innŭn kwajang inya). Media Educator responded, “Because they filmed a dirty person, it is an exaggeration.” But other representatives disagreed. The KCSC administrator summarized the ambiguity of the case by saying that the advertisement might be partially true but altogether it was not. Advertising Professor then conceded that there was no problem with truthfulness but suggested that there was a problem with disgusting visuals. Indeed, “expressions that created an excessive sense of fear or disgust” were explicitly prohibited in the provision on broadcasting dignity. In the end, the decision was to issue an opinion (not legally binding and not accompanied by any sanctions) that the spray informercials provoked disgust. This decision reflected censors’ discomfort with the campaign and their inability to pin it down for its untruthfulness, the initial issue raised in its regard. Their very decision to keep the assessment of truthfulness out of the verdict constituted a particular regime of truth in advertising—the regime that tolerates advertising exaggerations as long as they do not cause uncomfortable feelings. That a gut reaction was the best measure of advertising truth was a point made by Media Educator in a later interview. She answered my question as to what degree exaggerations were acceptable in advertising in this way: “While it is interesting, if it becomes uncomfortable, it becomes a lying advertisement.” Her answer points to how advertising exaggerations are ultimately not about what advertising texts say (contra the KCSC executive director), but rather how they are responded to by

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advertising audiences, whose comfort or discomfort—an affective rather than intellectual reaction—becomes the measure of advertising truth. It is by gauging such reactions, by substituting factual truth (“lying advertising) with affective truth (“uncomfortable”), that censors made decisions when proving or disproving the factuality of an advertisement was difficult. “Comfort,” however, lies not so much in the text of a commercial as in a complex of meanings that it generates for certain viewers under certain circumstances. What is a dubious overstatement of the product’s potency for one is a transparent and acceptable advertising rhetoric for another. What provokes disgust could alternatively invite ridicule and irony. Even the same viewer may have differing reactions depending on the context of reception, as I show in the next chapter. A judgment about advertising truthfulness thus becomes a decision about normative levels of public gullibility and affective engagement with advertising. At stake in the politics of advertising truth is not only advertising freedom but also the normative subjectivities of advertising publics, albeit not in the naive “magic bullet” ways assumed by traditional critiques of advertising ideology.

Pro du c ing “ Sm art” C on sumer s At one of the meetings, the representatives were to decide whether to support a truthfulness complaint about a commercial for a major donut chain. In the commercial, a young couple is lured into a café with an appetizing window display of colorful donuts. The man tastes a donut and beams, and the voiceover announces, “More delicious because [donuts are] baked at the store.” The assertion that the donuts were baked on the premises was what provoked the complaint. The information provided by the chain confirmed that the premium donuts were indeed baked on the spot. Still, the representatives were skeptical. Legal Adviser noted that some of the branches were tiny outlets in subway stations, and those could not possibly have the facilities to bake anything. Moreover, after a KCSC staff member explained that the chain classified its donuts as premium and regular, and only the premium ones were baked at the store, Communications Professor pointed out that the opening shot showcased a display with all kinds of donuts, not just the premium ones, and the claim that the donuts were baked on the prem-



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ises did not distinguish between the two kinds. The consumer could conclude from the visuals that all of the donuts were baked at the store, he said. Labor Activist suggested strong sanctions, arguing that consumers would be disappointed if, expecting a freshly made donut, they got a premade one. Think-Tank Manager, however, objected. He said that consumers were “smart” (sŭmat’ŭ hada): they knew not to take advertising claims literally. Communications Professor disagreed, and sided with Labor Activist. He said that when he first watched the commercial, he himself was misled and assumed that all of the donuts were baked at the store. “What about the consumers who are not smart?” he asked, provoking chuckles among the public representatives. Think-Tank Manager’s intervention and Communications Professor’s ostensibly naive question point to what was at stake in advertising censorship—the production of a particular subject. The notion of “smart” consumers (sŭmat’ŭ sobija or ttokttokhan sobija) was popular in consumption discourses at the time. It was invoked on the one hand to educate consumers about savvy purchasing decisions, and on the other to motivate companies to develop sophisticated products and marketing strategies. When addressed to consumers, this discourse celebrated consumer empowerment through “smart” shopping decisions. “Smart consumers” (ttokttokhan sobija) were also necessary for disciplining companies and advancing national competitiveness, as was explained in many media interviews by Pak Myŏng-hŭi, the head of the Korea Consumer Agency in 2007–2009. Formerly called the Korea Consumer Protection Agency, in March 2007 this government organization dropped the word “protection” from its title, to achieve “a realization of consumer sovereignty,” and “an opening of a new horizon for the advancement of consumers’ rights and interests on the basis of trust in the market” (as opposed to depending on protection from government agencies) (KCA 2007). The Consumer Protection Act was also renamed the Framework Act on Consumers. As Pak elaborated for a journalist, “Consumers too must become rational and smart consumers . . . ethical consumers. I hope you all become consumers who can have an honest sense of responsibility for your action.”11 The “smart consumer” discourse transparently reproduced the neoliberal ideologies that require that subjects take social risks personally

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and place their faith in the wisdom of market competition. It obscured the older “consumerism” that South Korean civil society groups deployed to collectively demand regulation to serve consumer needs, from informative product labeling to safety inspections for harmful ingredients. By accepting the smart consumer as the norm, advertising censors were contributing to normalizing this neoliberal subjecthood and undermining earlier imaginaries, whose coordinates included “protection”—regulation in the name of public interest. The context of advertising censorship in regard to which the “smart consumer” was evoked suggested another dimension of this smartness: a certain cynical sensibility. Cynicism, while often confused with general skepticism and disillusionment, in the strict sense refers to the coexistence of disbelief and compliance—acting as if one believed while retreating into an inner space of detachment or irony (Sloterdijk 1987; Wedeen 1999; Žižek 1989). A cynical distance appears as a form of resistance because its subject consciously disidentifies with the disagreeable discourse, practice, or institution. But in practice a cynical detachment actually mediates the reproduction of those offending phenomena: it enables those disgruntled subjects to participate and thus reproduce the status quo while maintaining a sense of personal integrity.12 Studies of workplace resistance, for example, demonstrate that employees’ minor noncompliance with rules and ironizing about corporate values seldom prevent them from trying to succeed in the organizations they mock, so that in the end the cynical employees reproduce the corporate system they are so critical about, albeit from a face-preserving distance (Contu 2007; Fleming and Spicer 2003). Cynical distance toward advertising, too, might seem to interrupt the commercial effectiveness of advertising, but the opposite is the case. Though complaints about consumer disbelief in advertising are common in marketing, advertising works because of the distance toward advertising messages, not despite it. For advertising to effectively circulate, advertising audiences should recognize themselves in the advertising call to desire and buy commodities but not literally expect the sublime satisfactions depicted. Buying a beverage will not transport one to a tropical island of beauties, as, for example, a popular 2009 commercial for a canned coffee with Hallyu star Cha Tae-hyun promised, but the commercial viewer is enticed to imagine just such a scenario while not expecting its actual realization. Even when the standard is not “empiricist realism” but the “emo-



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tional realism” of “a subjective experience of the world” (Ang 1985, 45), a consumption experience rarely measures up to advertising’s superlative portrayals of consumerist bliss. Counterintuitively, it is cynical distance that guarantees advertising’s smooth operations and prevents advertising audiences from feeling deceived and resentful if the sublime satisfactions proffered by commercials fail to materialize when the commodity is consumed. An advertising regime of truth requires a certain cynical distance, and collapsing it spells trouble.13 The consumers that Think-Tank Manager affirmed as the norm were “smart” because they did not really believe the advertising message yet acted as if they believed it. Unlike those who complained to the KCSC, “smart” consumers were not compelled to intervene and demand truth in advertising. Think-Tank Manager’s opposition to sanctions implied that smart consumers were able to recognize advertising exaggerations—but let them go. Communications Professor, in contrast, denied that cynical detachment from advertising was the norm and assumed a gullible audience who identified with the advertising message and naively insisted on advertising being held accountable to reality. At stake in the debate about the truthfulness of the donut commercial was determining the appropriate extent of cynical distance toward advertising—or, from another angle, the extent of acceptable exaggeration in advertising. After debating for almost half an hour, the representatives were still unable to reach a consensus on how smart they could assume consumers to be and whether it was legitimate to ignore consumers who believed advertising promises. The lunch hour was approaching, and some representatives frequently glanced at the clock. Eventually the committee chairman reframed the question from how smart consumers were to how much damage they were likely to incur should they take the commercial at face value. What if they did buy regular donuts believing that they were baked on the premises? Labor Activist insisted that it was ultimately about consumer experience and ominously repeated, “Consumers would be disappointed.” In the end, the representatives agreed that even if consumers were misled, the damage would be negligible. Moreover, because the advertiser was an established chain, the representatives speculated that it was an “honest mistake,” not intentional abuse—another form of reasoning that favored a contextual interpretation of the advertisement’s claim and

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downplayed its actual veracity.14 The chairman concluded that there was a problem with the commercial’s truthfulness, but, for their purposes, they should let it go. The debate ended with a “no issue” verdict. This episode shows how advertising censorship could potentially block the inflation of promises in advertising. It was the vision for advertising censorship that was implied by Communications Professor and Labor Activist’s insistence on sanctions. Yet, in this case, advertising censorship failed to limit advertising’s inflationary commodity ­aesthetics— and instead, as with the Tucson IX campaign, endorsed advertising’s enhancement of commodities’ appeal. With the donut commercial, similar to the cleansing spray discussion, the KCSC moved a little further the boundary of how far and on what conditions the advertising industry was allowed to transgress the norm that stipulated veracity in advertising. Advertising censorship thus also produced the “smart consumer” needed for an unobstructed operation of advertising. The effect of advertising censorship was a subject who, on the one hand, believed advertising enough to invest desires in consumption and did not feel conflicted about engaging in the practices advertising prescribed, but, on the other hand, also disbelieved advertising enough not to identify with advertising messages and demand their literal realization. The consumers who were not “smart”—like Communications Professor, who asked that question, or Labor Activist, who insisted on sanctions until the end—stood to learn from their disappointment with the premade donuts, and presumably adopt an appropriate distance toward advertising promises. “Smart consumers” knew not to expect a full satisfaction of the urges that advertising stirred. In a sense, censor-approved advertising forced a choice on its addressees—either be a smart consumer voluntarily or face the discipline of discomfort and other negative effects. Advertising addressees are thus barred from taking a subject-position that refuses to accept marketing concerns as the yardstick and instead chooses to prioritize advertising publicness and social world making. When the KCSC did ban certain advertisements, the censors often prevented the advertising industry from sabotaging itself—it was policing advertisers so that they did not produce advertising that was unbelievable, and thus training advertising audiences to ignore it. Such, for example, was the general opinion on the nonbanking loan ads (taepuŏp kwanggo) that flooded advertising media, from TV to subway fliers (Fedorenko



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2008). Calls to regulate or even ban such ads came up again and again, and one of the reasons quoted was the trustworthiness of advertising in general, which those ads were said to be eroding. Advertising censorship thus mediated a race for greater “smartness” between advertisers and their audiences.

L e n i e n t A dv e rtising C en so r sh ip and C yni c al Se n sibil it y By insisting on the smartness of consumers, the public representatives at the KCSC participated not only in undoing the local cultural logic that prized public interest but also in normalizing a cynical sensibility beyond advertising. In neoliberalizing South Korea, cynicism was a response to the shattered hopes for economic and social justice after achieving democratization. In the 1990s, Koreans witnessed former pro-democracy fighters make dubious alliances with the reactionary forces and implement neoliberal reforms, which shrank economic opportunities for the already disadvantaged (Chu 2010; Kang 2006). Taking the pulse of the times, Chu Ŭ-nu (2010) names his essay on 1990s’ South Korea “The era of freedom and consumption, and the onset of cynicism.” He argues that by the new millennium South Korea had become a cynical, nihilistic “society of commanded enjoyment,” borrowing the term from Todd McGowan’s (2004) critique of political apathy in the United States. Those pessimistic assessments resonate with Youngmin Choe’s identification of boredom as the characteristic affect in post–IMF crisis South Korea. For Choi, boredom captures ambivalence and apathy, “an unwillingness to engage in the world outside of one’s own private preoccupations” (2009, 4). Cynicism, boredom, and despair have been argued to be widespread “negative” affects in neoliberal societies, reflecting the prevalent economic precarity and breakdown of habitual affective affinities (e.g., Allison 2012; Berlant 2006). “Smart consumers,” the product of a lack of belief in advertising promises combined with compliant consumer behavior, are another guise of this apathetic late-capitalist subject. A cynical subjectivity, I suggest, is nurtured by the ever-­escalating race of advertising promises, which offers another window into the late-­capitalist affective landscape. Advertising’s untruths are ­habitually

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i­ magined as creating brainwashed, duped consumers—a simplistic, selfserving critique that ignores how consumers’ distance is a precondition, not an obstacle, to smooth advertising circulation. When advertising deploys “uncomfortable” exaggerations, its addressees generally know to detach and assume the subject-positions of “smart consumers,” who do not really believe advertising. The protective buffer comes at a cost, however. As AdBusters founder Kalle Lasn writes about the shocking Benetton ads of the 1990s,15 “Their cumulative effect is to erode our ability to emphasize, to take social issues seriously, to be moved by atrocity . . . . We pretend not to care as advertisers excavate the most sacred parts of ourselves, and we end up actually not caring . . . . The more indifferent we become, the more voltage it takes to shock us. On it goes, until . . . we become shockproof ” (1999, 23). Lasn’s point is not that the emotions evoked by advertising are less real but that advertising audiences learn not to act on them—in other words, they become cynical subjects. The further advertising goes in its attempts to stir affective responses, the more it trains its addressees in a detached attitude, which Lasn rightly sees as affecting subjectivities beyond advertising, for advertising audiences in their other capacities are also democratic citizens and political actors. To push this point further, a historical side effect of advertising’s quest for affective persuasiveness is a proliferation of cynical subjectivity and the production of a cynical public. In postmillennial South Korea, permissive advertising censorship facilitated this process while creating conditions for ever-greater advertising freedoms. All that said, to dismiss advertising censorship as utterly complicit with the advertising industry is to ignore that the very persistence of advertising review reproduces the popular perception of advertising as in need of scrutiny. As WikiLeaks founder and cyber-activist Julian Assange notes about censorship, “We should always see . . . the attempts toward censorship as a sign that the society is not yet completely sewn up, not yet completely fiscalized, but still has some political dimension to it—i.e. what people believe and think and feel and the words that they listen to actually matters” (Assange, Žižek, and Goodman 2011). Assange’s point is made about political censorship, but it holds for advertising censorship as well. To censor advertising, however hands-off, is to insist that what advertising says still matters—maybe for consumption choices, but also for broadcasting dignity, youths’ education, sexuality norms, and soci-



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etal tolerance for fact stretching. In other words, advertising censorship encourages the public to keep a critical eye on advertising, even when authorized censors are distracted by enacting liberal subjecthood and demonstrating familiarity with advertising strategies. It indeed might be conservative prudes who submit the most complaints to the KCSC, but their interventions contribute to keeping advertising accountable to public demands. Formal or informal, by regulatory bodies or by concerned citizens, advertising censorship implies a refusal to accept advertisers as the ultimate authority on advertising—and this refusal empowers advertising publics to claim ownership over advertising through creative appropriations, partisan commentary, and, at times, activist mobilization.

C o n c lusion Advertising censorship is a crucial node in making both advertising and its audiences what they are. This chapter ethnographically captured its processes and explored what is at stake in censorial decisions. I argued that advertising censorship is better understood as not obstructive but productive—of the terms and conditions of advertising publicity and of audience subjectivities optimized for smooth advertising circulation. On the one hand, censorial decisions establish the thresholds for permissible tactics of persuasion, such as the limits of reasonable exaggeration or affective stimulation. On the other hand, they also establish normative reactions to and social action on advertising, fixing appropriate levels of gullibility and cynicism—whether it is reasonable to be offended by the expression “dog’s suffering,” scandalized by the sexualization of cars, or disappointed about donuts’ misrepresented freshness. Advertising censorship facilitates advertising circulation because it ensures that both advertising audiences and advertising producers fall within those normative attitudes—advertising producers do not push consumer cynicism too far, and advertising audiences do not believe advertising too much. Specifically in post-2008 South Korea, advertising censorship seemed to be about silencing advertising and limiting its freedoms but was in fact about endorsing exaggerations, embellishments, and affective jolts. The effect of the censorial reverence for advertising freedoms was a greater affective burden on audiences, whose members became i­ndividually

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r­ esponsible for buffering advertising provocations and discerning between advertising truth and half-truth, at the risk of a disappointing purchase or emotional aggravation. In aggregate, those censorial decisions and required audience adaptions were gradually reconfiguring both advertising and its audiences, while shifting the societally accepted balance of public obligations and private freedoms. A normalized cynical distance toward advertising might have armed “smart consumers” against advertising abuses, but it also translated into a privilege for corporations to inflate their marketing promises and more aggressively exploit sensual and emotional experiences for commodity aesthetics. The presumption of consumer smartness constructed advertising as first and foremost a marketing communication, and ultimately lowered the bar for what is acceptable in advertising, thus undermining historical notions that tasked South Korean advertising with inspiring contributions to nation and world making and demanded compliance with publicness ideals.

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Advertising Publics Consumers here prefer brand-building initiatives as opposed to promotional campaigns—they love ads that tell stories of love, hope and dreams. Campaigns that resonate most with Korean clients are always warm, kind and gentle. —Myoung Jin Won, associate creative director of Leo Burnett Korea Of course I like funny ads, but because I think that advertising is one of the methods to move people’s hearts, I tremendously like advertisements that shake me up emotionally. —Hongja ttŏnanŭn yŏhaeng (Solo travel)

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dvertising that warms up one’s heart, advertising that works on feelings, advertising that can stir human emotions . . .” Mr. Kim, a government employee in his thirties, was describing advertising that he liked. In August 2009, I was collecting “advertising talk”—conducting interviews with South Koreans about their relations with advertising, inspired by Richard Wilk’s (2002) observation that consuming a medium and talking about it are parts of the same process. My interview was supposed to be with Mr. Hwang, Mr. Kim’s older colleague and superior. However, after we scheduled our meeting, Mr. Hwang realized that he had other plans that evening, with Mr. Kim, and instead of rescheduling had invited me to join them. On a monsoon summer evening, the three of us chatted in a busy pub in southern Seoul near the government building where the two bureaucrats worked. As soon as I explained my research, Mr. Hwang and 133

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Mr. Kim, without waiting for me to ask any questions, volunteered their opinions on Korean advertising. As an example of Korean advertising at its best, Mr. Kim brought up an iconic humanist campaign of the 2000s by Korea’s largest steel maker, POSCO (Pohang Iron and Steel Company). The commercial, set in an unidentified foreign seaside town, tells the sentimental story of a poor boy bidding against tourists in a street auction for a bicycle, which is coveted by his younger brother. With a meager “five dollars”—all the money he had— he improbably wins, because the tourists recognize his beautiful intention and withdraw their bids. As Mr. Kim explained, “Of course, what POSCO intended here was to show that . . . what we [POSCO] make is the best. But as they were running advertising for corporate pur­ poses, they were also promoting public interest [kongik].” Mr. Kim brought up the POSCO ad in response to Mr. Hwang, who said that among advertising he liked best the public interest ads from noncommercial organizations. Mr. Kim disagreed, “What I like is when corporations do this [promote public interest] . . . . Because ‘Don’t smoke’ is an obvious thing, of course there will be such an ad . . . . But when an ad like the one I was talking about [POSCO’s ad] comes from a corporation . . . it can make my heart sing with serenity [maŭm ŭl chanchanhage ullil su isŭmyŏnsŏ] and makes me feel good.” His tone and poetic words left little doubt that he enjoyed such advertising.

Figure 4.  A storyboard from the “FiveDollar Bicycle” commercial for POSCO, 2009. Reproduced with permission from POSCO.



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This story of a bureaucrat getting emotional over a sentimental commercial introduces the theme of this chapter, the culturally sanctioned modes of responding to advertising, while my analysis examines their politics. Advertising practitioners shape advertising texts, and censors enable their circulation, but it is advertising publics, their reactions or lack thereof, that actualize advertising’s effects, from purchases and advertiser profits to social mores and structures of feeling. An advertising public is a variety of media publics, which are formed by individuals recognizing themselves as addressees of a circulating media text and perceiving themselves as a part of the larger virtual collectivity of those addressed, whereas their identifications with the media text performatively realize the social world it implies (Warner 2002). How advertising publics form across consumer niches, negotiate the meanings of advertising texts, handle advertising affects, and ultimately channel advertising circulation often escapes the intentions of advertisers, advertising agencies, or advertising regulators, as this chapter shows, drawing on solicited advertising diaries, interviews, and public discourse on advertising. If previously I underscored that advertising “produces” its addressees, here I shift focus to explore how audiences “strike back” and “produce” advertisements, in the sense of not only deciding on the normative reactions to circulating advertisements but also collectively regulating its socially mandated functions, standards, freedoms, and obligations. The chapter foregrounds the recursivity of those co-productions while questioning their implications for advertisers as capitalist enterprises and for advertising addressees as commodity consumers, democratic citizens, and cultural subjects. I demonstrate that at stake in sentimental, playful, ironic, indignant, hypercritical, passive, activist, and other reactions to advertisements are not only media literacy, cultural prowess, and individual subversions of the culture industry. Those responses mediate the moral and political economies that govern advertising and advertisers. Overall, I argue that some of the habitual modes of engagement with advertising in South Korea—namely reading advertising as a social critique and sentimental identification with advertising messages—affirm advertising as a public text and subject advertisers to public accountability based on the quality of their contributions to public culture, whereas others—ironic distancing and marketing assessments—favor surrendering advertising to advertisers and give up on its publicness. My analysis suggests that

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agentive reinterpretations of advertising are not an exhaustive condition for an alternative, emancipatory world making, on the one hand, and, on the other, that advertising discourses, even without “subversive” readings, harbor critical openings for renegotiating advertisers’ freedom and public interest. The following section lays out my methodological and analytical strategies for capturing audience agency without losing sight of advertising’s capitalist functions and the structural limits on advertising’s popular appropriations. Continuing with the problem of cynical distance from the previous chapter, I theorize identificatory and misdentificatory modes of responding to advertising. The chapter proceeds to detail, through specific examples, the common distanced modes of relating to advertising and their political-economic stakes, to then contrast them with activist orientations. Further, I develop a case study of a mobilization around a controversial advertising campaign, to portray an advertising public in action and tease out the possibilities and limitations of such activism. In the final section, I return to humanist campaigns and sentimental identifications to foreground their role in reinforcing the publicness obligations of South Korean advertising and reenergizing the moral-economic obligations of South Korean capital to its compatriots.

A ge n ti v e Aud ie nc e s an d The ir ( Mis) id e ntifi c atio n s Reactions to advertisements—whether tearing up, inattention, critical denunciation, laugher, or activist mobilization—are not definitively inscribed in the advertising texts themselves. There is no “natural” way to respond to commercial advertising. Some of its features—its openly declared marketing goals, for one—might encourage certain modes of engagement, but advertising recipients, like other media audiences, imbue it with particular meanings in specific contexts of reception while factoring in vernacular ideas about the medium itself (e.g., Gershon 2010; Kulick and Wilson 2002; Cody 2009). Advertising is subject to culturally sanctioned ways of feeling and its display, and reactions to advertising, like other emotional experiences, are not individual and interior but cultural and social.1 Individually experienced advertising affects are socially



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shaped and channeled into habituated scripts of culturally competent responses—which might require sentimentality, or irony, or indignation, depending on the local consensus on advertising profanity and worthiness as it refracts through the actual circumstances of exposure. Among the discoveries of my fieldwork was that South Koreans prized sentimental identification with resonant advertising content, of the kind Mr. Kim confessed experiencing on account of the POSCO commercial. Just as advertising practitioners strove for “kind advertising” that provoked emotional identification (konggam), so advertising audiences were eager to experience intense emotions on the occasion of an affect-heavy advertising campaign. Indeed, konggam—often “total konggam” (wanjon konggam)—was common praise for advertising in everyday conversations and in online forums. Such and other reactions produce corresponding advertising publics— of sentimentalists, but also, as I will be showing, of popular-­culture connoisseurs, ironists, marketing experts, and social critics—whose social actions regarding advertising performatively construct it as a social phenomenon appropriate to those reactions. Importantly, none of these reactions necessarily imply naïveté about advertising as a commercial medium or gullibility about its marketing claims. Rather, these responses diversely mediate the acknowledgment of advertising as a profit-driven commercial persuasion, on the one hand, and, on the other, an appropriation of advertising as a public-cultural text for its affective pleasures and worldmaking effects. Sentimental identifications, for example, far from undermining audiences’ interpretative agency, destabilize advertising as marketing communication, for, unlike Mr. Kim, many “sentimentalists” failed to connect those ads to the advertised product and advertiser, as I noticed in my interviews, when about half of my informants would describe the visuals of an advertisement they liked but could not recall what it was for or which company sponsored it. Perhaps because there are few opportunities to observe spontaneous interactions with advertising, advertising audiences receive little systematic attention from ethnographers, who are well equipped to demonstrate how advertisements, rather than “magic bullets,” are negotiated media texts with complex social lives. When the medium is advertising, the usual subtlety of media reception analysis—awareness of audiences’ interpretative agency, of the social situations of reception, of the local

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meanings of the medium itself—is often suspended. This “ethnographic refusal” leads critical scholarship to privilege the critic’s own insight into advertising meanings and effectively implies that advertising-exposed subjects are naive, gullible, and manipulatable.2 An important exception is Neil Alperstein’s Advertising in Everyday Life (2001). Relying on interviews and solicited advertising diaries by US television spectators, Alperstein shows that “advertising becomes part of the cultural repertoire of resources available to individuals” (23). His analysis resonates with the findings of cultural-populist scholars of other media, who foreground subversive readings and interpret pleasure in public texts as inherently emancipatory (e.g., Ang 1985; Fiske 1989)—rightly recognizing the audience as agentive, albeit problematically ignoring how this agency is constrained by systemic forces (Gibson 2000; McGuigan 2012). South Koreans, too, are skilled at negotiating the meanings of advertisements, and indulge in their affective richness on their own terms. However, I argue that those negotiations and pleasures are best understood not as individual emancipatory acts but rather as a public coming together and collectively negotiating social worlds—with, or against, advertisers. As such, my codification of various responses to advertisements serves to clarify power relations that advertising reception mediates. Specifically, this chapter explores the implications of the South Korean advertising public habitually misidentifying with an advertising address. Misidentifications occur when advertisements are identified with on unanticipated terms. While generally advertisers wish to address only potential buyers, and primarily as commodity consumers, audience members might (mis)identify instead as concerned citizens, or protective parents, or minders of public morals. As importantly, nonbuyers exposed to advertising might refuse the non-subject status that marketing communication reduces them to and also identify as addressees. Whether incidental, tactical, or opportunistic, such misidentifications are identifications with what has been misunderstood, recontextualized, or repurposed.3 By framing those extra-marketing identifications as ­misidentifications—“mistaken” identifications—my usage intentionally prioritizes advertising’s instrumental logic, acknowledging it as a tool for marketing commodities and enhancing advertiser’s profits in the final analysis. As such, the notion resists the optimistic cultural-populist cel-



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ebrations of agentive audiences, which confuse audiences’ capacity for resistive readings with escaping hegemonic ideologies altogether. At the same time, inspired by the studies of the performativity of resistant rearticulations of the dominant norms and discourses (Butler 1993; Greer 2014; Muñoz 1999), I foreground the subversive potential of such misidentifications, insofar as they claim advertising for extra-marketing concerns, draw it into public politics, and redistribute advertising freedoms and obligations, often in favor of those doing the identifications—advertising publics. These misidentifications escalate into far-reaching public-cultural contests when an advertising public (mis)identifies as the national public and appropriates advertising discourse in the name of national causes, often citing dangers to more gullible fellow citizens.4 Such national orientations are implicit in Mr. Kim’s praise for the POSCO commercial promoting the public interest, and even more so in the complaints filed with the Korea Communication Standards Commission (KCSC; chapter 3). These national misidentifications impose publicness obligations on ­advertising—obligations to support progressive causes, such as gender equality, and to accommodate malleable youths and touchy seniors, whether or not they are the intended consumer niche. The national advertising public thus transforms advertising from niche marketing communication into a national institution, reminiscent of how in consciously modernizing nation-states national television often becomes a tool for modernization and enlightenment (e.g., Abu-Lughod 2005). Arguing that advertising publics gravitate toward imagining themselves as the national totality is not to deny the existence of segmented markets, an often-commented-upon feature of the post-Fordist economies, as, for example, Gabriella Lukács (2010) details for Japan, whose media and consumer markets often yield insights for understanding their counterparts in South Korea. In South Korea, too, marketing literature offered clever monikers for consumer niches that reflected different social, economic, and demographic groups. The Korea Broadcast Advertising Corporation’s “Media and Consumer Research” report for 2010, for example, identifies “smart mobilians,” “early adopters,” “gold seniors,” “premier consumers,” and “alpha moms” (KOBACO 2010, 8). However, as advertising publics, these segments were responding to a national logic as least as much as to niche logics. “Smart mobilians,” “gold seniors,” and “alpha moms” might have different needs, tastes, and subcultural codes,

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but they were all attuned to the nationalist-humanist aesthetic, knew the same celebrities, and agreed on brand hierarchies. The straightforward prestige rankings of available advertising media also encouraged this uniformity—the reputable national terrestrial networks and national dailies for big companies that can afford them, and niche channels and local newspapers for small and medium-size businesses.5 Identity politics had limited appeal in postmillennial South Korea, and its exploitation for the cause of modern consumerism rarely ventured beyond occasional gendered and generational appeals. Even those strategies often backfired when executed through national media. The non-target audience—such as the elderly scandalized by kissing in canned coffee commercials—did not care that advertisers were addressing another demographic and often enough caused trouble with their displeasure, for example, by filing official complaints. To tease out how individual agency, cultural definitions of advertising, and structural constraints intertwine in shaping advertising circulation and advertising publics, I open my analysis with advertising diaries, which, following Alperstein, I solicited by asking my research participants to record and reflect on their mundane encounters with advertising. Diary writers came from among the people I interviewed about their advertising-related practices and popular campaigns of the day. Recruited through convenience sampling, my interviewees fell under the category of middle-class consumers, from young adults to the middle-aged, the demographic that nationwide campaigns usually speak to.6 While many agreed to write diaries, few lasted beyond two to four entries, and only one wrote ten entries, as I had requested. I ground my discussion in the responses to advertising of the most prolific diary writer, twenty-year-old Yŏng-hŭi, whom I got to know also through regular phone conversations, emails, and occasional meetings. As a college student, she was a member of the stratum many Korean advertisers were after, so my privileging of her reactions mirrors the demographic preoccupations of the South Korean advertising industry itself. At the same time, contrary to the culturalpopulist approach, I emphasize that Yŏng-hŭi’s responses are best understood as shaped by national conventions of responding to advertising, not by a narrow consumer niche logic or her individual agency. I situate Yŏng-hŭi’s advertising-related practices within the commonalities of the structural relation to advertisers experienced by all South Koreans—as



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commodity consumers, sellers of labor power, citizens of the national polity, and cultural subjects. In that regard, my analysis pushes against the marketing-led fetishization of difference and foregrounds systemic relations and power inequalities. To triangulate individual responses, Yŏng-hŭi’s and others’ diary entries as well as interview answers are interpreted side by side with user-generated Korean-language Internet data. At the time of my ethnographic research, South Korean Internet was dominated by blogs and cafés, where I found a wealth of advertising-related discussions, ranging from personal reflections on particular campaigns to spontaneous or solicited exchanges among regular participants on advertising-related topics. While mainstream advertising still primarily relied on the traditional media, advertising publics already privileged online platforms. I gathered advertising-related entries from individual blogs not necessarily concerned with advertising; advertising-focused threads in popular online forums, such as DC Inside; and comments on media articles about advertising. Self-consciously public, those online discussions functioned as a space where normative patterns of reacting to and talking about advertising were reenacted. Whereas the mass media, mindful of the ebb and flow of advertising revenues, reported on advertising enthusiastically and cautiously, netizens’ discourses veered toward extremes, especially when critical opinions were expressed. At the same time, netizens captivated by poignant campaigns, such as POSCO’s “Bicycle” or “Toward People,” reposted them with lavish praise and kept them circulating online well past their run in the traditional media. In postmillennial South Korea, “advertising talk” online was as consequential if not more so than advertising talk offline and public discourse in traditional media.7

R e sp o nd ing fr om a Distanc e While South Koreans prefer inspiring, identification-worthy advertising, the advertising that dominates the South Korean mediascape invites other kinds of engagement. Most ads that cross the threshold of indifference fight for attention by flaunting celebrity endorsers, offering beautiful models as eye candy, pursuing shock value with improbable scenarios, and wackily melodramatizing the joys of consumption. At their best, such

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attention-hungry ads are entertaining. Often, however, they are annoying, especially after being experienced several times. “Some might say it is pleasing to look at a 173-cm tall former Miss Korea, but beyond that grotesque music and images, the sloppy dance . . . when I see the bizarre dance, I feel an urge to throw away my TV,” wrote a blogger about a commercial for the ubiquitous loan-service Wonk’aesing, which featured a fembot cheerleader dancing and an unsubtle jingle based on the phone number.8 At the time of my fieldwork, such commercials for private moneylenders flooded terrestrial and cable channels with earworm tunes about “no interest” and “quick loans,” often delivered by celebrities—causing much irritation to media audiences. I trace patterns of engagement with pesky ads by examining responses to a commercial for another service with unseemly associations, substitute driving, about which Yŏng-hŭi, the prolific diary writer, wrote her first entry. By placing her and others’ responses in their social context and specifying the divergent interests at stake, I foreground how distanced engagement with such unremarkable mainstream ads shapes power relations between advertisers and the advertising public. South Korean marketing research constructed college students such as Yŏng-hŭi as being the most susceptible to fads and, because they often lived with their parents, in possession of disposable income to satisfy their fancies, either from the pocket money they received or from part-time jobs. At the advertising agency where I interned (chapter 2), a generic “college student” often appeared on the presentation slides, especially for ads for alcohol, food, and telecommunications. Unlike those portrayals of carefree youths, Yŏng-hŭi was frugal and stressed about securing economic opportunities in the future. She attended a third-tier university because, she explained, her family could not afford to send her to afterhour tutors and she had gotten a low score on the college entrance exam. Yŏng-hŭi was unsatisfied with her education and agonized about her job prospects. Rather than a freewheeling spender, she struck me as a likely candidate for what a year later would become glossed as “Give Up Three Generation” (samp’o sedae), so named because the harsh socioeconomic conditions barred young people from having what were considered the essentials of a good life: holding a permanent job, getting married, and having children. While a departure from the marketing brief, Yŏng-hŭi was representative of the middle- and lower-class youths burdened with the personal responsibility of building their “human capital” in the neo-



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liberalized society and largely oblivious to the structural factors, such as family wealth and gender, that pose very real obstacles to success, as detailed by Nancy Abelmann, So Jin Park, and Hyunhee Kim (2009). Seemingly outside of those large political-economic shifts, responses to advertising nevertheless shape the distribution of opportunities, wealth, and power, as I begin to detail through Yŏng-hŭi’s advertising experiences. The first entry in Yŏng-hŭi’s advertising diary read, Dooly [Tulli] is a baby dinosaur character, whom I have loved from early childhood, like all South Koreans. Many people remember him as a symbol of childlike innocence, and, when I see Dooly, I, too, have many thoughts about childhood. But that Dooly was used in an advertisement for a substitute driver service gave me a bit of a shock. Substitute driver services are usually for adults who have been drinking until late and cannot drive while drunk, so someone drives for them [in their own cars]. To use Dooly in such an advertisement . . . . Hmm . . . !! I thought it’s a pretty shallow business ability, and I also felt a bit bitter. When children think about Dooly, they will think about substitute driving, and this is a bit worrisome.

As Yŏng-hŭi explains, the commercial for the substitute driver service was an intertextual play on a popular cartoon from the 1980s. In the cartoon, Dooly the baby dinosaur was preserved in an iceberg and turns up in Seoul, where he is found by a kind girl, Yŏng-hŭi, after whom I gave the diary writer her pseudonym. The Yŏng-hŭi from the cartoon brings Dooly home as a pet, and soon enough Dooly makes friends and embarks on plucky adventures. At his adoptive home, Dooly demonstrates certain rambunctiousness, and, endowed with magical abilities, he often uses his skills to challenge the oppressive father. The latter fact provoked critiques of the cartoon when it first appeared for inciting children to disrespect their elders. By the 2000s, the controversy was forgotten, and Dooly was one of the fictional characters competing to be the mascot of the Korean cute, against the penguin Pororo and the doll Pukka. In the 2010 commercial, Dooly rides in a car with his friends from the cartoon while singing a catchy jingle converted from a nursery rhyme: “I am no fool, I’ll get a tenpercent rebate.” A clever pun with Dooly’s name, the last four digits of the advertised service’s phone number are “2222,” which in Korean could be read as “Dooly Dooly” (tulli tulli), the chorus of the jingle.

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It is noteworthy that Yŏng-hŭi chose to write about the Dooly commercial in the first place. Yŏng-hŭi did not consume alcohol, nor did she own a car or even have a driver’s license, so the advertised service was doubly irrelevant to her. Yet she chose to write about the advertisement— (mis)identifying as its public—because the Dooly character resonated with her and she “got” the commercial’s intertextuality. She processed the advertisement not as an information about an available service but rather as a new, if unfortunate, episode in Dooly’s adventures. While she was not a user of the substitute driver service, she was someone who knew Dooly. In other words, indifferent to the commercial’s consumerist hail, she responded as a culturally competent participant of the South Korean national public, of which the Dooly cartoon was one of the constitutive texts. That the story about Dooly circulated in the form of advertising was incidental to her response—not its defining determinant. Netizens who responded to the substitute driving campaign also displayed little interest in the advertised service and (mis)identified with the commercial as another public-cultural text whose advertising form was of minor relevance. Like Yŏng-hŭi, many were bothered by such a use of a popular cartoon character. For example, one commentator listed the Dooly commercial as being among the commercials that they hated, noting, “Really, to make cute Dooly into this . . . . As someone who loves Dooly, I am very sad.”9 A lengthy post under the title “Regrets about Dooly” (from a blog that otherwise mixed comments about the IT industry, technology news, and comments on books and cultural products) echoed Yŏng-hŭi’s assessment: “When I saw that commercial for the first time, it’s outlandishness [ŭiwesŏng] confused me. I thought maybe I misunderstood something. Dooly and his friends appeared in an advertisement for substitute driving! What is that awkward feeling? Why can’t I just view this commercial and naturally let it go? . . . Hmmm . . . . It does not feel right . . . when I saw this ad, I felt sad and bitter.”10 Like Yŏng-hŭi, many commentators foregrounded the incongruity between the commercial and the cultural meaning of Dooly as a character from a beloved children’s cartoon and expressed sorrow and hurt over this turn in Dooly’s fate. The Dooly commercial realized a public of popular-culture experts, who found the campaign lacking because of its misuse of the cultural connotations of the Dooly character.11 Advertisers and advertising agencies might actively seek this pop-



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ular-cultural life for their campaigns, but that it will translate into sales is far from certain. When an advertising public responds to its popular-­ cultural content, it often neglects the sales message. Moreover, as the Dooly example illustrates, the conjured public could reject the advertising’s take on popular culture, which does generate publicity, yet of a negative kind whose promotional benefits are dubious. Whether corresponding to sales or not, such creative appropriations depend on the commodification of cultural products in ways that might benefit advertisers but not the broader public. As Yŏng-hŭi’s comment rightly implies, casting Dooly as the face of a substitute driver service impoverishes Dooly’s meaning as a childhood hero, for Yŏng-hŭi’s generation and those that come after, and it is unlikely that resistant readings can compensate for that. This critique holds for most advertisements that appropriate cultural stock for commercial gain. Rarely do such appropriations add to the symbolic richness of a cultural sign; rather, they vulgarize it, so that those popular-culture connoisseurs are arguably worse off in terms of the value of the collective cultural resources available to them. Public ownership of the cultural resource seized by advertising might seem to be restored via ironic appropriations, another common way of responding to the Dooly commercial in the blogosphere. I came across a lively discussion at an influential portal, dcinside.com, which unfolded under the title “Dooly Did a Commercial for a Substitute Driver Service, Has He Become Corrupted?” Igyŏtta!: My pure Dooly-chan12 . . . sob sob . . . . I don’t want to provide a link for you guys. It would destroy your innocence. [Korean emoticon for tears] You’ll find it if you do a search. [Korean emoticon for tears] Dooly did a substitute driver service ad . . . . Dooly-chan, no, you can’t. My pure Dooly did a commercial for substitute driver service . . . . I wonder, has Dooly become corrupted? Yuyu: Are you talking about the Dooly’s substitute driver service? Dooly is now thirty, it is about time he gets a job. Yuyu: At least it is not a private loan advertising. . . . Takchui: Brother Dooly [Tulli-hyŏng] is about to turn thirty (now he is twenty-eight), I understand him. But still . . . . As [Yuyu] said above, I hope he does not advertise private loans. Think about Mr. Micky Mouse

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In other blogs, commenters joked that “Dooly too must make a living,”14 whereas some quipped that the owner of the company must be a Dooly fan and wondered whether the substitute drivers were required to dress up in green dinosaur suits when at work.15 In this ironic reading, the commercial is claimed as a popular-cultural resource on the ironists’ own terms, to empower their own postmodern play with signifiers and to occasion their demonstration of wit and cultural prowess. The ironic mode of responding might be rejecting the advertiser’s intended message, but it is ultimately complicit with advertisers’ freedom to appropriate Dooly and other popular-cultural referents for marketing purposes. Irony on its own is an ineffectual resistance because ironic attitudes rarely prevent—and usually mediate—the ironic subjects’ practical complicity with what they are ironic about (Žižek 1999, 97–98). The ironic distance is still de facto acquiescence to the world making that the commercial implies. Unlike Yŏng-hŭi and other “bitter” commentators above, ironists do not feel compelled to reject the world making that transforms a childhood hero into a sellout. Irony about advertising becomes a form of cynical distance, considered in the previous chapter as a means for enabling advertisers’ freedom and a part of the pervasive late-modern cynical sensibility.16 Yŏng-hŭi’s response to Dooly’s “endorsement deal” illustrates another common tactic to get distance from the uncomfortable message: to adopt the perspective of a marketing expert. Her comment on the advertiser’s “shallow business ability” implies that one of her problems with the ad is that it would not sell. She thus laments a missed economic opportunity for the advertiser. Such a guerrilla business analysis was a common way of critiquing advertising—often deducing the “concept” of the ad and its intended audience, and predicting its failure to endear the advertiser to prospective customers. Most of the advertising diaries I collected never went beyond such entries, despite my gentle insistence that I would rather read about the writer’s individual impressions of advertisements and that their Internet research to find sales statistics was unnecessary.



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In the blogosphere, too, many of the critical comments on the Dooly campaign spoke from the position of a knowledgeable, knowing subject of marketing. To quote, “ ‘Dooly’ as a concept of protecting family safety? Is it what they are wishing for, that children who watch recent animations say, ‘Daddy! When you are in a rush, let Dooly drive!’ It is possible to feel closeness when seeing Dooly who came from the times when one was growing up, but isn’t it too much to stage Dooly as a guardian of family safety? Not that substitute driving is not a good service, but there was some dissonance between Dooly as a family character and a service that is so unrelated.”17 The author considers the “concept” of the campaign, a distinctive marketing term, reflects on how the commercial is supposed to engage the addressee (“closeness”), and comments on the match between the product and its celebrity endorser. The blogger is clearly critical of the campaign, but the linchpin of their criticism is the poor marketing behind it. Marketing calculations also inspired concerns for Dooly’s brand value, another angle from which the infelicitous commercial was criticized. At the time Dooly was running against other cartoon characters to represent South Korea. In a media commentary on the penguin Pororo’s eventual victory, a professor of media design and content was quoted saying, “My heart ached every time I saw Dooly in the commercial for the substitute driving service.” His heart ached for the dilution of Dooly’s economic worth: “That Dooly appeared in a commercial that has nothing to do with the animation’s story or its original image is greatly hurting the character’s brand value.”18 This reading was different from that of the popular-culture experts above, whose main concern was with Dooly’s cultural meanings and, to a degree, with the opportunistic commodification of culture. The primary issue here was with maximizing the value that Dooly as a commercial asset could yield to its owners. Assessing the marketing side of an advertising campaign might seem like a welcome sign of media literacy. An awareness of marketing strategies is likely to guard one from being tricked by them. However, such a stance comes at a cost. Namely, it naturalizes the marketing logic as well as advertisers’ worldviews. Yŏng-hŭi’s comment on the advertiser’s “shallow business ability” is a case in point. Even though the substitute driver service was irrelevant to her at the time, it could become relevant later in life and was probably already relevant to at least some of her friends and

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family, considering the notorious Korean “drinking culture,” which mandated participation in heavy drinking for social inclusion and for access to economic opportunities. However, it seemed improbable that Yŏng-hŭi would want to run her own business in the observable future and would want to advertise it. Despite the irrelevance to her personally of the ad’s marketing side, when watching the ad she put herself in the shoes of the advertiser. She did not comment on the rebate strategy for its value to consumers, for example. Yŏng-hŭi evaluated only the “image” that the company sought to produce, and she did not venture any guesses about whether the image corresponded to the actual service provided. In other words, she privileged the business imperatives of the advertiser over the needs of potential consumers like herself. This identification with the need to sell disavows the fact that the best interests of advertisers—capitalist enterprises driven by profit ­maximization— do not coincide with the best interests of advertising addressees, who in their daily lives are consumers of commodities, citizens of a political community, and inhabitants of lifeworlds constructed with popular-cultural artifacts. As commodity consumers, advertising audiences would be better served if they assessed the usefulness of the information that the commercial offered to them as service buyers. As citizens, they could benefit from examining the societal costs of advertising supporting mass media. As popular culture users, they could question the costs of letting advertisers trivialize the collectively produced cultural stock. Moreover, to respond to advertising as a marketing expert is also to assume the subjectivity of a neoliberal entrepreneur of the self and performatively support its hegemonic status in late-capitalist societies. A neoliberal subject is to manage her life as if it were an enterprise, to act as her own brand manager and advertiser who needs to sell herself in professional and romantic markets (Foucault 2008; Rose 1999; Illouz 2007). The guerrilla marketing analysis volunteered by the advertising public is an overlooked site where neoliberal logic is articulated and naturalized. To sum up my analysis of distanced modes of responding to advertising, audiences’ interpretative agency alone does little to challenge the hierarchy that puts advertisers’ material gains over public interest. Assuming a distance from dubious advertising messages—through ironic reinterpretations and marketing assessments—might deliver satisfying opportunities for engaging in cultural play and demonstrating marketing



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prowess. But those tactical victories come at the cost of strategic losses. While disidentifying from the messages without actually rejecting them, advertising publics follow advertisers’ lead in commodifying and vulgarizing shared cultural stock. By critiquing advertising for its poor marketing choices, advertising publics bracket their own human needs as consumers of commodities and information and reenact neoliberal hegemony. Distanced modes can also mediate what Robert Cluley and Stephen Dunne (2012, 253) term the “as if moment of commodity consumption” to theorize how “people find ways to ignore what they know as they engage in consumption activities that they find immoral, unethical, embarrassing or self-destructive” (Cluley 2015, 365) as if ignorant of their own complicity. More generally, agentive assertions of distance from advertising messages mediate implicit consent to the lack of agency in how consumerist capitalism subordinates human needs to the valorization needs of capital. An avatar of the “smart” consumers from the previous chapter, this detached, clever advertising public effectively releases advertisers from their public accountability.

Acti v ist O r ie ntatio n s While South Koreans were quite adept at sidestepping uncomfortable advertising messages, often enough they also actively rejected disagreeable ads. Challenging problematic advertising communications, they emerged as a socially engaged advertising public actively appropriating advertising for intervention into national lifeworlds. Tellingly, whereas for Alperstein’s US informants most responses to advertising were reflections on the personal relevance of particular ads, for South Koreans advertising was often a trigger to engage with social issues, either when reflections were recorded privately in a diary, or solicited in an interview, or when they were shared publicly through blogs.19 Commentaries on dubious ads often blended critiques of problematic advertising portrayals with critiques of social ills, the former treated as both evidence of and a constitutive part of the latter. It was, for example, advertising for private moneylenders, especially with celebrities, that was blamed for the growing debt problem in South Korea—not the disappearance of stable jobs due to deregulation (Fedorenko 2008). Often enough those critiques

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realized advertising public’s collective political agency by creating pressure on advertisers through the sheer volume of critical comments online, especially when the online buzz drew attention from the mass media and mobilized civil society groups. Yŏng-hŭi’s advertising diary is illustrative of how fluidly reflections on advertising turn into an incensed commentary on South Korean life. I did come across a few personal forays, but most of her entries veered toward reflections on Korean society and attitudes that particular advertisements encouraged or critiqued, such as the oppressive educational zeal of Korean parents or the immense stress of college entrance exams. Many of her entries made critical comments on the representation of women in advertising. Yŏng-hŭi, for example, pointed out sexism in real-estate commercials, which never showed men but only women, who were portrayed, on the one hand as having very materialistic concerns and on the other as not having jobs and enjoying leisurely lifestyles. To illustrate how Yŏng-hŭi’s musings on advertising turned into a social critique, one of her longest entries was a condemnation of a “W” cell phone commercial, which featured the South Korean entertainer Rain (often praised for his masculine attractiveness) promoting a particular cell phone model as “manly” and mocking men who use pink “girly” phones: Here “girly” refers to a woman, but it seems that rather than calling something womanly, it seeks to give it the image of greater feebleness by using the word “girly.” The advertisement says that a man cannot use a pink color, and must use a black, dark-colored cell phone that would match his manly side. Many people think that womanly things are feeble, passive, domestic, like that. There is much talk that we [Koreans] should not speak like that, we should correct our speech habits, we should change the consciousness in South Korea. But in the advertisements that we encounter in everyday life, such words continue to be used, and in people’s consciousness there is no way not to discriminate between manliness and womanliness.

While the thrust of her indignation is against the sexism of the ad itself, Yŏngh-ŭi also takes aim at the social problem of gender inequality, of which she sees this advertising as both a reflection and an agent. Yŏng-hŭi’s “girly phone” entry also illustrates the ready national identifications of South Korean advertising publics. Yŏng-hŭi was dis-



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obliging of the commercial’s selective address to manly phone buyers, which excluded her, a young woman, and, in the commercial universe, a likely possessor of a pink “girly” phone. Engaging from the position of “us Koreans,” Yŏng-hŭi—similar to many bloggers who commented on ­advertisements—posited advertising as a national discourse with a responsibility for creating proper Korean nationals by modeling desirable behaviors. In such ways, South Korean advertising publics charged advertising with social engineering tasks, which are commonly assigned to state-driven media, such as national television, in the contexts of modernization.20 With such national-activist orientations, advertising’s status as commercial communication and a medium of advertisers’ private interest was an irrelevant consideration, except when leveraged to pressure advertisers to abide by higher standards. Many of those advertising critiques simmered online and were forgotten soon enough in favor of new controversies. Online critiques became disruptive when they spread to the point of “cultural ignition” (Kang 2016, 4–5), when certain issues captivate Internet users, whose sharing and commenting reaches such a level of public awareness that failure to address the issue damages the legitimacy of the implicated parties. In those cases, the ads at issue could be voluntarily or forcibly stopped, sometimes with regulatory consequences. To return to the outcry against private money lenders in the summer of 2007, for example, the implicated celebrity endorsers were forced to apologize to their fans and to the general public, whereas the regulation of private loan advertising was tightened. Most disruptions occurred when civil society groups took up the fight to pressure advertisers and regulators. For many South Korean nongovernmental organizations, the faith in advertising world-making powers overlapped with their social-improvement impulses. As Anne Cronin (2004) shows for the United Kingdom of the 1990s, for governments and NGOs, regulating advertising images offers an attractive, visible, and cheap way to address societal issues—even though problematic advertising portrayals are their reflections, not causes, she argues, and regulating and limiting advertising portrayals of, say, smoking are unlikely to convince someone to stop their nicotine consumption. In South Korea, too, many civil society organizations scrutinized advertising content to effect positive social change, reasoning similarly to Yŏng-hŭi in her critique of the “girly” phone commercial. The Seoul YMCA’s Citizen’s M ­ ediation

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Room, the YMCA Headquarters of TV Watching Citizens, the Consumers Union of Korea, Consumers Korea, the Korean Public Health Association, the Media Division of WomenLink, and the Association of Advertising Consumers all monitored and analyzed advertising either for particular products and services, such as private loan advertising, or for targeting particular populations, such as advertising to children. They would publicize their findings via the mainstream media, hold seminars to discuss them, and develop policy suggestions for relevant government structures. For example, in the winter of 2010 the consumer protection division of Seoul YMCA held a contest called “Fishing for Bad Loan Advertising” through which it invited the general public to document cases of loan advertisements that violated regulations, and awarded prizes for the best submissions; the 120 submissions received informed a report with policy recommendations. Such public challenges to advertising happened well before the Internet, though online platforms amplified their resonance by enabling support from netizens outside of the traditional activist circles. On a few occasions, NGO interventions escalated into consumer boycotts, unleashing the political potential of advertising publics. The following section examines such an incident—the advertising public at its most militant.

Th e “O lle h ” C a mpaign : A P ublic Mo biliz atio n In mid-July 2009, the Korean Internet was buzzing about a series of animated ads for telecom giant KT (Korea Telecom). Saturating the main TV channels and circulating on the Internet, the nine humorous commercials followed the same plot: a protagonist encounters a delightful event and exclaims, “Wow!” only to encounter an even more delightful event and then shout “Olleh!” (pronounced as the sports chant “Olé!”), after which the KT logo is displayed. In one advertisement, for example, a lumberjack throws an iron axe into a pond, and an old wizard appears, extending three shiny golden axes, and the lumberjack says “Wow!” in amazement; then he throws the same axe into the pond again, and three young women appear, showing off shapely legs and each holding a golden axe, to which the lumberjack ecstatically shouts, “Olleh!” Other episodes included a



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couple sending their son off to a summer camp (“Wow!”) and then the father seeing off both his child and his spouse (“Olleh!”); a sexy blonde kissing an attractive young man (“Wow!”) and then kissing an old wrinkly “millionaire” with a posh car (“Olleh!”). By adopting the sports chant, the advertising campaign cleverly latched on to sports fandom culture, which blossomed after the 2002 World Cup, which South Korea cohosted with Japan. It also was reminiscent of the well-loved 1989 advertising campaign that launched Lotte’s beverage brand, Del Monte, with the slogan ttabong (purportedly “good” in Brazilian Portuguese) that then entered the vernacular language. KT press releases, however, stressed their corporate philosophy: if spelled in Chinese characters, “Olleh” means “The future is coming,” capturing the company’s innovative vision; if read backward, “Olleh” turned into the English “Hello,” which communicated the friendly image of the company. The campaign was to enact KT’s transition from a clunky public corporation into a hip innovator. The “Olleh” experience—an experience that exceeded one’s wildest expectations—was to be delivered by KT’s service bundle. The first comprehensive package of that kind on offer in South Korea, it covered all of one’s telecommunication needs—fixed line telephony, cell phone service, and Internet subscription. But it was not from the commercials that potential buyers were to find this information about KT’s unique offer. The campaign addressed a public not of rational consumers but of playful fun seekers, who appreciated its humor and opportunities to add the exclamation “Olleh!” to their cultural repertoire. A brief from Cheil Worldwide, the advertising agency behind the campaign, explained, “We all know too well the rules for corporate advertising: be serious, touching, not fun, proper, authoritative, show only the view of the company. That’s why all South Korean corporate PR is similar . . . . Let’s make a campaign that people could sincerely like and enjoy, that would be the most delightful and fun campaign ever, the new world where customer and KT could have conversation and have fun, not just simple corporate PR.” The brief thus rejects the idioms of humanist advertising and frames the campaign as entertainment offered to customers to play with. This advertising strategy was likely affected by the marketing wisdom that prescribes humorous advertising in times of crisis. Having experienced the devastation of the IMF Crisis, in the spring and summer of 2009 many South Koreans were apprehensive, as it was unclear when the

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2008 financial crisis would bottom out and how severely South Korea would be hit. In this context, advertising was perceived as important for boosting public and investor morale, whereas marketing analysts predicted that consumers wanted an escape from everyday stress and would develop affinity for brands that let them have fun. As one local expert put it, “The less there is to laugh about, the more we must make the consumer smile even through a short advertising message.”21 Humorous advertising was thus akin to a public service by advertisers—a gift to anxious consumers that was, however, to keep on giving through increased customer loyalty. In addition to speaking to a fun-craving public, the campaign also winked at the connoisseurs of marketing. For the first week, “Olleh” was a “teaser” campaign; there was no information about what exactly the campaign was for. Intrigued by the visuals, some netizens and media outlets engaged in the guessing game until the KT bundle was finally announced and the mystery was solved. The campaign enjoyed explosive popularity, and was voted the second most memorable campaign of 2009.22 It became a part of local situated knowledge and a useful resource for narrativizing daily life and its encounters. The exclamation “Olleh!” made it into everyday conversations and TV programs. Many netizens collected the “Olleh” ads on their web pages, and soon parodies and imitations appeared. One of them, for example, showed a man who jumped from a boat to save an attractive drowning “damsel in distress” (“Wow!”) and then found himself surrounded by a flock of topless mermaids (“Olleh!”). The quotidian popularity of this advertising campaign dawned on me when, going for a meeting at Chung-Ang University in central Seoul in September 2009, I saw a poster congratulating students who had passed a qualification exam to work for customs. The successful passing of the exam was marked as a “wow” moment, while the drinking party to celebrate was “olleh.” The “Olleh” advertising public was also witty and ironic, not unlike the advertising public conjured by Dooly’s commercial. They laughed both with the protagonists and at them, in the latter case assuming the subjectposition of an ironic observer. The “Golden Axe” episode, for example, invited identification with the lumberjack’s delight in the company of sexy women, but it also cast the viewer as an observer who could laugh at the protagonist’s excessive excitement. The irony was generated by the ex-



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pectations violated, but the delight at the violation was made fun of too. Other episodes invited laughs at a surprising development or an unusual ending to familiar stories, while some of them played with social norms, such as the “Summer Camp” episode. Yet some resisted the invited ironic stance, and scrutinized and rejected the world making the campaign attempted. To quote one blogger, “The ‘Summer Camp’ episode of the new KT ad . . . I laughed when I saw the episode with the golden axe, but when I saw the scene when a man sent his child off to the camp and danced joyfully, I thought, ‘What is that??’ It was a peculiar feeling. Maybe it is because I am a woman, but somehow I didn’t like it. Why would they show something like that on public TV?”23 The commentator accepted the subject-position of the ironic spectator for some of the commercials, but to the others she responded as a member of socially engaged public and as a woman. Her question about why such a message would be broadcast on public TV implies concern for the national public and for social norms, of which she recognized advertising as constitutive. It also supports my earlier point that for South Korean advertising publics, the expectations of advertising were tied to the perceived social role of the carrying medium—the sexist message was more problematic because it was circulating via a public broadcasting channel. Another blogger reflected on incidentally observing a child use the word “olleh” at a playground and then explain it to his confused friend by retelling the “funny” “Golden Axe” and “Summer Camp” commercials. After describing the event, he comments, To me, a grown-up man, it is not a big deal to see the image of an adult lumberjack who shouts “Olleh!” when three charming young ladies appear and strip their clothing, showing off their naked thighs; it is not a big deal to see the image of a man who shouts “Olleh!” in excitement after remaining alone, having sent his child and wife far away. As we live, we have encountered enough of such talk from married men who speak like that with people around. But what does it mean when such an image is seen by children? What are the thoughts of those children who see such advertisements as funny? . . . It is just that I realized that the KT “Olleh” advertising campaign, which until now I watched without much thought, is not an advertising campaign that should be watched thoughtlessly.24

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This post documents how the writer first engaged with the campaign ironically (“not a big deal”), but then, upon recognizing in the campaign’s public the national community that includes children, he thought it was more appropriate to take a concerned stance, to process the campaign seriously as creating a social world and social subjects. Importantly for my points about the situational logics of advertising responses, this was the same person who changed his mind about the proper mode of responding to the campaign, from appreciating its entertainment value to denouncing its world making. In the big picture, the critiques of the campaign were marginal; in the blogosphere, and particularly in the mass media, they were overshadowed by overall enthusiasm for the campaign and playful appropriations of the “olleh” expression. A Dong-A Ilbo article rounded up critical assessments of the “Summer Camp” and “Millionaire” episodes in the blogosphere under the title “KT ‘Olleh’ Advertising, Gender Discrimination on the Sly?,” quoting netizens who discussed the episodes in those terms.25 The journalist herself refrained from taking a position. Other newspapers seemed to ignore the story, whether due to the relatively low profile of the complaints or out of a desire to benefit from KT’s generous advertising budget. The campaign was brought to the attention of the KCSC, the media watchdog and subject of chapter 3. As a female participant of its censorial meetings recalled in an interview, it was deliberated whether the campaign violated the “dignity of broadcasting,” the umbrella article to cover problematic representations. The mostly male committee found the campaign to be merely humorous, dismissing their female colleagues’ critiques of the campaign as lacking a sense of humor and being overly sensitive (min’gamhada). “Of course it is humorous to men. To women, it is quite offensive,” my informant noted, before volunteering a few more examples of how the committee systematically silenced women’s perspectives because its recommendations were determined by voting. The censorial committee thus prioritized the ironic stance of male marketing connoisseurs over concerns with advertising’s sexist world making. The complaints against the campaign were also received at WomenLink (Yŏsŏng Minuhoe), an influential feminist organization, whose media division often contested problematic gender portrayals via advocacy and civil society mobilization. Ms. Cho, a senior staff member of the media division, recalled how WomenLink received a steady stream



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of calls from annoyed members urging intervention. Speaking as women and as parents—not as consumers of KT, or advertising connoisseurs, or clever ironists—they complained that the campaign perpetuated gender inequality and undermined family values. “[The callers] would say, ‘What kind of nonsense is that?!’ [Igye mwoya? Maldo antoe],” Ms. Cho said, clearly sharing their indignation. Still, at WomenLink they hesitated to intervene, being burdened by the then-recent decision of the Constitutional Court, which had ruled advertising to be subject to freedom of speech. As Ms. Cho summed up their quandary, “At our organization we thought that there was an issue [with the campaign] from the very beginning. But we also thought, ‘Don’t we need to recognize the freedom of expression even in advertising these days?’ Even though we thought there was a problem, at first we had no intention to address it.” As I discussed in chapter 3, this new freedom of advertising speech caused much discomfort and soul-searching among those involved in policing advertising at all levels of formal and informal structures of advertising censorship, from the quasigovernment KCSC to NGOs such as WomenLink and even to advertising review boards under trade associations. Yet the phone calls kept coming, and, after hesitating for about a month, WomenLink intervened. It publicly spoke out against the campaign. Their critical opinion, eventually released to the media and posted on WomenLink’s website, blasted the campaign for “discriminatory content which sexually objectifies women and thus offends [ pulk’wegam ŭl chagŭk hada] female consumers and implants distorted values to children and youths,” and requested that KT immediately discontinue the “Millionaire” and “Golden Axe” episodes of the campaign, which, they said, were degrading to women. The campaign, WomenLink argued, cast women in supporting roles only, thus reproducing the stereotypes of gender roles; WomenLink’s analysis showed that only one of the nine ads had a woman as a protagonist having an “Olleh!” moment. While it was gender equality that WomenLink activists were concerned with, it is noteworthy that they responded to the campaign as consumers, seemingly of KT services, though the ambiguity of the category was open to including the abstract consumer, the celebrated subject of neoliberal capitalism on the one hand, and on the other the middle-class carrier of public interest, the local inflection of contemporary consumer c­ itizenship that allowed for collective mobilization, the themes I develop in chapter 5.

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KT responded that pulling the advertisements was impossible but promised to consider WomenLink’s points in the future. WomenLink went on the public TV channel MBC to announce a boycott of KT until the company stopped the campaign. Many newspapers covered the story, and numerous bloggers commented on WomenLink’s report, some approvingly, and some criticizing those offended by the ads for lacking a sense of humor. A week from the boycott announcement, KT withdrew the ads. According to advertising industry rumors, KT was at first reluctant but yielded to the arguments of its advertising agency, which feared the negative publicity for its client. At that point, the campaign had been running for about two months and was close to its natural end. It is unclear how things would have turned out had WomenLink taken issue with it earlier. The feminists’ victory was confirmed when six months later KT picked challenging outdated norms as the theme for its next campaign. New ads ran under the slogan “Flip the Usual Way” (ta kŭrae rŭl twijibŏra), and its episodes mocked the “usual ways,” such as all old women having the same perms or office workers ordering the same cheap noodle dish when bosses treat. Significant in light of the earlier controversy, one of the ads directly promoted women’s equality by ridiculing patriarchal norms: The ad mocked the “usual way” when only women cook for the Lunar New Year festivities and pronounced, “Those who don’t work, won’t eat.” Similar to the earlier campaign, KT ads assumed a fun, entertaining tone, but the critical message and call to change discriminatory traditions acknowledged WomenLink’s and netizens’ demands. The “Olleh” case is a useful antidote to popular imaginaries of advertising as an omnipotent medium capable of transforming viewers if not into consumers of the advertised commodity then into converts of whichever ideologies it peddles. Bringing into relief the central points of this chapter, the incident illustrates how popular advertising campaigns circulate similar to other popular-cultural products and how they are open to creative reinterpretation and appropriation. It highlights how the debates that advertising sparks are not necessarily about commodities but also about social norms. It demonstrates that the advertising public does not coincide with the target consumer niche, and that the target consumer niches are not necessarily the most vocal members of the advertising public, so advertisers are forced to accommodate the visions of those who wish to claim advertising campaigns in support of their vision.



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The episode also fleshes out how advertising circulation is fragile and contingent, and how advertising meanings are frequently renegotiated, even with the same advertising campaign. The “Olleh” commercials conjured a nationwide advertising public that responded in multiple, coexisting modes—they assessed the marketing strategy of KT and its agency; they identified with the protagonists’ excited “Olleh!” shouts; they processed from an ironic distance the improbability of the “Olleh” scenarios; and they read advertising as a world-making text about social norms. The multiple modes were available to all members, who, depending on their convictions and situational priorities, chose how to engage with the campaign—whether to laugh with it, whether to laugh at it, or whether to get indignant. At first the appreciative voices were the loudest, yet as time went by critical assessments gained momentum. The turning point was the uncompromising position of WomenLink foregrounded by the media savvy of its activists. Yet, as I discussed, their own decision to interfere was far from overdetermined. Unsure about whether or not they were in the right to enlist advertising for their own world making, WomenLink hesitated. Should other people have been at the organization’s helm, perhaps the KT “Olleh” campaign would have run its natural course, and perhaps the next season would have seen even racier campaigns. Or perhaps the advertiser would have noticed the online critiques and gone with the “Flip the Usual Way” concept anyway. Moreover, if the industry rumors were to be believed, had it not been for someone at the advertising agency being concerned about the negative publicity, KT might have ignored the feminists. That the outcome of the conflict was an affirmation of advertising public’s proactive, entitled claim on advertising—not only its interpretations but its actual content as well—was the result of multiple contingencies, which hinged on advertising addressees juggling the modes of responses to advertising available to them. As they were choosing how to engage with the campaign, they were enacting the local parameters of advertising. In the case of the “Olleh” campaign, they ended up asserting advertising as a public text that circulates socially progressive messages—the messages with which advertising publics can wholeheartedly identify, rather than messages they process from an ironic distance. While the immediate contest was about the politics of representation, the deeper-running contention was to keep advertisers accountable to the preferences and politics of advertising publics.

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Se ntime n tal I d e ntific atio n s For the South Korean advertising public, identifications were most common with humanist advertising, and my opening vignette began to introduce such reactions. Plentiful praise for affect-intensive advertising campaigns themselves reproduced their emotional register. A blog post, for example, waxed lyrical about SK Telecom’s “Hero” commercial, which celebrated the everyday accomplishments of ordinary people: “When I saw this ad, I choked with emotions [kasŭm i mungk’ul haesŏsŭmnida]. ‘Each of us is a hero for someone,’ this copy tremendously touched my heart [maŭm] . . . . It became a commercial with which we all could emotionally identify [konggam], which we all could feel deeply in our hearts.”26 Here, advertising is commended for delivering a gratifying experience of being shaken up emotionally and drawn into intense identification with a moving message. The heart—or rather, “mind-heart,” maŭm—on which such advertising operates is a realm of innermost sentiments (Jung 2013; Harkness 2013b; Yoon 2008). Responding from maŭm, the advertising public engages in a sentimental world making. Remarkably, the experience is understood as collective, not individual—“we all” are the sentimental national public that such an aesthetic realizes. Sentimentalism is known for its pedagogical ambition to improve individuals through affect—by provoking empathy with the innocent, virtuous, and oppressed to achieve moral elevation. In the European and American contexts, the roots of sentimentalism are in Enlightenment thought and eighteenth-century novels (Burnetts 2011), whereas in East Asia the tropes of sentimental education could be found in Confucian classics, which sought to educate its readers through inspiring stories of virtue, suffering, and redemption. In South Korea, sentimentalism blurred with the melodramatic mode, which permeated popular film and television productions and also offered a vernacular optic to make sense of South Korea’s dizzying pace of socioeconomic transformations (Abelmann 2003; An 2005; Paquet 2007). The latter argument builds on Peter Brooks’ (1995) insight that melodrama thrives in times of social change, for its contrived plots of the Manichaean battles between good and evil particularly resonate because they relieve anxiety about the moral order being thrown into disarray. As Nancy Abelmann (2003) argues, in rapidly changing South Korea, melodrama amounted to a dominant structure of



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feeling. Sentimental advertising and its public were a part of this emotional landscape.27 While convinced by Abelmann’s arguments about the centrality of melodrama to South Korean life, I was nevertheless surprised to discover continuities in the feelings about such different genres as TV melodramas and commercial advertising. Early in this research, I was incredulous of intense, earnest praise for advertising, such as Mr. Kim’s at the chapter’s opening. My own response to humanist campaigns went along criticalironic and marketing-savvy lines. I found many of the celebrated humanist campaigns, including POSCO’s and the “Toward People” series, over-the-top syrupy. I was more puzzled than moved by their saccharine sentimentality. (The soundtrack of “Let It Be” sung by a child to signify family values in the “Hero” commercial—could it be any less subtle or any more corny?) My impulse was to dismiss the emotional praises on the Internet as likely paid for by advertisers, but their sheer volume and their seemingly random occurrences in blogs that were neither particularly popular nor concerned with advertising refuted that suspicion. When I was researching the “Toward People” series, for example, I was unable to find a single critical or ironic comment about it on the Internet, let alone in the mass media. My attempts to solicit such responses in conversations also failed. Many of my Korean acquaintances, however, found puzzling my resistance to the campaign’s heart-warming aesthetic. If for me the instrumental medium—advertising—cheapened the message and called for distance, for them the humanist message redeemed the medium and invited identification.28 Local feeling scripts endorsed sentimentalism about advertising, and in that regard the local advertising public was a match for local advertising practitioners, who yearned for an emotional communion with the masses (chapter 2). For some South Koreans, the pleasure at humanist aesthetic seemed even intensified by the very tension generated when advertising, a commercial tool for advancing advertisers’ private profits, was put in public service. Recall how Mr. Kim insisted that public interest messages ­resonated more intensely when articulated through commercial advertising paid for by a corporation than through regular public service advertising (“But when an advertisement like the one I was talking about [POSCO’s ad] comes from a corporation . . . it can make my heart sing with serenity and makes me feel good”). When I probed, he was unsure why

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watching corporations deliver a humanist message was more satisfying. He wondered if it had something to do with the lack of professionalism in nonprofit advertising productions. He then contradicted himself by noting that public service announcements in Korea have improved greatly, and gave me a couple of examples, though the emotional charge of those descriptions was nowhere near his praise for the POSCO ad. Such appreciation for the humanist aesthetic in commercial advertising might seem like naïveté about advertisers’ commercial motives, but, I argue, it is rather their ambivalent acknowledgment. Namely, Mr. Kim’s pleasure at POSCO’s commercial fits the logic of sentimental melodrama. In melodramas, evil is punished and innocence rewarded, which amounts to a validation of a perceived moral law, what Brooks (1995) terms the “moral occult.”29 Such victories of the good deliver catharsis, he argues, because they prove the stability of unwritten moral laws, which, a modern secular substitute for premodern religious universe, laurel the good, just, and innocent in the end. Considering the deep-seated suspicions about the self-interested agendas of big corporations in South Korea, to watch a chaebol compelled by public interest is like watching a melodramatic villain bow to the forces of good. Not only does the humanist content of such advertising discursively assert the triumph of public interest, the melodramatic sensibility is also stroked at a meta level, insofar as melodramatic conventions recognize the very expression of emotion as evidence of superior morality.30 Within this logic, by provoking sentimental emotions, corporations testify to their inner goodness. Like other South Korean conglomerates, POSCO was involved in its share of controversies, of which Mr. Kim couldn’t be unaware.31 By spending its money to move people’s hearts and improve society through sentimental education, POSCO demonstrates that, in the end, it puts humans before profits—the corporate “moral occult” in action. Sentimentality about advertising can be critiqued as self-indulgent enjoyment of unearned emotions, a common charge against a sentimental public. Reactionary sentimentalism recognizes suffering but then congratulates the sentimentalists on their own heightened sensibility and compassion—and dulls the urge to remedy the causes of suffering at the practical level. It is this dynamic that prompted Oscar Wilde to call sentimentality “merely the bank holiday of cynicism” (quoted in Solomon 2004, 3).



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With humanist advertising, too, its public relishes sentimental spectacles of the humanism of and by corporations, while ignoring the fact that the problems such humanist ads expose are structural, not moral, and are often a result of corporate activity. The POSCO commercial ignores that poverty is a world-systemic issue engendered and exploited by transnational capital such as POSCO. It suggests that economic inequality can be overcome by kind tourists opening their hearts to the local poor, while the role of the companies is to inspire them to do so and to produce commodities, which then can be resold cheaply. It is an incomparably easier solution than compensating lost livelihoods to displaced locals, as, for example, was demanded of POSCO in 2008 after it built its new industrial facilities at a seaside location in India that might as well have been the setting for the “Bicycle” commercial.32 To enjoy humanist advertising, in other words, its public has to ignore that corporations are first profit-seeking agents, not morality-driven sentimental caregivers. The cost of affective pleasures is acknowledged in a blog post about the “Toward People” campaign: “SK Telecom is this humanist and warm company . . . not really, right? Still, its efforts to give people great emotions in a short commercial in order to have the name of SK Telecom remembered are truly remarkable.”33 In order to be able to enjoy the ad, the author has to bracket his knowledge that SK Telecom, like other corporations, is not really humanist or warm. (That knowledge was hard to avoid for anyone living in South Korea: in the 2000s, SK owners and top management were in the news on suspicion of corporate crimes, whose investigations resulted in convictions and jail terms for some of the suspects.34) To submit to the pathos of the message, the writer has to act as if unaware of the corporate commercial motivations and not necessarily humanist means for their pursuits. The emotional reward for this willful amnesia is the sentimental indulgence in the corporate “moral occult.” It is the enjoyment of such sentimental moments that binds subjects to the ideological fantasy of capitalism as a humanist project of socially responsible corporations.35 Nevertheless, however complicit with corporate mystifications, the sentimental public should be recognized for its potential for disrupting the injustices of consumerist capitalism from within. At the very least, its emotive volatility holds a greater promise for action than the apathetic irony and cynicism of those who refuse to be affected and resign to the

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politics of “as if,” and ultimately complicity. Humanist advertising conjures images of a world where corporations are agents of care driven by humanitarian concerns. Those images may help corporate legitimization and even enhance sales, but they also impose moral standards of sentimental humanism on corporate activities and open corporations to the demand to prioritize human needs over profits. As mentioned in the introduction, Samsung’s iconic humanist campaign “Another Family” was deployed to put pressure on the chaebol. Even when particular ads are not brought up, the very image that “humanist and warm” companies created in humanist ads becomes weaponized in contests over corporate power, as I detail in the final chapter.

C o n c lusio n In postmillennial South Korea, there was a rich repertoire of culturally sanctioned modes for responding to advertising. Like advertising publics everywhere, South Koreans enjoyed ironic play with advertising messages and were apt at deciphering advertising strategies and assessing them for marketing effectivity. However, they also demonstrated a penchant for emotional readings of advertising, either indulging in affective identification with sentimental messages or lashing out at problematic portrayals. Importantly, these diverse responses—popular-cultural, sentimental, activist, marketing-savvy, ironic—were enacted by the same subjects, who switched among different modes of engagement depending on the circumstances and situationally calibrated their distance from the advertising message. Reactions depended on the aesthetic properties of the advertising text, its recipients’ general inclinations, and the context of engagement—from who was imagined as being affected by the campaign to which social issues were prominent on the societal agenda. At stake in these shifting reactions was more than an individual appropriation of dominant culture. Advertising respondents were realizing particular advertising publics—collective agents whose social action on advertising, including emotional display and inaction, was recursively constituting both this social phenomenon and themselves as its proper addressees. With their irony, social critique, and sentimental praises, advertising publics were adjusting the public and private commitments of advertis-



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ing, maintaining its cultural logics, and policing the frontiers of advertisers’ freedoms—while themselves becoming subjects of the social world that such adjustments implied. The key dynamic of this mutual constitution of advertising and its publics, I argued, is misidentification, when advertising is responded to by those uncooperative with, or irrelevant to, its marketing goals, such as Yŏng-hŭi was in relation to most of the advertisements she commented on. Such misplaced and misdirected identifications recommit commercial advertising to the public interest and reenact its publicness-oriented cultural logic. They leave marketing concerns to advertisers and instead interrogate advertisements for the social values they advance and the national lifeworlds they affirm. Such misidentifications resonated with the professional aspirations of South Korean advertising practitioners, and also partially compensated for the loosening of content review, as with the “Olleh” campaign. At the same time, some seemingly oppositional advertising responses—ironic appropriations and marketing critiques—served advertisers’ interests better than the consumptive, political, or cultural needs of advertising audiences. While my data is specific to postmillennial South Korea, this analysis aimed to chart the politics of advertising reception in general: the collective potentialities of advertising publics and their limits imposed by the capitalist nature of the medium that begets them. On the one hand, however successful advertising publics are in reinscribing advertisements with alternative meanings, appropriating their affects for private pleasures, and otherwise rerouting their circulation, in the final analysis their actions on advertising hardly ever interfere with advertising’s systemic function in capitalist material and ideological reproduction. On the other hand, advertising is not completely closed off, and the collective mobilization of advertising publics may succeed in recruiting advertising discourse for desirable world making within the constraints of consumer capitalism. Advertising appropriations and subversions carry more radical implications when their object is not advertising representations but ­advertising money flows, and it is such a radical intervention that the final chapter explores.

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Advertising Suppression and Consumer Citizenship When the mass media and businesses abuse this tool [advertising] for profit, there is no room for a true democracy and healthy capitalism. —Kim Sŏng-ho, Samsung, It Is Time to Stop Advertising Suppression To demand consistency at strategically selected points where the system cannot afford to be consistent is to put pressure on the entire system . . . . Such demands, while feasible and legitimate, are de facto impossible. —Slavoj Žižek, Trouble in Paradise

“P

ress Conference to Declare Consumer Boycott of KwangDong Pharmaceutical, the Chosun Ilbo Advertiser” read the banner behind which two dozen activists crowded the main entrance to the headquarters of the right-wing newspaper Chosun Ilbo on June 8, 2009. Two men and one woman also held up individual printouts with the pictures of the popular soft drinks produced by the boycotted company, with caption “I boycott KwangDong Pharmaceutical, the Chosun Ilbo advertiser.” The boycotters represented the National Campaign for Media Consumer Sovereignty (Ŏllon Sobija Chukwon Kukmin K’aimp’ein, commonly abbreviated to Ŏnsoju), a loose alliance of civil society groups, whose names were listed on the banner.1 While journalists and curious passersby took 166



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pictures of the perfectly staged scene—the characters for Chosun Ilbo above the protesters, the boycott banner upfront—the Ŏnsoju representative, Kim Sŏng-kyun, read in a well-paced voice, “We are not enemies of business. We are your partner and your consumer, your worker and your owner. Kneel down [murŭp kkurŏra] before the will [ttŭt] of the consumer, the will of the Korean people! . . . KwangDong Pharmaceutical, you must decide—are you going to fight with consumers? Are you going to listen to consumers’ opinion and stay with consumers?”2 KwangDong was the first target in a second round of boycotts, which had been initiated a year earlier to pressure advertisers of the right-wing press to place advertising in the two left-wing dailies, the Hankyoreh and the Kyunghyang. Activists reasoned that equitable advertising distribution across the ideological spectrum was essential for a diversity of opinions and hence for Korean democracy. A year earlier, Ŏnsoju had incited hundreds of its supporters to convey those demands directly to the advertisers. The resulting avalanche of phone calls paralyzed the targeted businesses, and several activists in the 2008 campaign were sentenced to fines and suspended jail terms. In 2009, Ŏnsoju abstained from calling, but boycotts themselves were consumers’ constitutional right, Kim Sŏng-kyun insisted in many an interview after the KwangDong boycott was announced. As he explained to an MBC journalist, “Companies have freedom to choose media to advertise. But consumers also have their consumer right to point out to companies their mistakes and to do boycott activism. Companies can suffer damages . . . , but that is an aspect that can emerge in the process of consumers exercising their rights and so is covered by the constitutionally guaranteed consumer rights.”3 Still, even without disruptive phone calls, in 2009 activists faced accusations of “advertising suppression,” and their leaders, including Kim, would be investigated by the police. Ŏnsoju activism and its condemnation as “advertising suppression” offer a window onto the contests over advertising money flows. Whereas the earlier chapters focused on how advertising as a social phenomenon is constituted through the circulation of advertising texts, in the final chapter I turn to advertising payments, which do much more than enable those “textual” circulations. Buying media space for advertising—placing ads in a newspaper or on a broadcast entertainment program—generates direct points of collaboration between businesses and the mass media, creating powerful financial incentives for the latter to privilege the interests of their

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advertisers and of high-income audiences. Advertising payments systemically protect the wealth and power of the wealthy and powerful. The cultural logic, however, positioned South Korean advertisers, especially the biggest ones, as also benefactors of the mass media, imposing a rationale of philanthropic civic action on commercial advertising placements. The moral-economic expectation was that “corporations must . . . place their advertising honorably,” to use the expression from the roundtable that urged South Korean entrepreneurs to resist authoritarianism in the 1970s (Dong-A Ilbo, January 14, 1975)—and such an incitation would not be out of place in left-wing discourses around Ŏnsoju activism. This moral economy of publicness-minded advertising allocation was institutionalized in the decades-old system for terrestrial advertising sales, which entrusted Korea Broadcast Advertising Corporation to bundle the high-demand prime spots with those of regional and minority broadcasts, advertising with whom was of little marketing effect for most advertisers (chapter 1). Ŏnsoju boycotts were an attempt to enforce such public-mindedness on advertising spending in print media. That Ŏnsoju was accused of “advertising suppression”—evocative of the 1974–1975 White Pages Incident when Park Chung-hee’s authoritarian regime muzzled a critical newspaper (chapter 1)—placed their activism in the historical battle over South Korean democracy. “Advertising suppression” connoted reprehensible oppressions of civic liberties, and that a consumer movement was charged with such illegitimate meddling was telling of the paucity of justifiable grounds to challenge corporate freedoms, even in advertising (chapter 3). However, there were competing interpretations of what constituted “advertising suppression” in postmillennial South Korea. If the conservatives evoked it to condemn a civic organization’s pressuring companies to advertise across the ideological spectrum, the progressives wielded the charge against advertisers themselves, particularly the chaebol, when they withdrew their advertising to punish media outlets—usually the left-wing dailies—for critical coverage. Such charges against Samsung are the chapter’s parallel story. The battle over definitions of “advertising suppression”—a competition between corporate freedom to advertise and consumer freedom to boycott—is the thread for untangling the contests over advertising money allocations and their implications for the social constructions of advertising and South Korean power politics.



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Importantly, Ŏnsoju’s demands were grounded not in the yesteryear moral ideal of publicness, which were effectively declared obsolete by the 2008 Constitutional Court decisions. Instead, Ŏnsoju activism was legitimated with appeals to consumer citizenship and consumer sovereignty, the pillars of the neoliberal doctrine, which Ŏnsoju rearticulated to demand democratic accountability of corporations to its consumers. The activists’ legitimate yet radical demand, this chapter shows, rebooted the publicness ideal of advertising and put pressure on the core politicaleconomic alliances of postmillennial South Korea. Consumer sovereignty, which appears in Ŏnsoju’s name, is often understood as making consumer decisions without external interferences. It is both an assumption of economic theories and a normative ideal of free-market doctrines. The notion of sovereignty—an absolute power of a certain entity over itself, to govern itself without external obstructions— is, however, susceptible to radical reinterpretations, and that was precisely the power of Ŏnsoju’s intervention, this chapter argues. Ŏnsoju’s demand on corporations—“Kneel down before the will of the consumer, the will of the Korean people!”—was a command for obedience, similar to that of a sovereign commanding its subjects to submit to its will. While targeting advertising allocations, Ŏnsoju in fact demanded a redistribution of citizenship and sovereignty among people and corporations—a revolutionary challenge to corporate power and to the fundamental structures of consumerist capitalism. Before detailing the trajectory and the implications of Ŏnsoju’s boycotts, in the next section I turn to Samsung and its advertising practices while clarifying the notions against which Ŏnsoju’s consumer sovereignty intervention must be understood—corporate sovereignty and corporate citizenship, as they were interpreted in postmillennial South Korea, particularly in relation to corporate advertising. The following two sections trace the conjuncture of Ŏnsoju’s emergence in 2008 and, through archival data and interviews with the boycotters’ leader, Kim Sŏng-kyun, explore the radicalized conception of consumer sovereignty behind the mobilization. Then the chapter traces the trajectory of Ŏnsoju’s activism into the second round of boycotts in 2009, to contrast their limited effects with their harsh prosecution, and develop an argument of how Ŏnsoju’s too-literal (mis)identification with neoliberal consumer sovereignty became what Slavoj Žižek (2013, 11) identifies as the subversive

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politics of ­impossible demands, which, “while thoroughly realistic, strike at the core of hegemonic ideology and imply much more radical change.” The chapter concludes with lessons from Ŏnsoju’s practical attempt to democratize capitalist corporations.

Sa msung ’ s A dv e rtising C h o ic e s a n d C o r p o r ate C itiz en sh ip Samsung, South Korea’s largest conglomerate and largest advertiser, became accused of advertising suppression in the course of one of the biggest corporate scandals in South Korea. In October 2007, Samsung’s former top lawyer, Kim Yong-ch’ŏl, went public with allegations about Samsung keeping a slush fund distributed among bank accounts under executives’ names, including Kim’s own, for bribing influential officials, prosecutors, journalists, and scholars.4 Kim confessed that he himself had participated in such practices and named other high-ranking people involved. At a press conference Kim scandalously said, “Samsung instructed me to commit crimes,” and added that “a basic responsibility for all Samsung executives is to do illegal lobbying, buying people with money.” Samsung denied Kim’s allegations as motivated by “personal grudges.” The corruption scandal drew much attention from civic and political groups, and prosecution started a formal investigation into Kim’s allegations.5 The scandal aired somewhat of an open secret about Samsung’s influence in all spheres of South Korean life. The founding Lee family controlled the sprawling network of over seventy subsidiaries and affiliated businesses via an intertwining and circular ownership structure, enabled by the financial liberalization of the 1990s (Kim 2016, 84–88). The Samsung Group entered most major industries, from electronics and appliances to hospitals and universities to apartment buildings and insurance. It was also connected via marriage to other chaebol and political elites, the latter also won over by honorary board positions in Samsungaffiliated companies (Kim 2016). The conglomerate’s influence was buttressed by its aggressive expansion into the media. Samsung affiliates have entered not only advertising (its Cheil Communications being South Korea’s biggest advertising agency since the 1970s) but also cable television, the film industry, record-



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ed music production, media production, media distribution, and online publishing. One of the three right-wing “ChoJoongDong” newspapers, the JoongAng Ilbo, was started by Samsung founder Yi Pyŏng-ch’ŏl in 1965, and, though the official relationship was severed in 1999, ties remained; the head of the JoongAng Ilbo from 1994, Hong Sŏk-hyŏn, was a brotherin-law of the Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee. The notoriety of Samsung’s overpowering presence provoked bitter jokes about the Republic of Korea being the “Republic of Samsung,” a rendition of the “Chaebol Republic” moniker. In a sense, Samsung was not just a commercial enterprise but Korea’s shadow sovereign, its representative to itself and to the world. The main controversy of the Samsung slush fund scandal revolved around chaebol power and its abuses, but advertising became a point of contention as well—namely whether Samsung was within its rights to withdraw advertising from the newspapers that critically covered the dumpster fire started by the whistleblower Kim Yong-ch’ŏl’s allegations. After the progressive Hankyoreh and Kyunghyang reported in detail on Kim’s press conference, Samsung’s advertising in the two dailies stopped— and accusations of “advertising suppression” followed. Usually Samsung and the other large chaebol—Hyundai, LG, and SK—advertised comprehensively across the ideological spectrum (Yi S. 2010). What might seem like a marketing strategy to cover all possible consumer segments was driven at least as much by extra-marketing considerations, as the parties involved were well aware. For all South Korean businesses, advertising choices involved a complex calculus in which reaching prospective buyers was not necessarily the main consideration, especially with print advertising. Because the national dailies were entangled with the main political camps, print advertising choices announced support for the corresponding power blocs. Placing ads with the three conservative dailies connected advertisers to the mass-media flank of the right-wing elites and plugged them into the networks of big business and conservative politicians. In contrast, many right-wing business owners would avoid advertising with the left-wing Hankyoreh and Kyunghyang on principle, to avoid supporting “commies” ( ppalgaengi), as a Hankyoreh advertising manager explained in an interview. (Left-wing business owners were fewer in numbers, but they too would sometimes place ads in the two left-wing dailies just to support them, I was told.) In addition to this overt politicization, print advertising choices were

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further complicated by an informal cartel pressure system among the newspapers. Businesses were expected to place simultaneous ads within newspapers of the same ratings, whether or not they covered different demographics—or face negative publicity from the slighted publications. While not sitting easy with the ideal of a democratic press, the cartels were practically enforcing advertisers’ public responsibility to financially support the press. This rule for comprehensive advertising within the same tier, however, often excluded the two progressive dailies, especially when conservatives were in power and left-wing liaisons were unlikely to win political favor. Perhaps due to this transparent politics of media placement, there was a remarkable clarity among the South Korean public about how advertising was a means for enabling and silencing certain voices. This clarity translated into expectations that large corporations demonstrate their commitment to the public interest by supporting diverse presses. It was not uncommon for progressive civic groups to analyze and report on chaebol advertising placements, and often to critique their preference for the conservative dailies (e.g., Yi S. 2010). Samsung and other chaebol, however, usually did not exclude the leftwing press from their advertising contracts. For example, in January 2007, Samsung placed 664 million won worth of advertising in the Dong-A Ilbo, 551 million in the Chosun Ilbo, and 519 million in the JoongAng Ilbo—but also 356 million in the Hankyoreh and 350 million in the Kyunghyang (Yi S. 2010, 20). While the amount of advertising in the two dailies was just over half of that in the right-wing newspapers, it was a significant contribution to the budgets of the poorer left-wing dailies. In 2006, Samsung’s advertising money accounted for as much as 20 percent of the Hankyoreh’s advertising revenues.6 That said, the chaebol were known to pull their advertisements in response to critical coverage.7 The game was familiar to anyone even marginally interested in South Korean media politics, and it was expected that the ads would return once the brouhaha was over. That Samsung’s advertising choices were driven by moral-economic imperatives, not marketing, was not lost on the left-wing media themselves. As the Hankyoreh’s advertising department representative readily admitted to me in an interview, whether Samsung advertised in the Hankyoreh or not made little difference in Samsung’s sales. Many Koreans would buy Samsung goods whenever there was a choice because they



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believed in their superior quality and because of Samsung’s reputation for efficient and reliable after-sales service. Samsung’s advertising made an incomparably greater contribution to the newspapers’ budgets than to Samsung’s sales. Yet advertising managers at the Hankyoreh did not consider their financial dependence on the chaebol an obstacle to robust reporting, and neither did their readership and allies in the progressive camp. As one of Hankyoreh’s journalists explained in a conversation, by supporting diverse media, Samsung paid back the Korean people, who had made Samsung a successful company. Samsung’s comprehensive advertising placement, in other words, reenacted the moral economy that obliged corporations to prioritize national interest and public good over private profit seeking. Such advertising magnanimity also matched the imaginaries of humanist capitalism and humanist corporations that were circulated in publicness-minded advertising campaigns by the chaebol, including Samsung itself. It was a violation of those conventions of advertising placement that invited accusations of “advertising suppression” in the wake of the Samsung slush fund scandal. The disappearance of Samsung’s advertising from the left-wing press grew conspicuous after the Taean oil spill in late December 2007, when a Samsung barge collided with an anchored crude oil carrier off the Yellow Sea coast, causing great environmental damage. Samsung’s apology for the accident appeared in all of the national newspapers except the Hankyoreh and Kyunghyang. In January 2008, activists held a “Press Conference to Condemn Samsung That Tames Critical Mass Media with Advertising Suppression.” In front of the Samsung headquarters, they declared, “Ongoing advertising control of the Hankyoreh and Kyunghyang by Samsung is a childish and vulgar personal revenge by chaebol power that puts the force of capital first,” and went on to say, “We cannot condone that Samsung, nominated as our representative brand and heading toward being a global enterprise, thinks nothing of the mass media’s social functions and responsibilities and unleashes the current situation simply over an article that it did not like.”8 The report on the press conference at the organ of the National Union of Mediaworkers presented the lack of Samsung advertising in the two progressive dailies as “unfair,” noting that “in the case of Samsung Electronics, it published plenty of advertisements for its refrigerators, printers, notebooks, cell phones, TVs in the

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ChoJoongDong, as if boastfully, but completely excluded the Hankyoreh and Kyunghyang.”9 Civic organizations launched a subscription drive for the dailies and published supportive advertisements, condemning “advertising suppression” by Samsung and calling for “saving” the two newspapers. The popular mobilization was self-consciously reminiscent of the White Pages Incident of 1974–1975, albeit the media suppressor was not the authoritarian state but a corporation. To read those accusations closely, the logic that empowered Samsung critics to demand that Samsung advertise in the media that criticize it pivoted around subordinating corporate sovereignty—“force of capital”— to the considerations of responsible corporate citizenship, which, for the declaration’s authors, stood for prioritizing “mass media’s social functions and responsibilities” over “childish and vulgar” reactions to public criticism. The evocation of the “personal” suggests a contrast to the public— the public interest that should be the priority for Korea’s “representative brand.” It also suggests that by “Samsung” the authors might mean not a group of publicly traded companies but the Lee family, if not chairman Lee Kun-hee individually, shifting the conflict into the arena of moral choices by individuals. The accusation of unfairness further reveals that advertising placements are judged not as a matter of marketing but of social justice and publicness. This transfer of advertising into the moral domain was driven by identification with the discourses that compel corporations to prioritize the public good. Activists were reading back to corporations their pledges to corporate social responsibility (CSR) and citing the local corporate ideologies that lauded entrepreneurs as agents for public good—and demanding their practical fulfillment. This logic is expounded in a polemical article from the citizen journalists’ website OhmyNews, whose writer decries, “It’s been over twenty months since Samsung Group stopped advertising in the Hankyoreh and Kyunghyang. Gone this far, it is media suppression through advertising. This is advertising suppression by chaebol, which is unprecedented in the world’s media history, this is murder of democratic mass media.” He continues to scold Samsung for “a wrong consciousness about the relation between the mass media and businesses in a liberaldemocratic nation-state.” As he explains, “Just like the mass media are a public institution [konggi] and carry public responsibility, so big companies carry social responsibility too. Big companies must bear in mind



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that even though they are private enterprises, with their advertising they have social responsibility.” The writer urges Samsung to fulfill its corporate mission of “contributing to the nation-state and human society” by advertising in the critical media and concludes with a call for a public discussion on the “advertising suppression” by the chaebol.10 Contra the OhmyNews critic, far from “unprecedented in the world media history,” politically motivated, selective advertising is a common practice among advertisers, which rarely hesitate to starve off critical media all over the world (Curran and Seaton 2009). What is surprising is the very attempt to question corporate advertising choices. The incident deserves attention precisely because Samsung faced criticism for a rather typical, and sensible, corporate choice to withhold advertising from the left-wing media that publishes exposés on chaebol affairs. In postmillennial South Korea, however, the moral ground for defending self-interested advertising placements was uncertain. Indeed, Samsung spokespeople remained silent on the issue throughout the incident. Samsung advertising did not return to the left-wing dailies for almost three years. When publishing the whistleblower Kim Yong-ch’ŏl’s revelations, Hankyoreh managers made arrangements for what they saw as the worst-case scenario—going without Samsung advertisements for twelve months. The much longer disappearance of the chaebol’s advertising caused severe financial difficulties. In the preceding years Samsung had brought 15–20 percent of the Hankyoreh’s advertising revenues, being one of the newspaper’s biggest advertisers. In 2008, its share dropped to 3 percent, and the next year it was zero. In 2009, the overall advertising revenues of the Hankyoreh fell by 22 percent in comparison with prescandal 2007.11 Because of the deficit in the newspaper’s accounts, the Hankyoreh employees took turns going on unpaid leave. Samsung started placing advertisements in the Hankyoreh from early 2010, the first appearing on the occasion of the figure skater Yuna Kim winning a gold medal at the Vancouver Winter Olympics, an event that overwhelmed Korea with pride and joy. By then, Samsung’s slush fund scandal had blown over. In August 2009, Samsung’s chairman was convicted of tax evasion and breach of trust, though the court dismissed the bribery charges. Lee was sentenced to a 110-billion-won fine (about US$89 million) and a suspended three-year prison term. However, four months later, in December 2009, Lee received a presidential pardon. By

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March 2010, he was back at Samsung’s helm.12 The whistleblower Kim Yong-ch’ŏl, however, was unable to find a job as a lawyer and was working in a bakery—until he published a tell-all book, Thinking about Samsung (2010), which became a bestseller despite a media blackout. Still a pariah, Kim found a low-profile job in the education sector and told those few journalists who sought him out about his two divorces, lost friendships, and thoughts of suicide.13 The controversy over Samsung’s advertising withdrawal is evidence of how the discourse of advertising as an institution with public obligations powerfully shaped social action in postmillennial South Korea. None other than South Korea’s biggest advertiser, Samsung, was honoring it in its advertising allocation. For civil society activists, it became thinkable to demand that corporations base their advertising placements on considerations of public interest, which in this case implied support for critical media, whose reports were damaging for the advertisers, if not in terms of immediate sales than in terms of stock prices and public opinion. Refusing to treat advertising placement as a private decision by an advertiser, civil society organizations pressed for a public input into corporate allocation of advertising money. While their pressure was not particularly successful, the airing of those arguments itself, as well as grafting them onto the globally hegemonic CSR rhetoric, kept advertising within the domain of public accountability. The episode also offers a window into the collectively maintained moral obligations of corporate citizenship and the limits of corporate sovereignty in South Korea. If the chaebol addressed the public as humanists and sentimentalists, the public addressed them back as responsible humanist corporations. Such an address was steeped in the historical ideologies that positioned chaebol as patriotic enterprises whose owners naturally put the well-being of the nation above private wealth. At the same time, Samsung critics appropriated the neoliberal discourses of CSR—taken not as an empty PR slogan but rather as a commandment, in this case, to support democratic mass media. Being a socially responsible corporation implied recognizing consumers as constituents whose desires, for example, about Samsung advertising budgets, mattered. Consumer sovereignty, in other words, was expanded to popular sovereignty, or the legitimization of authority by the consent of the people over whom the authority was exercised, and mobilized to exert moral pressure on



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corporations. Such consumer sovereignty was based on literal identification with corporate discourses. It presented a seemingly legitimate but impossible demand that could be neither granted nor rejected (Žižek 2013)—only silenced by the persecution of the vocal consumer citizens. Such was the fate of Ŏnsoju, the boycotters of the companies that advertised only in the conservative press.

C rusad ing C o nsumer C i tiz en s The Ŏnsoju at first emerged as a response to right-wing negative coverage of the candlelight vigils that engulfed downtown Seoul for over three months in May–August 2008. Started as protests against allowing imports of allegedly contaminated US beef, they developed into a mass movement against president Lee Myung-bak’s neoliberal policies, particularly the cut-throat educational competition for youths (Kang 2016, chapter 5).14 Whereas the left-wing Hankyoreh and Kyunghyang sided with the protesters, the three right-wing dailies covered the protests unsympathetically. They drew a picture of naive citizens misled by conniving agitators. “Who is the de facto power behind the candlelight vigils?” ominously asked the Dong-A Ilbo editorial of May 10, 2008, and pointed to “left-wing unions” and “political instigators” allegedly conspiring to topple Lee’s government.15 The right-wing dailies presented the mass demonstrations as petty struggles for power, in which the protesters were only pawns. North Korea was also alleged to be a behind-the-scenes puppeteer. Such portrayals angered the protesters, who saw themselves as defenders of the public interest, not duped foot soldiers in skirmishes among the entrenched interest groups. While it was true that the protests played into the hand of the progressive camp and left-wing organizations, the majority of the people in the streets—among whom were many high school students and mothers with strollers—identified as politically unaffiliated consumer-citizens fighting for their own health and the health of Korea’s future generations.16 Anger toward the three conservative dailies was also fueled by a recent memory of how the same newspapers had criticized the resumption of the US beef imports when the previous progressive government had entertained such a possibility (Lee 2016, 2256). On May 31, 2008, one month into the protests, an online café emerged

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on the popular Daum portal to fight the “distorted” (wegoktoen) reporting by the right-wing dailies, the ChoJoongDong. What had started as a condemnation of the misrepresentation of the protests turned into a fullfledged campaign against the newspapers themselves. Their complicity with the authoritarian regimes and feuding with the progressive presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-Hyun were all aired and excoriated. In the heat of the moment, the partisan journalism was blamed for virtually all evils of Korean society. The café—to become Ŏnsoju and transform into a civic organization in August 2008—saw its popularity grow exponentially, with forty thousand people joining within days of its founding, to increase to almost eighty thousand over the summer.17 Soon café members’ vitriol spilled into an offline campaign, and advertising was the sling to defeat the Goliath of the ChoJoongDong. While not explicitly referenced, Samsung’s withdrawal of its advertisements from the progressive dailies, in its eighth month, was an important backdrop to these developments. Activists compiled and circulated lists of companies that placed advertisements in the right-wing trio but not in the Hankyoreh or the Kyunghyang. The café’s visitors were given “homework”: to call the advertisers and tell them to stop advertising in the rightwing press or face consumer boycotts. Callers were encouraged to report about their calls on the Ŏnsoju website. The initiative was supported by nongovernmental organizations, which took part in the anti-US-beef protests and were irked by the dismissive coverage by the conservatives. In their rhetoric, Ŏnsoju mixed the language of fighting for consumer rights with moral appeals, reminiscent of the chastisements of Samsung analyzed above. As consumers of companies’ services and commodities, the café participants called for advertisers to obey their will. According to Ŏnsoju, supporting the progressive media was not companies’ voluntary choice but their moral duty. Consumer sovereignty, which appeared in the name of the organization, expanded to popular sovereignty, which activists asserted to exert hierarchy over corporate sovereignty. Advertising might be a private corporate expense, but its allocation had to be accountable to consumer-citizens’ oversight because of the moral ownership they claimed in the corporations whose commodities advertisements incited them to buy. That mobilized consumer citizens were media consumer citizens further radicalized such activism. Mass media—even if conceived as a



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commodity, and not as public good—is not a regular commodity that serves the satisfaction of individual wants. Media consumers might be buying a particular newspaper or subscribing to a particular channel, but the stakes of such shopping decisions are higher than simply individual exposure to particular ideas. Rather, certain points of view are enabled, or prevented from, circulating and thus having world-making effects. Media consumers, in other words, are a media public captured through another conceptual paradigm. From a critical theory perspective, to approach media publics as media consumers is to frame them as passive recipients of what is produced for them. Yet if the consumer is taken not as an analytic category but as a resonant social construct, claiming the consumer status yields tactical advantages. Within the hegemonic neoliberal cosmology, a consumer is officially a sceptered actor whose choices are the will behind the “invisible hand” of market competition and whose desires, in theory, determine what and how is produced, while stimulating innovations and even socially conscious management.18 To reframe media publics as media consumers is thus to elevate them to the role of the ultimate arbiter in the marketplace. It is in this sense that, I argue, Ŏnsoju radicalized the official ideologies of consumer capitalism and turned them on capitalists themselves. The logic of Ŏnsoju’s activism was legible and legitimate from the multiple perspectives that commanded authority in postmillennial South Korea. First, Ŏnsoju’s “consumerism” resonated with the moral economy that historically obliged corporations to prioritize public interest, most readily equated with the interests of the middle-class consumers for whom Ŏnsoju spoke. Second, it appeared as an extension of century-old concerns with consumption as a site of patriotic citizenship and collective mobilization (Nelson 2000). Third, Ŏnsoju’s emphasis on the consumer as an executor of the will of the market and hence the ultimate authority for companies dovetailed with neoliberal market fundamentalism. Finally, Ŏnsoju’s argument for the diversity of perspectives in the mass media resonated with the dominant interpretations of the failures of South Korean democratization to bring social and economic justice, a failure that has been explained by the inability to nurture an effective public sphere (Choi 2005; Kim 2000, 147–149). In its multiple valencies, the consumerist agenda approximated a universal position of public interest.

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No wonder then that Ŏnsoju’s call for boycott mobilized thousands. Many went beyond the usual repertoire of “slacktivism” (Morozov 2009) and, caught in “cultural ignition” (Kang 2016), mobilized for offline activism. The targeted advertisers were overwhelmed by a deluge of threatening calls and their websites flooded with angry messages. As an employee complained to journalists, “Some [of the callers] said they would come and attack me or even harm my family if we keep our ads in the papers because it is such a dishonor.’’19 According to Ŏnsoju, tens of thousands of calls were made to particular advertisers on a given day. Activists also boycotted the products of the targeted companies and put effort into promoting competitors’ brands. Later official reports estimated that about thirty advertisers that advertised primarily in the Chosun Ilbo were hurt, and nine companies in particular suffered a total of 11.2 billion won in losses.20 By mid-June, just as Ŏnsoju hoped, the three conservative dailies were hurting. Many businesses, unwilling to deal with the raging protesters, indeed pulled their advertisements. While before the campaign the Chosun Ilbo came out on sixty-eight pages, after June 12, when the Ŏnsoju activity peaked, it was reduced to forty-eight pages, and the Dong-A Ilbo shrank from forty-eight pages to forty.21 The Journalists Association of Korea reported that “the number of large corporations’ advertisements printed in the three papers dropped from 12–15 per issue to 2–4.”22 Other reports quoted that advertising was reduced by half.23 Condemning the Ŏnsoju campaign as “pressure on advertisers” and “blackmail,” the conservative camp, oblivious to the ironies in the role reversal, drew parallels with the “advertising suppression” incident of 1974–1975. In 2008, the alleged advertising suppressor was a civil society group that mobilized to defend the democratic public sphere and enable critical media. The conservative pundits were reinterpreting the White Pages Incident to conflate the struggle for democratic media and against authoritarianism with the corporate push for freedom of enterprise. The case of Ŏnsoju’s critics was helped by the fact that the Dong-A Ilbo, one of the conservative trio, was the victim of the 1974–1975 events. Three weeks into the boycott, on June 23, a complaint was filed with the Broadcasting and Communications Commission, an administrative media watchdog, to demand that the Ŏnsoju Internet café close down. The complaint was publicly endorsed by major business associations



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and conservative civic groups. The police announced the beginning of a criminal investigation of the twenty-two moderators of the Ŏnsoju Internet forum.24 The police persecution, however, also won more public support for Ŏnsoju. Just on June 25, the day the police investigation was announced, Ŏnsoju counted 6.4 thousand new members. Some angry protesters even attacked the buildings of the Chosun Ilbo and the Dong-A Ilbo. The Chosun Ilbo editorial deplored the attacks: “This is anarchy. Thugs are on the rampage; policemen are beaten; reporters are assaulted; newspapers are terrorized; and good-natured citizens are afraid to go out.”25 Whereas Ŏnsoju identified as media consumers exercising their sovereignty, their critics dismissed the mobilization as the frenzy of an illegitimate crowd. However, where Ŏnsoju were losing points for not speaking in the rational disembodied voice of public reason, their mobilization in the streets elevated them to the status of the carriers of popular sovereignty—the voice of the people and the agents of public interest. Just over a week after the investigation began, on July 1, the Korea Communication Standards Commission ruled that posting online information about companies’ advertising placements, with the purpose to boycott them, was illegal. The hosting portal was ordered to remove fifty-eight out of the eighty investigated postings. The online activists behind the boycotts were summoned for questioning, which, by the end of August, led to arrest of two café organizers, the indictment of fourteen café members without physical detention, and fines from three to five million won imposed on eight more activists, all on the charges of interfering with the normal conduct of business.26 The decision was appealed, but the Seoul Central District Court upheld the verdict in February 2009. The twenty-four defendants were found guilty of obstruction of business;27 the two main organizers received ten and six months’ prison terms suspended for two years,28 and the rest were fined between one and three million won. The court, however, ruled that consumers were lawfully entitled to boycott newspapers’ advertisers to sway newspapers’ editorial policies, and it was specifically the phone calls and threats that infringed on business operations and constituted a crime.29 The ruling thus put the corporate right to conduct business before consumers’ right to protest and effectively constituted advertising as first and foremost a business expense governed by corporate sovereignty. The judges ­prioritized ­advertisers’

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freedoms over advertising’s public obligations, in line with the two 2008 Constitutional Court decisions. Ŏnsoju’s new leader Kim Sŏng-kyun, nevertheless welcomed the part of the court ruling that asserted consumers’ right to boycott peacefully and devised a new disruption around it. In 2009, as in 2008, Ŏnsoju pressured advertisers to withdraw from the conservative dailies and advertise with the progressive ones. But to avoid legal problems, Kim’s tactic was to publicly announce Ŏnsoju’s boycotts of particular companies and abstain from contacting them directly. Instead, boycotters were to post to the Ŏnsoju website updates about not buying the boycotted brands and to calculate the cumulative damage they were thus causing. “There is no law in the Republic of Korea that Ŏnsoju is breaking,” Kim repeated cockily to journalists, whose attention made him into a small-time celebrity in June 2009, after the press conference described in the chapter opening inaugurated a new round of boycotts with KwangDong Pharmaceutical. Only three hours after KwangDong Pharmaceutical was ordered to “kneel down before the will of the consumer, the will of the Korean people,” the company announced that it would advertise in the two leftwing dailies. KwangDong Pharmaceutical placed 7.6 million won (about US$6,000) worth of ads with the Hankyoreh and the Kyunghyang.30 It did not, however, withdraw its advertising from the right-wing press. Still, the boycott was lifted, and Ŏnsoju supporters celebrated a victory. Corporations were obeying the will of the sovereign consumers, and mobilized Korean people were recognized as “partners” and “owners” of businesses. Three days later, Ŏnsoju’s online manifesto announced a new target— five companies of the Samsung Group. As with the KwangDong boycott, Ŏnsoju evoked the moral economy of corporate obligations to demand submission to consumers’ will. With Samsung, however, the demands were also leveraged through the recognition of Samsung’s larger-thanlife stature in South Korea. The manifesto described Samsung as “our people’s [uri kungmin ŭi] pride but simultaneously a shameless company that took advantage of the time when the nation was struggling [during the IMF Crisis], to hushedly legalize the succession of executive director [and Samsung chairman’s son] Lee Jae-yong.”31 Not only had the chaebol’s inventive succession tactics—exposed in the then-recent 2005 Samsung X-File scandal32—allegedly wronged the whole nation; the manifesto also charged Samsung with subjugating the Korean people: “It is a company



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that put the nation on its knees [murŭp kkulligo] before its huge force, its capital, and its power, and made the Republic of Korea into the ‘Republic of Samsung.’ ”33 The trope of forcing the nation to kneel frames Samsung as a sovereign in the Republic of Korea. While acknowledging the power of the conglomerate, the manifesto also opens it to moral claims for subordinating its state-like stature to popular sovereignty, the basis of state power in democratic societies. That logic has already been demonstrated to be at work in the discourses on Samsung’s “advertising suppression” of the progressive dailies. (That in June 2009 it was already nineteen months since Samsung stopped advertising in the Hankyoreh and the Kyung­hyang was likely a factor in choosing the conglomerate as a boycott target, though it was not mentioned in the manifesto.) To deserve its power, Samsung had to listen to the Korean people, the agents of popular and consumer sovereignty. However strong Ŏnsoju’s moral suit, fighting Samsung in the Republic of Samsung was ambitious to the point of being foolhardy. Kim Yong-ch’ŏl’s revelations, as well as the whistleblower’s own fate, gave fresh evidence to the rumors that the chaebol did not hesitate to punish its critics.34 The enthusiasm that had engulfed Ŏnsoju’s website after the easy first victory transformed into a sombre resolution to head into an unequal, hard battle against all odds. As the manifesto admitted, “Samsung is a humongous, unmanageable rival. Samsung’s domestic sales are said not to exceed 10 percent of its global sales. In other words, even if it [Samsung] sells nothing to the Korean people [kungmin], we won’t deal it a mortal blow.” The boycott had more of a symbolic than a practical impact, as activists well realized. They presented it as a “historic struggle,” and even declared the boycott itself to be “the people’s true victory” (kungmin ŭi chinjŏnghan sŭngni). Its importance was not in winning but in the people challenging Samsung. The struggle that Ŏnsoju was indeed winning was for reimagining corporations—particularly the omnipotent Samsung—as being bound by popular will and public interest. The Ŏnsoju added four thousand new members to its online café on the day it announced the Samsung boycott. Thirty thousand more joined within the next month, boosting membership to eighty thousand. Of those members, about ten thousand publicly pledged on the Ŏnsoju website to boycott Samsung products. Ŏnsoju set the goal to cause Samsung ten billion won worth of damage by avoiding buying desired products or

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­services from Samsung and taking that business to its competitors. Boycotters posted about Samsung products they did not buy and calculated the cumulative damage they had thus caused to Samsung. Some members also conducted so-called one-person protests (1-in shiwi), picketing in public places with posters that said “I boycott Samsung, the ChoJoongDong advertiser”—one of the few measures of public protesting that remained legal after Lee Myung-bak’s administration cracked down on freedom of assembly. Ŏnsoju’s leader, Kim Sŏng-kyun, himself was among the most active protesters, and there were many pictures on the Ŏnsoju website of him standing with boycott posters in front of Samsung offices and shops that sold Samsung products. Though Ŏnsoju boasted almost a hundred thousand members, the boycott could hardly hurt Samsung in any tangible way, just as the manifesto predicted. To me it seemed implausible that many South Koreans would in fact abandon Samsung products—too many times I caught critics of Samsung among my acquaintances in possession of Samsung laptops or cell phones. They would say something like, “Yes, I know, Samsung is a bad company, but what can I do? Their quality is the best.” Ironically, it was on my Samsung cell phone—bought used for its cheapness, not for brand preference—that Kim glued the sticker with the Ŏnsoju logo and a call to boycott Samsung when I first visited their office. My companion, Mr. Im, a friend and an entrepreneur in his late thirties, who had arranged for my interview through an activist acquittance and insisted on coming along because of his sympathy with Ŏnsoju’s cause, was typing something on his Samsung laptop as he waited for me to conduct my interviews.

Ŏ n s oj u ’ s C o nsume r C i tiz en sh ip My meeting with Kim Sŏng-kyun at the Ŏnsoju’s office took place a few days after the Samsung boycott was announced. Ŏnsoju’s home base was in a rundown area behind Deoksugung Palace in northern Seoul. The dingy officetel tower of grey concrete looked giant among the old lowrise houses with crumbling tile roofs but nevertheless was hard to find in the meandering alleys, some of which were blocked by construction work. The whole area seemed transported from the past, Seoul as it was in perhaps in the 1980s. It was tempting to read it as symbolic of how Ŏnsoju



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mobilization was reviving the spirited struggles of those days. Sharing the building with a sauna, a few greasy-spoon restaurants, small exportimport operations, and electronics resellers, Ŏnsoju’s office was tiny: a cluttered meeting room with a kitchenette in the corner and a room with a couple of computers further in, where Ŏnsoju’s only salaried administrator was working away, keeping tabs on Ŏnsoju’s vibrant online message board. The walls were decorated with anti-ChoJoongDong posters, and on the counter there were snacks, fruit, sweets, and soft drinks brought by supporters. Kim, an agile and articulate man in his late forties, looked simultaneously tired and energetic—as if he had given a hundred interviews but was willing to do another hundred to make sure that his point got across. A 1984 graduate of politically active Korea University, he was likely a former student activist, though he never mentioned this himself.35 In that regard, Kim differed from those 386ers who, like creative director Park Woonghyun from chapter 2, were happy to flaunt their rebellious university days while living comfortable mainstream lives. An irony of life in twenty-first century South Korea was that if for an adman a political past was a symbolic asset, for an activist it was mostly a liability—it courted accusations of sacrificing the public interest to entrenched “political” purposes. For my benefit, Kim reiterated Ŏnsoju’s official stance: Our position is that we think that there are many problems with the Chosun Ilbo, the JoongAng Ilbo, and the Dong-A Ilbo, the ChoJoongDong. For decades they have habitually published distorted reports. It was impossible to do corrections, and these newspapers have never received any punishment. During the colonial period, they collaborated with the Japanese colonizers . . . . After the liberation, at the times of the dictatorships, they stood on the side of the dictators and oppressed the media. In the present, they are not working for the majority in the nation but for the minority . . . . Why wouldn’t we directly attack the ChoJoongDong but [attack] advertisers? It is because there is really no way to go directly after the ChoJoongDong . . . . Because the ChoJoongDong have become a big power structure [kwŏllyŏk kigu], there are absolutely no measures through which they could be kept in check. If you ask to what degree [they are powerful], the ChoJoongDong make presidents, they manipulate at the backstage, that’s precisely what the ChoJoongDong are. Just think that they are more powerful than the president.

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What might seem to be an eccentric conspiracy theory was not that far from the position of South Korea’s mainstream left. Kim’s narrative echoed the renditions of South Korea’s history by critical public intellectuals, notably Choi Jang Jip (2005), as well as by a number of left-wing civic organizations, such as Nosamo (No Mu-Hyŏn ŭl sarang hanŭn saramdŭl ŭi moim, “Gathering of people who love Roh Moo-hyun,” est. 2000), Choase (Chosŭn lbo ŏmnŭn arŭmdaun sesang, “Beautiful World without the Chosun Ilbo,” est. 2002), and the Citizens Alliance Against the Chosun Ilbo (est. 2000). For these organizations, as for Ŏnsoju, the conservative press was perceived as the major barrier to achieving social justice and substantive democracy. For Ŏnsoju, boycotting the ChoJoongDong advertisers was a roundabout way of building a harmonious, democratic society with an effective public sphere, whose absence Kim, like many others, saw as the major obstacle to achieving social and economic justice: “If advertising no longer goes to those guys, those companies [the ChoJoongDong], a huge change will arise . . . . Because those guys in the ChoJoongDong publish distorted reports and lie, people cannot know the precise facts . . . . As the ChoJoongDong wither away, as the power of those guys declines, everything can be achieved normally [chŏngsangjŏk ŭro]. What I am saying is that opportunities will open for our society, Korean society, to develop, as we consider what’s your opinion and what’s my opinion. This is not simply a problem of newspaper companies. Our country’s democracy, our country’s history, our country’s development, everything culminates here.” Ŏnsoju’s discourse of the historic struggle for national destiny was reminiscent of the anti-authoritarian activism of the 1980s, yet for Ŏnsoju the agent of this struggle was the consumer, whose centrality draws different battle lines and horizons for activism. The sovereign consumer is the juggernaut in the neoliberal mythologies of free markets, as already mentioned. By focusing on media consumerism, and particularly by insisting on the legitimacy of collective consumer intervention, Ŏnsoju was subverting the neoliberal doxa from within and empowering consumers beyond the limited politics of shopping choices. As Jiyeon Kang (2016) explains, commenting on the mobilization around the 2008 anti-US-beef protest, which led to the emergence of Ŏnsoju and overlapped with their activism, “This protest phenomenon does not allow for easy distinction between citizens and consumers. Participants complained that [president]



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Lee [Myung-bak]’s rhetoric of ‘choice’ in privatization, deregulation, and free trade in fact failed to afford sufficient choice to consume safe products and quality public services ranging from beef to education to medical insurance” (120). Kang argues for the newness of such political participation in Korea, linking it to the technological capabilities of the Internet and the sensibilities of the young generation. What I wish to also emphasize is how such consumer-citizen mobilizations were feeding off the dominant neoliberal discourses about the sovereign consumer while rejecting the neoliberal common sense that individual action in the market is the best way to have one’s voice heard. This brand of consumerism allowed for a convincing claim for representing universal interest beyond partisan politics and “selfish” interests, the common charge against mobilized collective actors such as workers’ unions. Unattuned to the damning connotations of “political” early in my fieldwork, I asked Kim Sŏng-kyun why Ŏnsoju spokespeople were so adamant that theirs was an apolitical movement. In my view, it was political because Ŏnsoju intervention was speaking to the antagonistic relation between capital and citizens in the realm of public politics. Kim gave me an exasperated look and explained, “We are not opposing those guys [the ChoJoongDong] because we oppose their political arguments, but we oppose them because they are wrong when those guys publish distorted reports and when they lie . . . . [The ChoJoongDong] say that we attack them because of the difference in the points of view. Who is conservative? Who is progressive? That is a political argument. But our position is different . . . . It is not a political argument. I say it [Ŏnsoju] is a consumer movement.” A present Ŏnsoju member jumped in to clarify that Ŏnsoju’s critics wanted to frame Ŏnsoju as a political movement to discredit it. If Ŏnsoju were a political movement, it became a matter of opinion who was right and who was wrong. “But a consumer movement is always right,” he stressed, slightly but significantly modifying the business mantra that “the consumer is always right.” When I and my interview companion, Mr. Im, were discussing this later in an Insadong teahouse, he drew a map of the South Korean political landscape on a napkin. According to him, and matching my own observations, about 20 percent of South Koreans consistently identified with the progressive “left,” and about 30 percent sided with the conservative “right,” whereas the remaining 50 percent changed sides depending on

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whose representatives spoke better. Ŏnsoju’s campaign, then, was trying to win that fickle half by presenting their movement as not about the left and the right but about right and wrong. It was precisely the substitution of the individual consumer of “the consumer is always right” with the collective solidarity of “consumer movement is always right” that made Ŏnsoju’s campaign a powerful intervention that disrupted the advertising-mediated ties among business, the right-wing media, and conservative political elites. That intervention was political insofar as it asserted a collective agency to challenge the existing balance of power and was attempting to change the economic practices and institutions that secured it. Yet, true to Ŏnsoju’s self-understanding, the movement was also antipolitical in the sense that its ultimate agenda disavowed the structural antagonism that it was trying to remedy. Rather, it framed Korea’s predicament in terms of a moral lack and opportunistic violation of the market laws. Ŏnsoju’s critique of the curtailed public sphere was uninterested in the political-economic argument about how dependence on commercial advertising systematically disciplines the mass media to advance advertisers’ agenda and reproduce the entrenched interests. In spirit, Ŏnsoju’s program appeared social democratic insofar as it strove to insulate the mass media from marketplace vagaries and ensure the watchdog role of media over both businesses and the government. Yet unlike the social democratic model, Ŏnsoju’s agenda did not imply government support for media outlets or other institutional protections from advertisers’ whims. Rather it was a combination of free markets and corporate morality that was to ensure “our country’s democracy, our country’s history, our country’s development.” The malicious impediment of free markets—markets for ideas, for media, and for advertising—was one of Ŏnsoju’s allegations against the conservative dailies. Leveraging the neoliberal doxa, Kim blamed the trio of suppressing the corporate freedom not to advertise in the conservative dailies: “Some advertise there [in the ChoJoongDong] because they like those guys, but others advertise even though they hate them.” He suggested that companies advertise in the ChoJoongDong because they fear negative publicity: “They advertise [in the ChoJoongDong] not because they see advertising effects, they place their advertisements simply to have insurance, as a preemptive measure.” Ŏnsoju alleged that the right-wing dailies not only violated consumer sovereignty by depriving the reading



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public of “precise facts” but also suppressed corporate sovereignty—the corporate freedom to advertise as businesses see fit. The critique above curiously meshes with appeals to the wisdom of the markets with the personification, melodramatization, and moralization of social actors. Reminiscent of the sentimentalist dichotomies of good and evil mobilized to engage social causes in humanist advertising, the three dailies are treated as incorrigible villains that must be defeated, whereas corporations—notably Samsung—are imagined as being driven by feelings such as love, hate, and fear, as well as moral sentiments. As moral and affective agents, corporations are reasoned with through sentimentalized appeals to the public good. Despite their scathing critiques and belligerent boycotts, Ŏnsoju were not critics of capitalism per se— they were crusaders against corporate moral failures—the immature, short-sighted behavior of particular decision makers or a result of bullying from the ChoJoongDong. Their vision is well captured by the banner that appeared on the group’s website for a few weeks in the summer of 2009: “The stronghold of democracy is the organized power of awakened citizens; the stronghold of capitalism is the organized power of ethical consumers.” In a way, Ŏnsoju were advocates of the humanist capitalism populated by benevolent corporations, whose images advertising circulated. Ŏnsoju, however, weaponized those discourses by their drastic expansion of consumer sovereignty and consumer citizenship. Where the sentimentalist public exercised the as if distance to indulge in such campaigns, Ŏnsoju activists moved to close the gap between the “humanistic capitalism” of advertising and the “really existing” one, via collective mobilization. They pressured the corporations to act on their professed humanist commitments and specifically to stand up for democratic media. Failure to do so was unacceptable, as illustrated by Kim Sŏng-kyun’s accusations of advertisers during our interview: “Advertising in the ChoJoongDong, in the distorting newspapers, is the same as distorting and committing wrongdoings, it is financing bad organizations, that is how I see it . . . . Advertising can simply be defined as capitalism, but the notion of advertising in our country is that giving money to those bad companies [the ChoJoongDong newspapers] is cooperating with their bad deeds and committing a crime [pŏmjoe haengwi], we see it as similar, so there is a certain moral responsibility [todŏkchŏgin ch’aegim], [and] we are questioning that responsibility.”

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“Committing a crime” is harsh language to describe placing advertising with the mainstream dailies. Kim’s charge, however, is of transgressing against the unwritten laws of the moral economy that obliged South Korean enterprises to prioritize public interest, in this case, to support a democratic public sphere and critical media in particular. Ŏnsoju’s moral arguments set a high bar for corporations to act as personified corporate citizens with an obligation to Korean consumer-citizens as fellow members in the nation-state and also as constituents in the corporate community. And Ŏnsoju, the concerned consumer-citizens, were there to cajole and discipline corporations to fulfill their perceived duties, should they fail to recognize themselves in such an address and voluntarily respond as responsible corporate subjects.

I mp o s sible Me d ia C o nsumer ism Despite its limited scale and scope, the second round of Ŏnsoju activism in the summer of 2009 brought as severe a suppression as had the first one a year earlier. Once again, critics likened Ŏnsoju’s boycotts to the 1974–1975 White Pages Incident. Conservative pundits accused the activists of interfering with free market economy, violating freedom of expression, harassing small companies mafia-style, conspiring with the progressive dailies, and even receiving a commission from them. Rightwing reporters also insinuated personal motives behind the boycotts by pointing out that Kim Sŏng-kyun’s spouse was a journalist at the Kyunghyang. Conservative organizations—Lawyers for Citizens, the Civil Coalition for Fairness in Media, Citizens United for Better Society—held seminars, published critical expert opinions, and opened a Help Center for Enterprises Subjected to Advertiser Boycott. The right-wing newspapers themselves were at the forefront of the criticism. A JoongAng Ilbo editorial on June 16, 2009, lamented, “Nowhere in the world does such advertising terrorism [kwanggo t’erŏ] exist.” The writer also attempted to discredit Ŏnsoju by questioning their patriotism: “The activists’ off-track boycott campaign against Samsung is an attempt to rattle a business mogul who represents Korea, and it could in fact negatively impact the entire nation. It represents an act of treachery to the country.”36 If for the activists nurturing a democratic public sphere



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took priority, for their adversaries the “entire nation” was best served by economic stability tied to the stability of the chaebol, and interference with their business interests amounted to terrorism. In another unsubtle tactic to undermine the activists, the editorial questioned their sanity and maturity: “It seems that an investigation would be a natural step, one that would help maintain the health of Korean society. However, the prosecution would need to assess the group members’ mental health beforehand, as they are involved in preposterous and childish acts that could hurt the entire country.” If for Ŏnsoju it was a crime to neglect the corporate responsibility to support the democratic public sphere, for its critics it was terrorism and insanity to discipline corporate profit seeking with demands for public accountability. The latter accusations are telltale signs that activists were violating the unwritten rules that protected the incumbent distribution of wealth and power in South Korea. In late June 2009, a complaint was filed with the Seoul Central Prosecutors’ Office against five Ŏnsoju activists, including Kim Sŏng-kyun. The investigation revealed that when Ŏnsoju announced its boycott of KwangDong Pharmaceutical, Kim was invited to visit its office. What Kim described as reaching an amicable agreement the prosecution presented as extortion and intimidation.37 Within a month, on July 29, 2009, Kim and Ŏnsoju’s media activity team director were indicted, and three months later, on October 29, 2009, the court found Kim guilty, sentencing him to a ten-month jail term suspended for two years. Two other Ŏnsoju members charged with the same offense were found not guilty. Kim appealed the decision but was found guilty again in October 2010. His consequent appeal to the Constitutional Court in December 2011 resulted in the verdict that Ŏnsoju activism did not fall under the freedom of expression provisions.38 In January 2011, Kim stepped down as Ŏnsoju leader and disappeared from the milieu of media activism. It might seem puzzling that Ŏnsoju’s activities, which were limited in their scope and effects, especially the 2009 boycotts, were perceived as such a threat as to warrant criminal prosecution. How does essentially blogging about boycotting the products of a particular company become an offense and even “terrorism”? My South Korean acquaintances who were sympathetic with the progressive camp suggested that Ŏnsoju leaders were prosecuted because they went against Samsung: the criminal investigation started soon after Ŏnsoju announced Samsung

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as its second target. Yet, as Ŏnsoju themselves admitted, the amount of damage they could cause to Samsung was negligible, particularly considering that even a conviction of Samsung’s chairman failed to shake Samsung’s power a few months earlier. More likely, having witnessed the public protests that engulfed Seoul in the summer of 2008, president Lee Myung-bak’s administration did not want to take a chance on another mass movement erupting. Considering Lee’s unpopularity and his association with the right-wing dailies, it was not implausible to think that Ŏnsoju’s anti-ChoJoongDong crusading might spill into the streets and become an antigovernment protest. The pro-business resolution of boycotts appeared inevitable also because one of the vectors of Lee’s presidency was the deregulation of the mass media. Tightening screws on anti-corporate activism and legally expanding corporate freedoms were two sides of the same coin. While the two 2008 Constitutional Court decisions dislodged advertising from legal controls and enhanced advertisers’ sway over mass media, the prosecution of Ŏnsoju leaders created deterrents for civil society organizations to interfere with advertising flows, thus charting the limit for the exercise of consumer sovereignty and citizenship. The message of the Ŏnsoju prosecution was that consumer sovereignty should be taken metaphorically only, and certainly not so far as to undermine corporate sovereignty. Ŏnsoju activists were labeled terrorists and questions of their sanity arose because the organization’s demand that consumers be kings and corporations be their subjects turned into a subversive identification (Žižek 1999)—or, in the vocabulary from the previous chapter, a misidentification that refuses a proper degree of detachment. The activists literally identified with the business cliché that the consumer is always right and would not back down until their “always right” position was accepted by the advertisers. Whether tactically or inadvertently, they transformed an empty feel-good slogan into a program for collective action—whose political cachet was ever stronger because it was articulated from the position of seemingly “apolitical” consumer interest. In a sense, Ŏnsoju consumercitizens were the opposite of the cynical “smart consumers” from chapter 3, who did not consciously believe corporate discourses but acted as if they did, thus creating a leeway for advertisers to avoid responsibility for their half-truths. By rejecting the politics of “as if” regarding corporate compliance with consumers’ wishes, Ŏnsoju advanced a resonant demand, which



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despite its legitimacy within the hegemonic ideological framework was impossible to satisfy without endangering the whole system. After the hectic period in June 2009, Ŏnsoju’s activity subsided. Still, the count of the “damage” to Samsung was updated monthly, and as of August 31, 2011, had surpassed 11.5 billion won (about US$9 million), 1,436 people having posted updates.39 In the meantime, in July 2009, a new media law was bulldozed through the National Assembly, allowing for media cross-ownership and general programming for cable channels, and thus opening up opportunities for the right-wing media conglomerates to expand their influence through general-audience broadcasting. Leftists saw this development as catastrophic. No longer focusing on advertising, Ŏnsoju cooperated with media-focused nongovernmental organizations to block the emergence of what they saw as Korea’s version of Fox News. They protested the law itself, protested the ChoJoongDong newspapers and the economic daily Maeil Kyŏngje becoming licensed for broadcasting, boycotted the investors of the new channels—but all in vain, and four new channels started broadcasting on December 1, 2011. The court proceedings regarding the 2008 advertising boycotts concluded only in August 2013; the seventeen million won (about US$15 thousand) worth of fines imposed on the fifteen convicted members were paid off via a fund­ raiser (Lee 2015, 10). Overall, the South Korean experience paralleled the battles against corporatization of the mass media elsewhere—battles that were similarly lost due to industry lobbying and attacks on movement leaders (Pickard 2013; Stole 2006). While losing the legal fight, Ŏnsoju might have won the discursive one. The activists articulated a resonant agenda that blended historical moral-economic considerations with neoliberal discourses of the primacy of the consumer, thus working out moral-ideological rationales for subordinating corporate sovereignty to the popular will. Ŏnsoju ideologues subverted the individualizing “the consumer is always right” mantra into a mobilizing “the consumer movement is always right,” opening a venue for transforming the politics of shopping into a challenge to the conservative business-media alliance. In postmillennial South Korea, where politics proper was by and large discredited, this covert politicization and even radicalization of consumer citizenship was a fruitful experiment with the tactics of redistributing citizenship and sovereignty in favor of consumers amid the expansion of corporate power.

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I thus interpret Ŏnsoju’s consumer citizenship as a noteworthy tryout with the “progressive arts of government,” whose challenge to contemporary capitalism went beyond an indignant critique of the abuses and a denunciation of the powerful (Ferguson 2010). Ŏnsoju’s was a foray of organized consumers making corporations into subjects of government. Ŏnsoju activists attempted to conduct corporate conduct with discipline (boycotts) but also by appropriating a neoliberal government of freedom to advance the agenda of consumer-citizens. The activists effectively seized initiative in the hegemonic corporate social responsibility ­discourses—meshing them with local moral-economic understandings— to transform self-congratulatory PR-speak into far-reaching demands. In other words, they appropriated and radicalized “neoliberal” mechanisms of consumer citizenship. Whether taken up as a tactic or as a goal in itself, such radical consumerist interventions channel corporate justificatory discourses into a path that corporations cannot walk all the way without sacrificing profits to consumers’ interest. It is a path toward humanist capitalism, which, to be consistently humanist, has to stop being capitalist. Though Ŏnsoju activists would not see it this way, their project was about transcending capitalism by confronting and exploiting its internal contradictions. The JoongAng Ilbo might have been right, after all, to call them terrorists, for the logical end of Ŏnsoju’s consumer sovereignty was a new social order.

C o n c lusio n This chapter explored the politics of advertising money flows in postmillennial South Korea, particularly in the print national media, which were closely connected to political and business elites. It tracked how corporate decisions about where to advertise could be disciplined by those claiming moral ownership over advertising money based on their consumption of the advertised commodities and reliance on the advertising-supported mass media for democratic participation. With advertising media placements, too, the cultural logic that prescribed publicness put a strain on advertising’s private instrumental purposes, and this chapter framed those contests about advertising money as an arena for contesting private interests and public needs in advertising’s social contract.



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Toward a critical anthropology of South Korean advertising, the chapter underscored how advertising as a social institution is implicated in big politics in intricate ways, which are shaped by local power struggles and can be deduced neither from advertising systemic functions nor advertising texts. Advertising contracts are often driven by the situational logic of networking and favor seeking, neither marketing calculus nor the impersonal market forces that supposedly reward publications’ popularity with readers. Taken to the extreme in South Korean national dailies, those extra-marketing calculations placed advertising payments on the continuum between a charitable donation and a networking lubricant between businesses and the mass media aligned with political camps. Intuitive to social actors themselves, this dynamic matched—and reproduced—­historical understandings of advertising as a medium whose marketing purposes were subordinated to other goals, even though the goals envisioned by the publicness-centered visions of advertising certainly differed from deploying advertising as a legal means to infuse money into sympathetic media. Those differences animated the competing accusations of advertising suppression, which were the chapter’s thread to situate advertising entanglements within South Korean power politics. In addition to specifying this advertising politics in postmillennial South Korea and foregrounding the importance of advertising money flows in local advertising constitution, this chapter traced how contests over freedom to advertise and freedom to protest advertising placements connected to a key struggle under capitalism—the allocation of rights and obligations among people and corporations. Smart to how advertising money is the carrot and stick for enabling opinions and arguments, Ŏnsoju weaponized this economy to democratize advertising distribution, support critical media, and ultimately challenge the conservative hegemony. To legitimize their intervention, the activists rearticulated consumer citizenship, a dominant ideology of neoliberal capitalism, which, in the activists’ slight yet radical reinterpretation, created new tactical options for collective politics to not only disrupt the conservative hegemony but also redress the power imbalance between corporations and consumers. Speaking as consumers—neoliberal constituents whose sovereign will is binding—Ŏnsoju activists claimed citizenship in corporations and asserted the right to oversee their operation. Even though Ŏnsoju activists declared a democratic public sphere as their goal, they were effectively

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pursuing an economic democracy, a shift in decision-making power from corporations to their buyers whereby corporations are accountable to consumers, whose human and democratic needs thus took priority over profits. Advertising, too, was to be subjected to direct consumer will—an argument that reenergized the historical ideals of advertising publicness by dressing them in the garb of consumer citizenship, a contemporary discourse seemingly aligned with the dominant neoliberal ideologies. The draconian crackdown on the activists testifies to both the moral-economic legitimacy and political-economic radicalism of such rearticulation. To return to South Korean advertising and its cultural logic, the attempt to reroute advertising money flows for the sake of a consumerdriven economic democracy imagined another kind of unlikely advertising. Whereas humanist advertising from the previous chapters conjured a sentimental public indulging in the spectacles of caring corporations but putting up with their practical impossibility in reality, Ŏnsoju’s “consumerist” claim on advertising money transformed those imaginaries into a collective political project, an attempt to actualize the dreamworld of a capitalism prioritizing human needs and serving popular democracy. By adapting the cultural logic of advertising that prioritized its publicness over private profits to the new era, Ŏnsoju was nurturing “advertising, the flower of capitalism,” to exploit cracks in the ideological edifice of neoliberalism, sprout imaginaries of better social arrangements, and yield tactics toward their realization.

Epilogue Digital Times: Wither Advertising?

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eturning to Seoul in August 2015, five years after my fieldwork, I was struck by the absence of advertising on the subway cars. Empty ad frames glared from surfaces previously cluttered with posters for family weekends at amusement parks, antiwrinkle creams, insurance policies, and soft drinks. Glued to their smartphones, Seoulites rarely glanced at the remaining few ad displays, many of which were from the subway authorities, educating the public about proper manners or trying to entice potential advertisers. The vanishing of subway advertising was the most conspicuous sign of traditional media losing its ground in the face of media convergence. By 2012 the share of Internet-reliant advertising grew to a substantial 20 percent, to surpass a quarter of all advertising expenditures (27 percent) by 2014.1 In particular, explosive growth was recorded by mobile advertising—advertising delivered via handheld devices, such as smartphones, which took over South Korea relatively late but with a vengeance. In 2012 the share of mobile advertising grew a staggering 184 percent to account for two percent of the total advertising market in South Korea, that number to quadrupled by 2014 (KISA 2013, 58; KISA 2015, 63). The explosion in new media spending was even more remarkable considering that the overall volume of advertising was barely increasing. This redistribution of advertising revenues among multiplying media platforms was symptomatic of seismic shifts in the South Korean media ecology. While the business needs that advertising historically met—selling commodities and liaising with opinion and policy makers—­ remained, those goals were increasingly met through more cost-­efficient means afforded by digital platforms and smart mobile devices. In 197

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r­ etrospect, the first decade of the new millennium, the temporal focus of the preceding chapters, was the last period when traditional media, such as newspapers and terrestrial television, were still the center of gravity for news and entertainment. This research incidentally acquired another purpose soon after its completion—to capture a disappearing media landscape, along with its logics, forms, networks, and infrastructures. Glimpsed in the contests I detailed, the publicness ideal for media aesthetics and particularly for politics was fading amid the new integration of media forms, contents, and institutions. Generally understood as caused by technological developments, the transformations appeared inevitable, while debates about the socially desirable trajectories for digitalization and convergence were muted. In many ways, the changes were the effects of the computer- and Internet-enabled multiple convergences that have been transforming practices of media production, distribution, and reception as well as the underlying political economy since the 1990s (Jenkins 2006).2 Previously distinct platforms, such as television, radio, and print, began to borrow each others’ characteristics when personal computers became metadevices through which all audio-visual content could be produced and accessed, whereas fast, accessible Internet accelerated this process. As digitalized media benefited from technological enhancements, their representational and communicative capabilities expanded at the expense of the diluted media specificity, which increasingly hung on historical and institutional factors. South Korean digitalized newspapers, for example, were in direct competition for mobile traffic with the local Internet portals whose aggregate news feeds made them de facto news media even though they created no content of their own. Those newspaper subscribers that remained in the 2010s often subscribed primarily to support the associated political camps. Advertising’s online migration was a part of this shape-­shifting of various media, though, in light of this book’s arguments, advertising transformations—in terms of both preferred platforms and aesthetics— have also been inseparable from their social context, institutional infrastructures, and associated vested interests. As Raymond Williams (2010, 93) argues about television, a media technology that purportedly altered the world, new technology as a possible cause of social change needs to be situated within its relationships to other kinds of causes, such as the

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complex political, cultural, and economic conditions in which the new medium was developed and adopted by its users. Coinciding with the expansion of neoliberal policies all over the world, media digitalization and convergence have been captured by corporate interests, whose commercial needs grew to define media uses and infrastructures. It is important to remember, however, that, though concerns with the social goals of media and communication were often sacrificed to competitiveness, as with president Lee Myung-bak’s convergence reforms in postmillennial South Korea, their neglect was an outcome of conflicts, collaborations, and contingencies channeled through soft and hard infrastructures. In South Korea, advertising’s changing configurations were, on the one hand, integral to the deregulatory push to privatize media and reorient it toward market competition. That online spaces have been relatively unencumbered by regulation as far as promotional communication goes invited a revival of the unsubtle promotional tactic that relied on the brute force of shock and repetition. In the 2000s, pop-up and banner ads relentlessly bombarded Korean-language Internet users. Just reading news online was an annoying game of avoiding hovering graphic imagery. I certainly sympathized with a complaint by a Cyworld microblog user, “Advertising is called the flower of capitalism . . . but I am disgusted by the ads with photographs of screws stuck into gums, next to ‘The overall price of implants?’ with which portal sites endlessly advertise dentist clinics, plastic surgery, and dieting.”3 I also wondered if the two-minute jingles of the late 1950s, before South Korean advertising regulation came into place, had provoked a similar level of annoyance among audiences (Shin and Shin 2013, 45). On the other hand, the lasting practices and discourses of South Korean advertising—such as those of advertising practitioners and media nongovernmental organizations—also collectively maintained the older ideals, some of which were reinvigorated by the new media affordances. The unbridled web environment reinforced the old South Korean penchant for unlikely advertising. If in earlier times a humanist commercial had to be aired in designated time spots and be clearly marked as advertising to avoid being mistaken for regular media, the lack of spatiotemporal limitations on marketing communication online inspired more genre- and medium-bending experiments. Exceeding the stipulated thirty-­second length of television commercials, Internet-based video advertising held

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viewers’ attention with elaborate narrative strategies, such as love triangles, detective stories, and multi-episode minidramas, which rarely mentioned advertised brands other than in the final sponsor shot. An early example is the award-winning campaign from the early 2000s, “Love Is Always Thirsty,” for the fruit-flavored beverage 2%. The online ads mimicked television melodramas, showing intense fights between a young couple played by the popular actors Jung Woo-sung and Jun Ji-hyun. One episode shows them yelling insults at each other on a subway platform, the woman mocking her boyfriend for being poor and implying that she is also dating someone richer, in response to which the boyfriend slaps her in the face. In another episode, the woman gets out of a posh car and runs screaming incoherently in the rain while the bruised boyfriend lies unconscious in the street. The series also included her threatening him with a gun and him contemplating suicide on the roof of a skyscraper. The melodramatic intensity and violence of the “Love Is Always Thirsty” campaign generated anything but a consumption-friendly light mood; those short films were unrecognizable as advertisements. The old aesthetic and new technology resonated to move advertising further and further away from its instrumental form as a marketing communication about commodities. At the same time, advertising remained advertising insofar as its discourses advocated on behalf of corporations and trafficked in “capitalist realism.” Among the remarkable campaigns of the second postmillennial decade was the 2012 advertisement for Samsung’s Galaxy Note smartphone. The television commercials showed young non-Korean men and women—all ordinary-looking unknown models—enjoying their smartphones in casual non-Korean settings and taking a selfie in a goofy pose at the end to illustrate the campaign’s slogan: “Be creative, Samsung Galaxy Note 2.” Unlike previous ads with international models, the Samsung commercials cast non-Koreans not as formulaic “foreigners” but as regular consumers using and enjoying the product, presumably like the addressed South Korean public would. Only the Korean-language voiceover reveals that the campaign was for the domestic market. What might appear as a boast about the global success of South Korea’s flagship chaebol could also be interpreted as Samsung’s attempt to resign from the historical moral economy of corporate belonging in South Korea. By neglecting to distinguish between domestic consumers and “foreigners,” the conglomerate

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asserts itself as a citizen of the world, with no special obligations to South Koreans. With this markedly cosmopolitan address, Samsung undermines the nationalist-communitarian basis for radical claims on participatory citizenship in corporations, the kinds of arguments mobilized by Ŏnsoju activists to demand the democratization of advertising placements, as well as by many other chaebol critics, from nongovernmental organizations to labor unions. Those demands also gained moral force from the perceived reciprocal relation of national belonging, in which members—humans and corporations alike—bear an obligation to living compatriots, ancestors, and future generations. The “foreigner” ads, however, positioned the South Korean corporation as a global company outside of this nationalist moral economy. Incidentally, around the same time, Hyundai deployed foreign models in a similar manner in its new “Sexy Utility Vehicle” campaign. Coming from South Korea’s biggest chaebol, such campaigns were suggestive of a corporate push to retire the ideal of affective mutuality between human and corporate compatriots in favor of a market-­regulated, limited-time relationship between global businesses and their buyers. While corporate profit motives and legitimation needs remained, in the vortex of multifaceted convergences advertising was losing its positions as a popular means for achieving those objectives. “Media-­promotionalcultural convergence” is Iain MacRury’s (2009, 243) term for the seamless enmeshing of content-producing and marketing activities in service of sponsors’ commercial goals. Jonathan Hardy (2013) describes those developments as the “integration without separation” of marketing and media, whereby previously distinct forms of promotion—paid (advertising), earned (PR), owned (publishing), and shared (social)—become indistinguishable. Hardy also identifies a twin tendency of the dis-­integration of marketing and media driven by “opportunities to reach, track and target individuals more (cost) effectively, and in environments such as social media, e-commerce and search that lie outside media content vehicles” (125). In other words, to reach audiences, marketing communication no longer needs to be integrated into content media, such as a newspaper sheet or a television program. Rather, it delivers enticing content of its own, and fewer and fewer promotional activities fit within the historical definition of commercial advertising as persuasive communication that declares its goal to stimulate a purchase and parades its sponsors. Marketers choose subtler strategies, such as media content produced for and

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by brands, positive publications in traditional media and online, and the cultivation of influencers and social media buzz—which, in turn, pushes the content of advertising proper toward entertainment and news media. In the deregulated and intensely competitive media environment, the convergence progressed through promotion-saturated commercial media productions and content-rich advertising meeting each other halfway—or, seen another way, cannibalizing each other. Most openly, South Korean advertising was encroached upon by product placements. Historically restricted, those paid-for product exposures were liberalized throughout the 2000s, particularly after 2010 (Chae and Sun 2013). With big-budget South Korean dramas, producers began to jam episodes with product placements to cover production costs. The popular 2016 TV series Descendants of the Sun (KBS), for example, received much criticism for what was perceived as excessive product placement interruptive of the drama flow: a coffeeshop franchise, a sandwich franchise, a barbecue restaurant franchise, an automated driving system, branded almonds, a cosmetics brand, ginseng products, a smartwatch, bottled water, and a travel app. In one episode as many as thirteen product sightings were counted.4 In a sense, blurring between advertising and content media is hardly new. Public relations experts cultivated favorable media attention long before the Internet. Though promotional and media industries were technically separate, there was much practical integration between the two, as political economists of media have detailed. Critical media scholars repeatedly demonstrated how commercial media are likely to naturally promote their biggest advertisers by favorably covering their news and withholding reportage harmful to their interests. But with the new technological convergences, those promotional expansions led to a substantive change in the media forms themselves. Even though permeated with capitalist consumerist ideology and tooting their sponsors’ horns, earlier media productions remained distinct as content media and shied away from direct sales appeals. The entertainment media of the 2010s, by contrast, were becoming saturated with explicit shopping nudges. The critics of Descendants of the Sun dubbed the episode that was particularly overflowing with branded goods as “Descendants of the PPL [product placement],” implicitly reframing the drama as a shopping catalogue.5 This commercial saturation was fulfilling MacRury’s predic-

Epilogue

203

tion that “as your mobile phone becomes your TV and your pop video becomes your advertisement, as your iPod becomes your GPRS PDA and your direct mail becomes a mobile reminder, to talk about ad ‘breaks’ will become an act of nostalgia” (2009, 243; italics in original). Where MacRury suggests a wistful longing for clearly bounded media forms, substantial segments of the new media publics welcome this diffuse promotional communication and respond to its clever, playful addresses as “smart consumers” who are in on the game. This convergence of consumer desires and commercial goals might be optimistically interpreted as reflecting consumer empowerment (Jenkins 2006), but it also testifies to the ideological grip of the “media-promotional-cultural convergence” and opens up new and insidious ways of capitalist exploitation (Fuchs 2011). Those processes of convergence, integration, and disintegration began with the traditional media’s expansion to the web after the ­popularization of the Internet, but it was not until Internet-connected ­smartphones—mobile multimedia minicomputers—became ubiquitous that the changes became epoch-making. As a manager of South Korea’s telecommunications provider KT put it, “Wireless communications is becoming more about data than voice, which is much like the transition from horse carriages to cars.’’6 In South Korea, the smartphone craze began with the local launch of Apple’s iPhone in November 2009, two years after its US debut. By June 2010, Samsung was selling its own Galaxy models at home, and the smartphone adoption was quickly making up in scale and enthusiasm for what it had lost in timeliness. In 2010 only one-sixth of South Koreans were smartphone service subscribers, that number to triple within a year (to twenty million), and to cover three-fifths of the population (thirty million) by October 2012. With the first unlimited data plans released in 2010, Internet use with smartphones surpassed its use via wired devices, increasing more than five times in 2011. As of 2015, South Korea boasted the highest smartphone penetration in the world, with 88 percent of South Koreans owning a smart mobile device.7 The Internet-connected smartphone quickly became the node integrating all aspects of everyday life and dictating its rhythms. Social media and web-based instant messaging in particular exploded and became indispensable for professional communication and customer service, let alone everyday sociality, to the point that people without smartphones were being criticized as a burden on others, as I quickly

204

Epilogue

learned in August 2015. New habits of and expectations for constant online accessibility transformed the practices of work, leisure, and many daily chores. Mundane tasks, from banking to school homework, came to require Internet-based services, usually reached through dedicated apps, which became the gateways to the web. Those apps offered unprecedented access to their users’ attention and individual data, revolutionizing marketing communication by making it ever more ubiquitous and customized. The disappearance of subway ads reflected marketers’ conviction that passengers’ “eyeballs” were better captured through mobile devices as they glanced through the news feed at Internet portals, played online computer games, chatted over the local messenger KakaoTalk, or scrolled through updates on social media. For the advertising industry, this mobile migration meant that marketers prioritized web-based promotional activities, whereas advertising in the traditional media was reduced to a supporting role. Traditional advertising was withering away. A 2012 promotional campaign for Wol soju, for example, was to be experienced online. Interactive videos simulate drinking situations with entertainer Han Ga-in, who, filmed waiting for the viewer at a bar, greets them and inquires about their day, and, based on typed answers, offers a drink and selects music. The remarkable success of Psy’s “Gangnam Style” music video gave rise to businesses specializing in viral marketing campaigns, by gamifying participation and otherwise encouraging audiences to engage and share (Kim I. 2013). Another muchpraised example of innovative promotion, the 2013 campaign by Korean Air, “The Europe That I Love Top 10,” asked netizens to upload their travel photos and vote for the most desirable European destinations. Slideshows of netizens’ photos became a series of advertisements: “Europe that I want to experience myself,” “Europe where I want to spend one month,” “Europe where I want to run away,” “Europe that I want to have.” Eventually the travel photographs were also published as a photo book. An instance of popular hybrid genres, the 2014 campaign for the bakery chain Paris Baguette revolved around “adumentaries” for YouTube. Promoting the chain’s pure milk cake, the two-and-a-half-minute-long videos said nothing about its taste or production process but instead showed regular people talking about the sentimental meaning they get out of giving and receiving cakes (Yi and Cha 2015, 130–131). One episode, for example, elaborated on a news report about a small rural school in the village of

Epilogue

205

Samgyeri. The adumentary showed schoolchildren decorating a cake with wild flowers and a “thank you” inscription, to give it to a family with five school-age daughters, whose moving to the village saved their school from shutting down due to low student population. Such adumentaries were evocative of the decades of humanist South Korean advertising. What was distinctive, besides these new-media hybrids’ reliance on participatory web-based platforms, was their even greater neglect of the metamarkers of marketing communication. Advertising was becoming so unlike advertising, it was hardly advertising at all. In South Korea, as elsewhere, advertising’s adaptations to the digital environment are by no means a certain process. There are changes that seem to suggest the closing of the public interest horizon even in South Korea, despite the lingering cultural logic that still binds commercial advertising to publicness and democratic public culture, at least for some social actors. But those questions are for future research. My aim has been to attempt a critical anthropology of advertising that tracks advertising circulation through the sites of its production and public life, foregrounding contingencies yet without losing sight of structuring politicaleconomic forces, and particularly questioning the implications of trivial ­advertising-related practices and contests for advertising as a social institution as well as for South Korean capitalism and democracy. I emphasized how neither advertising connections to larger social structures— mass media, business, government—nor its aesthetic commitments, let alone its social trajectories, are overdetermined effects of the systemic forces of capitalist political economy, even though, in the final analysis, commercial advertising is begotten by capitalist needs. Rather, advertising configurations reflect open and latent disputes among advertising practitioners, cultural regulators, corporate decision makers, activists, and advertising publics, whose interests and perspectives do not neatly align with the obvious political-economic alliances and sometimes bring about critical openings. While acknowledging the capitalist logic of commercial advertising and exposing the forces and infrastructures that favor corporate discretion over advertising and limit advertising’s public accountability, I nevertheless privileged their contradictions and arising contests, to push against the assumptions of advertising as an indisputable, ­unassailable domain

206

Epilogue

of capital’s interest, which in the light of my arguments, p ­ erformatively make it more such. I highlighted successful challenges to capital’s control over advertising—challenges that worked against the established power ­structures—and explored opportunities for meaningful public accountability for advertising, media, and, to some degree, corporations. While those interventions were fleeting and rarely progressed in a cumulative way, they nevertheless made thinkable alternatives to the commonsensical imaginary of advertising messages and money naturally prioritizing corporate interests over those of social actors, whose lives are shaped by advertising in multiple ways. Even if advertising as a distinct genre disappears or transmutes beyond recognition, the struggles against media’s domination by commercial interest will surely continue. The public service ideal of South Korean advertising was never realized in full, but it sets an ambitious horizon for media critique and activism—in South Korea and beyond.

A ppe ndi x 1 Chronology of Major Events in South Korean Advertising

1886 1963 1968 1968 1969 1969 1973 1974 1974–  1975 1976 1980 1980 1980 1981 1981 1984

First known Korean advertising published Advertising permitted on state television channel KBS-TV Broadcast Advertising Review Committee launched Coca-Cola and Pepsi enter South Korean market MBC launched as a private TV channel State channel KBS stops airing advertising Samsung establishes advertising agency Cheil Communications In-program advertising is banned The Dong-A Ilbo White Pages Incident Korea Broadcast Ethics Committee begins prescreening of broadcast advertising Chun Doo-hwan consolidates and nationalizes broadcast media and forces mergers of print media; Basic Press Act adopted KBS-TV (public channel) resumes advertising Korea Broadcast Advertising Corporation (KOBACO) is established and takes over advertising sales for terrestrial broadcasters KOBACO takes over prescreening of terrestrial broadcast advertising Color television broadcasting begins Advertising expenditures in South Korea reach 1 percent of GDP 207

208

1987 1988 1988 1989 1989 1990 1991 1991 1994 1994 1995

1995 1998 2001 2002 2005 2007 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2009

Appendix

South Korea’s democratization; Basic Press Act abolished; liberalization of mass media Hankyoreh newspaper is founded Federation of Korean Industries (FKI) founds the Korea Advertisers Association (KAA) Korea Broadcasting Commission (KBC) takes over mandatory prescreening of terrestrial broadcast advertising Korea Audit Bureau of Circulations (KABC) is founded Private terrestrial broadcaster SBS launched Limits on foreign investment in South Korean advertising are removed; foreign advertising companies are allowed to set up branches in South Korea KARB (Korea Advertising Review Board) is established as an industry association by advertising-related organizations Internet banner ads appear in South Korea for the first time KARB starts voluntary advertising review As a part of the WTO Uruguay Round agreements, South Korea commits to complete liberalization of advertising market, including abolition of KOBACO’s monopoly on selling terrestrial broadcast advertising Cable TV begins broadcasting Satellite TV is launched KARB takes over mandatory advertising review Digital satellite broadcasting starts Digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) starts Korea Internet Advertising Review Board is launched Korea Communication Standards Commission (KCSC) is established Ŏnsoju is established, conducts the first round of conservative advertiser boycotts Constitutional Court rules KARB’s mandatory prescreening of advertising unconstitutional Constitutional Court rules KOBACO’s monopoly of terrestrial advertising sales unconstitutional Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) is launched Ŏnsoju conducts the second round of conservative advertiser boycotts

Appendix

2009 2010 2011 2012

209

Broadcasting Act legalizes media cross-ownership and allows cable channels to offer general programming Product placement is liberalized Four general programming cable channels start broadcasting KABC publishes first audit report on South Korean newspapers

A ppe ndi x 2 Acronyms

AE Account Executive AFKN American Forces Korean Network ChoJoongDong Chosun Ilbo, JoongAng Ilbo, and Dong-A Ilbo CSR corporate social responsibility GDP Gross Domestic Product IMF International Monetary Fund ITUC International Trade Union Confederation KAA Korea Advertisers Association KAAA Korea Association of Advertising Agencies KAIST Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology KARB Korea Advertising Review Board KBS Korea Broadcasting System KCIA Central Intelligence Agency KCSC Korea Communication Standards Commission KDI Korea Development Institute KISA Korea Internet and Security Agency KOBACO Korea Broadcast Advertising Corporation KORCAD Korea Office Radio Corporation of America Distribution KPF Korea Press Foundation MBC Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation NGO nongovernmental organization Ŏnsoju National Campaign for Media Consumer Sovereignty POSCO Pohang Iron and Steel Company SBS Seoul Broadcasting Station TRC Truth and Reconciliation Commission 210

A ppe ndi x 3 Details on Advertisements Mentioned

211

When lacking two percent (60-second version)

When lacking two percent (15-second version)

New Koreans series

Cola Independence 815

Cool like the first time

Panmunjom

Del Monte

Dooly substitute driver service

2% (soft drink)

2% (soft drink)

Bacchus (energy drink)

Cola Independence 815 (soft drink)

Cool soju

Daum (internet portal)

Del Monte (orange juice)

Dooly Substitute Driver Service

Advertised Brand

English Translation

둘리 대리운전

델몬트

판문점

처음처럼 쿨

콜라독립 815

새 한국인

2% 부족할때

2% 부족할때

Korean Title Lotte Chilsung

Lotte Chilsung

2001

2003

Daehong https://play.tvcf.co.kr/26986 Communications

https://play.tvcf.co.kr/22489

https://play.tvcf.co.kr/218198

Daehong https://play.tvcf.co.kr/1853 Communications

Daehong https://play.tvcf.co.kr/2826 Communications

URL (as of April 2021)

Lotte Chilsung (orange juice) Dooly Substitute Driver Service

2009

https://play.tvcf.co.kr/23951

Daehong https://play.tvcf.co.kr/5306 Communications

Daum Cheil https://play.tvcf.co.kr/2342 Communications Communications

Lotte (Cool soju)

Pŏmyang Foods

1991

2000

2009

1998

1993–1997 Dong-A Pharm

Advertiser

Year

Advertising Agency (if known)

Ghana chocolate

Hot Six

Golden Axe (“Olleh”)

Millionaire (“Olleh”)

Summer camp (“Olleh”)

Black noodles (“Flip the usual way” series)

Grandmothers’ 할머니 머리 편(“다 hairstyle (“Flip 그래”를 뒤집어라) the usual way” series)

Ghana chocolate

Hot6 (energy drink)

Korea Telecom

Korea Telecom

Korea Telecom

Korea Telecom

Korea Telecom

자장면 편 (“다 그래” 를 뒤집어라)

여름캠프 편 ( “올레”)

백만장자 편 (“‌올레”)

금도끼 편 (“‌올레”)

핫식스

가나초콜릿

Be creative

Be creative

Galaxy Note II (cell phone)

정직한 초코렛

Honest chocolate

Fair Trade chocolate

Korea Telecom

Korea Telecom

2010

2010

Korea Telecom

2009 Korea Telecom

Korea Telecom

2009

2009

Lotte Chilsung (energy drink)

Lotte

Samsung Electronics

Beautiful Store

2010

1981

2012

2010

(continued)

Cheil https://play.tvcf.co.kr/24383 Communications

Cheil https://play.tvcf.co.kr/24381 Communications

Cheil https://play.tvcf.co.kr/23417 Communications

Cheil http://www.pandora.tv/view​ Communications /yujin921/35692907

Cheil https://play.tvcf.co.kr/23412 Communications

https://play.tvcf.co.kr/24760

Daehong https://play.tvcf.co.kr/6227; Communications https://play.tvcf.co.kr/6005

Cheil https://play.tvcf.co.kr/152050 Communications

Yi Jeseok’s Adver- https://youtu.be/Dl29JO-b_Sw tising Research Lab (Jeski Social Campaign)

The first place (“The Europe that I love Top 10”)

The Korean Military Academy

Age is just a number

Korean Air

KTF

KTF

A kiss

Maxim T.O.P. coffee

Nongshim Ramen Older brother first, younger brother first

태권도

Taekwondo

Mastercard

형님 먼저 아우 먼저

키스

효

Kyongdong Boiler Filial piety

나이는 숫자에 불과 하다

육군사관학교 편

1위 편 (“내가 사랑 한 유럽 top 10”)

Lunar New Year 설날 편 (“다 그래”를 (“Flip the usual 뒤집어라) way”)

Korean Title

Korea Telecom

Advertised Brand

English Translation

1975

2009

1991

1991

Nongshim Ramen

Dongsuh Foods

Mastercard

Kyongdong Boiler

KTF

KTF

2001

2002

Korean Air

Korea Telecom

2010

2013

Advertiser

Year

URL (as of April 2021)

https://play.tvcf.co.kr/187957

https://play.tvcf.co.kr/5325

Cheil https://play.tvcf.co.kr/19937 Communications

https://play.tvcf.co.kr/6193

Daebang https://play.tvcf.co.kr/20906 Communications

Cheil https://play.tvcf.co.kr/674 Communications

Cheil https://play.tvcf.co.kr/1649 Communications

HS Ad

Cheil https://play.tvcf.co.kr/24568 Communications

Advertising Agency (if known)

쿡

삼성휴먼테크

포장마차 편 (“또 하나의 가족”)

Thank you for coming (“Pure milk cake campaign”)

Five-dollar bicycle

Comfort women (“Let’s protect ourselves”)

Qook

Human-Tech

Snack stall (“Another Family”)

Hero (“Toward People”)

Paris Baguette

POSCO

Pro-Specs

Qook (home entertainment package)

Samsung Electronics

Samsung Electronics

SK Telecom

영웅 편 삼성 (“삼성 휴먼테크”)

정신대 편 (“우리를 지킵시다”)

5달러 자전거

와줘서 고마워 편 (순수우유케이크 캠페인)

정 (情)

“Chŏng” series

Orion Choco Pie

선생님과 학생 편 (“정”)

Teacher and student (“Chŏng”)

Orion Choco Pie

Orion Choco Pie

2009

1997

SK Telecom

Samsung Electronics

1983–1993 Samsung Electronics

KT (Qook home entertainment package)

Pro-Specs

1994

2010

POSCO

Paris Baguette

2009

2014

1989–1993 Orion Choco Pie

1989

https://play.tvcf.co.kr/5359

https://play.tvcf.co.kr/16474

https://play.tvcf.co.kr/216171

TBWA Korea

(continued)

https://play.tvcf.co.kr/11531

Cheil https://youtu.be/sLN9d​ Communications _pTwNI

https://play.tvcf.co.kr/545006

Cheil https://play.tvcf.co.kr/16381 Communications

Welcomm

MBC Adcom

Innocean Worldwide

http://www.chocopie.co.kr/

https://play.tvcf.co.kr/21121

입술 편 (Sexy Utility Vehicle 투싼 ix)

Lips (“Sexy Utility Vehicle Tucson IX”)

Automatic parking (“Sexy Utility Vehicle Tucson IX”)

Manly for men (W SK800)

Thank you 감사 편 (한가인과 (Drinking with 술 마시기, 월(月)) Han Ga-in, Wol soju

Wonk’aesing

Tucson IX (car)

Tucson IX (car)

W (cell phone)

Wol soju

Wonk’aesing (money lending service)

2008

Wonk’aesing

Bohae

2012

Hyundai Motors

2011

SK Telesys (cell phone)

Hyundai Motors

2009

2010

SsangYong Group

Advertiser

1984

Year

https://play.tvcf.co.kr/89136

https://play.tvcf.co.kr/101195

https://play.tvcf.co.kr/23635

https://play.tvcf.co.kr/234928

URL (as of April 2021)

Spring https://play.tvcf.co.kr/26507 Communications

Cheil Communi- https://play.tvcf.co.kr/146568 cations; AdQUA Interactive

SK M&C

Innocean

Innocean

Advertising Agency (if known)

Note: Most of the ads mentioned in this book can be viewed at https://bit.ly/FlowerOfCapitalism.

원캐싱

“남자를 남자 답게” 편 (W SK800)

자동주차 편 (Sexy Utility Vehicle 투싼 ix)

오늘은 속이 불편하 구나

Korean Title

SsangYong Group Feeling unwell today

Advertised Brand

English Translation

Not e s

I n tr o d u cti o n  Epigraphs. Ch’ae Pok-hŭi, “Munhwa ro puhwal hanŭn chabonjuŭi ŭi kkot kwanggo” [Flower of capitalism, advertising revived as culture], Simin ŭi sori [People’s voice], June 27, 2006, accessed April 30, 2021, http://www​ .siminsori.com. Harms and Kellner 1990 1. Launched in September 2005 and running on major TV channels for four years, until November 2009, the campaign won local advertising awards and was applauded by observers. The commercial can be viewed online at the URL provided in appendix 3. 2. I use “cultural logic” in the traditional anthropological sense, to refer to normative ideals that are negotiated and compromised against the practical logic of concrete situations and interests (e.g., Fischer 1999). It is different from Fredric Jameson’s usage in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), where “cultural logic” appears as another designation for ideology. 3. By “advertiser” I refer only to companies that advertise their goods or services, not to advertising agencies or advertising workers. As I will show in chapter 2, the common conflation of these groups erases important differ­ences in their interests and commitments, leading to simplistic analyses and critiques. 4. “Moral economy” can be defined “as a system of transfers, exchanges, valuations, and calculations governed by notions of right, wrong, good, and evil” (Minn 2016, 80) and “the economy of the moral values and norms of a given group in a given moment” (Fassin 2005, 365). The concept was introduced by E. P. Thompson (1971) to analyze protests and riots in eighteenth-­ century England and gained traction after James Scott (1977) applied it to peasant resistance. It has since offered a useful analytic to capture diverse 217

218

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

Notes to Pages 4–10

phenomena, such as protests against the World Trade Organization, immigrants’ remittances, refugee crises, and corporate social responsibility (Edelman 2005; Fassin 2005; Minn 2016). See Turnbull (2017) for details on celebrity advertising in South Korea. I had never been sure whether the high frequency of advertising-related news was a fact of life in South Korea, or whether I noticed such stories everywhere because of my research interests. Whenever I picked up any of the multiple free subway newspapers on my commute in Seoul in 2009–2010, rarely would I not come across at least one article about advertising. By contrast, I hardly ever saw an advertising-related story in Toronto’s Metro Today in 2007–2008, when I was doing preliminary work on this project and keeping an eye out for possible comparative angles. For accounts of South Korea’s neoliberalization, see Abelmann, Park, and Kim 2009; Chang 2019; Cho 2009; Song 2009; Park 2007. “Modern advertising” generally designates professionally produced commercial advertising that seeks to stimulate consumer demand for industrially produced commodities (MacRury 2009; Williams 1999). Unlike earlier forms of commercial and noncommercial promotions, modern advertising does not simply inform about the existence and availability of certain commodities but is also a proactive strategy to stimulate their sales. For a discussion of the relation between advertising and modernity, see inter alia, Barlow 2008; Burke 1996; Leiss et al. 2005; Maliangkay 2008. This usage is similar in other Sino-character-based languages. I thank Tomoko Seto and Zhao Zhenkun for confirming this point. Kim Tae-ho, “Sŏn’gwanwi kwallyo konghwaguk ŭn nuga mandŭronna?,” ­PRESSian, April 4, 2011, accessed January 14, 2012, http://www.pressian.com. Pak Hyo-sin, “Chabonchuŭi ŭi kkot kwanggo,” Ŏrini Dong-A, May 18, 2006, accessed August 29, 2010, http://kids.donga.com. Advertising scholars define advertising as “a paid nonpersonal communication from an identified sponsor, using mass media to persuade or influence an audience” (Richards and Curran 2002, 64). My formulation expands this definition to consider advertising as a situated social phenomenon, not just a mode of communication, but I preserve the conventional boundary between advertising and non-advertising. I thus limit this study to massmediated, openly promotional messages whose sponsors, importantly, are upfront about their instrumental goals, which are communicated either directly through the advertising message or indirectly through the message form and the circumstances of its circulation. To underscore, advertising is treated as distinct from public relations and from publicity, sponsorship, direct marketing, personal selling, or sales promotion. For debates on defin-



13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

Notes to Pages 11–22

219

ing advertising, see MacRury 2009, 4–5; Richards and Curran 2002; Dahlen and Rosengren 2016; Turow 2018. My analysis also excludes hybrid forms, such as product placements and so-called native advertising, because they “sneak in” on other media forms, such as television shows, and are better understood through those “host” genres. See Goldman and Papson 1996, 2011; Jhally 2014; Stavrakakis 2006; Williams 1999. Those arguments are developed in Ewen 1976; Murdock and Golding 1977; McChesney 2015; Herman and Chomsky 2002; and Hackett and Carroll 2006. See, for example, Kim S. D. 1997; Shim 2000; Hearns-Branaman 2009; and Kim 2014 and 2016. See, inter alia, McFall 2004; Leiss et al. 2005, 165–167; Mazzarella 2003, 21–23; McStay 2018. For those arguments, see Johnston 2004; Odou and de Pechpeyrou 2011; Walz, Hingston, and Andéhn 2014; and Fedorenko 2016. Anthropologists employed in the advertising industry confirm those dynamics. See McCreery 2006; Malefyt and Morais 2012. Developing the term from Arjun Appadurai’s framework of the “social life of things” (Appadurai 1986), Cronin explains that an advertisement is “not the culmination or endpoint of various processes of branding, research, and marketing: it is a temporary stabilization of a flow of beliefs and commercial values into a representation form” (2004, 49). How advertising texts construct their meanings has also been analyzed by linguistic anthropologists (e.g., Harkness 2011, 2013a; Inoue 2007; Goffman 1987; Lefkowitz 2003). For arguments on agentive audiences, see Ang 1985; Kulick and Wilson 2002; and Spitulnik 2002. For cultural producers as intellectuals, see Abu-Lughod 2005; Lukács 2010; Matzner 2014; and Park 2014. Boyer (2003) advances similar arguments about censors. For general overviews of anthropology of media, see Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002; Wilk and Askew 2002; and Rothenbuhler and Coman 2005. Conceiving of advertising audiences as publics allows one to move away from the marketing jargon of “target consumers” and “market niches,” reliance on which naturalizes the marketing-centered worldview and is complicit with the neoliberal project of reframing human life as an enterprise. Even the category of advertising consumers—constructed after “media consumers” and broader than people who buy advertised commodities—is implicated. As David Graeber (2011) explains, expanding the category of consumption to include any activity that does not immediately lead to the production

220

23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

Notes to Pages 25–29

of new commodities for sale comes with problematic assumptions about property, desire, and social relations, as well as with a reactionary politics of reframing productive but non-sales-oriented activities as consumptive. The merged companies were structured as holding groups, which united sev­eral advertising agencies and increasingly related services, from ­media-buying to market research, which, however preserved independence from each other beyond financial matters of running a global business. The holding group structure allowed for expansion and revenue growth in the industry where individual agencies were limited to working for one client only in any one industry. For details, see Faulconbridge et al. 2011, 15–17. In the post-Fordist era, the new emphasis on smaller market niches, catering to identities and emphasizing individuality over mass consumption, created room for independent boutique agencies. Nevertheless, the advertising market remains dominated by megagroups, which adapted to new conditions by forming alliances, acquiring local agencies, or hiring local specialists. The four largest chaebol—Samsung, Hyundai, LG, and SK—commanded over 20 percent of the advertising market in the four traditional media (TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines) between 1998 and 2006 (Yi S. 2010, 4). In 2008 the four accounted for 22 percent of television advertising, 16 percent of radio advertising, 8 percent of newspaper advertising, and 7 percent of magazine advertising (Yi S. 2010, 15). Kim Rahn, “Korea Exposed to ‘Samsung Risks,’ ” Korea Times, January 13, 2014, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr. For details on Cheil Worldwide, see Kim 2016, 91–94. Kim Hyung-eun, “Chairman’s Daughter Gets New Post,” Korea JoongAng Daily, December 9, 2010, http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com. “Creative advertising is . . . advertising that avoids looking like advertising in a conventional sense or one that is not explicit about its intent of selling goods. For average clients whose idea of advertising is a straightforward sales pitch, it could come across as incomprehensible or even offensive. What is more, creative advertising’s requirement of creative autonomy means that a large degree of the clients’ control and involvement in their advertising is taken away from them” (Lee 2013, 34). Also see Nixon 2003, 39–40. There is a subtle difference between the two words. Generally, tapta from the first expression means possessing a certain qualification fitting the name, whereas sŭrŏpta from the second expression means possessing the looks or a character fitting the name. So generally tapchi anta would indicate a lack of appropriate qualification. But the nuance is subtle for advertising. In the next example, a journalist uses the latter expression not to point out



Notes to Pages 29–30

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a lack but to praise the winners of an advertising contest; that the viewers perceive those ads as if they were not advertising is a merit. 31. Pak Tong-hwi, “Hankyŏng kwanggo taesang: Kamdong ŭi him! . . . In’ganmi tamŭn kwanggo yakchin,” Han’guk Kyŏngjae, December 6, 2006, http:// news​.hankyung.com. 32. By “affective” I mean, here and throughout the book, related to felt bodily intensity, though it is not my intention to strictly distinguish between affects and emotions. For discussions that inform my usage, see Berlant 2011; Tran 2015; and Yang 2014. 33. I thank Robert Oppenheim for alerting me to the “invented tradition” status of the term. 34. See “For One Night, North and South Korea Are Brought Together by Music,” Hankyoreh, March 16, 2012, http://english.hani.co.kr; “Researchers Commemorate Values of Roh’s Administration,” Hankyoreh, July 8, 2009, http:// english.hani.co.kr; and Kim Sŏng-hun, “1% man ŭl wihan ŭn kyŏngjehak ŭn chugŏtta!” [Economics for the 1% is dead!], PRESSian, February 5, 2016, accessed May 5, 2017, https://www.pressian.com. 35. Korea’s isolationist policy ended abruptly in 1876 with the Treaty of Kanghwa between Japan and Korea, which, a result of a military provocation, obliged Korea to open three Korean ports to Japanese trade and granted Japan exterritoriality and other rights, thus setting in motion the chain of events that would culminate in Korea becoming a Japanese colony in 1910. Capitalism per se, however, was not a part of the conversation at the time. As Andre Schmid writes, “Consequently, at a time when the specific concept of capitalism had yet to be introduced, much of the writing in the economic realm did not focus on structural questions but on how the behavior of the population could be modified and regulated so as to encourage commerce (sangŏp). Nurturing an entrepreneurial spirit, encouraging selfhelp, respecting merchants, making good use of talent, knowing market prices, valuing time, and standardizing weights and measurements—all these became areas for modifying individual behavior as the immediate way of revamping the country’s economic orientation and aligning it with the capitalism of the world system” (Schmid 2002, 42–43). 36. Similar arguments are developed in Eckert 1991; McNamara 1999, 57–62. 37. Eckert quotes one of Korea’s first prominent entrepreneurs, Kim Sŏng-su, in response to a journalist’s question about whether “he thought that money was the most important thing in the world.” “ ‘Certainly not,’ he said. ‘What’s money [that anyone could ever consider it so important]? There’s nothing more vulgar than money, nothing more filthy than money. How could [anyone] ever say that money was the most important thing in the world?

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39.

40. 41. 42.

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Notes to Pages 31–35

I, for one, have never once thought that money was the most important [thing]. More [important] than money are humanity and also righteousness’ ” (Eckert 1991, 225). As Lee Seung-hwan (2006) describes this dilemma in the present day, “When the traditional moral dictum of the maximization of gong [public] and the minimization of sa [private] confronted the free market economy which approves self-interest and selfish desire, it inevitably caused mental disorder among Koreans. Caught in an unresolvable compromise between the minimization of the public and the maximization of profit, modern Koreans have become moral schizophrenics” (119). Park Si-soo, “Lee Kun-hee Convicted over Bond Deal,” Korea Times, August 14, 2009, accessed December 29, 2011, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr; Jaeyeon Woo, “South Korea Plans to Pardon Former Samsung Chairman,” Wall Street Journal Online, December 29, 2009, accessed December 29, 2011, http://online.wsj.com. For the politics of “as if,” see Wedeen 1999, and, for related arguments, NavaroYahsin 2002. Theorizing consumer behavior, Robert Cluley and Stephen Dunne (2012) account for the “as if moment of commodity consumption” (253), when the consuming subject knows that her consuming practices are made possible by exploitative practices and contribute to environmental degradation but nevertheless continues with them as if ignorant. I develop this theme in chapters 3 and 4. Launched in 1997, it introduced the new cell phone technology with stories of family members keeping in touch while apart; the campaign ran for over a decade. Moon Hyun-sook, “[Analysis] Lee Administration’s Three-Year Broadcast Media Takeover,” Hankyoreh, August 29, 2011, accessed December 22, 2017, http://english.hani.co.kr. This approach was inspired by Marcus’ (1995, 106–110) strategies for multisited ethnography: to “follow the people,” “follow the thing,” “follow the metaphor,” “follow the plot, story, or allegory,” “follow the life or biography,” and “follow the conflict.” Following controversial advertising fits within these techniques for “tracing within different settings of a complex cultural phenomenon given an initial, baseline conceptual identity that turns out to be contingent and malleable as one traces it” (106). To further specify my research process, all interviews were recorded, summarized, and selectively transcribed. Interview quotes throughout the chapters are based on those transcriptions. The exceptions are quotes from censorial meetings in chapter 3, whose reconstructions are based on my fieldnotes made during and immediately after those meetings, which I did not have permission to record.



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44. When directly asked about advertising, many of my interlocutors struggled to think of something concrete, yet the same people would volunteer stories about advertising in the midst of conversations on other topics. This point was driven home to me by my acquaintance Po-suk, a career woman in her late thirties and a mother of two. We met to catch up in November 2009, and she inquired about the progress of my research. I said that I was investigating KT’s controversial “Olleh” campaign, which had ended about three months before our conversation. I asked Po-suk what she thought about it, and she said she couldn’t remember it at all, and I changed the topic. One of the reasons we met was that Po-suk kindly agreed to proofread an important letter that I had to send in Korean. To illustrate a grammar construction that I was using imprecisely, she made an example of how her five-year-old daughter repeated the word “olleh” because she heard it in the commercial—the one that Po-suk could not remember a half an hour earlier. This story illustrates how people are often unaware of their own relations with advertising and how asking direct questions about such matters does not get the researcher very far.

C ha p te r 1 : H isto r i c al Stru g gl e s ov e r A dv e rtising Fr eed om 1. Tom Dillon, “Kwanggo hal chayu ŏpsi chayu ran issŭl su ŏpta” [No freedom without freedom to advertise], translated by Sin In-sŭp, Dong-A Ilbo, January 9, 1975, accessed January 19, 2018, https://newslibrary.naver.com. 2. For a critical summary of Dillon’s article, see Mattelart (1994, 31–32). 3. “Chwadam: Kwanggo chayu ŏpsi ŏllon chayu ŏpta” [Debate: No freedom of press without freedom to advertise], Dong-A Ilbo, January 14, 1975, accessed January 19, 2018, https://newslibrary.naver.com. 4. Shin published the first history of Korean advertising in 1986. His book—part a chronicle, part a sourcebook of original documents—went through several revised and coauthored editions, including some in English. All consequent histories of advertising in Korea have drawn on Shin’s primary research. 5. For precolonial and colonial advertising in Korea, in addition to Shin’s histories, see Maliangkay 2008; and Ma 2004. The details of the 1886 advertisement are discussed in Chŏng 1996, 6–8; and Fedorenko (2022). 6. The first television broadcaster in South Korea, the Korea Office Radio Corporation of America Distributor (KORCAD, also known as HLKZ and RCA TV) launched in May 1956. Starting with “two hours of regular broadcasts every other day,” the station expanded its programming to “two hours every

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9.

10.

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12. 13.

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day except for Fridays” in November 1956 (Shim and Jin 2007, 162). According to Shin and Shin (2013, 41), KORCAD-TV aired the first television advertising in South Korea on May 12, 1956, whereas the first radio advertising was aired by MBC in Pusan on April 15, 1959. Lucky began manufacturing toothpaste and other household items, whereas GoldStar assembled first Korean radios in 1959 and then, in the 1960s, went on to make fans, telephones, and black-and-white TVs (Ma 2004, 126). KBS absorbed the existing television channel, the Daehan Broadcasting Corporation (DBC-TV), which was the new name of KORCAD-TV after it was acquired by the newspaper Hankook Ilbo. At the time, DBC-TV was broadcasting via the facilities of American Forces Korean Network, the US military station (the second television station to start in South Korea, in 1957), because its own equipment burnt down in 1959 (Shim and Jin 2007, 163). To list other private broadcasters, the private radio station Dong-A Broadcasting Station was established in 1963; the private Christian radio station Christian Broadcasting System opened in 1959 and has accepted advertising since 1963; private Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation was established in 1969. Still, South Korea was quite far from a middle-class consumerist dream: in 1968, only one in six hundred families owned a refrigerator. “Kogŭphwa ŭi mulgyŏl (1): Naengjanggo” [Wave of luxury (1): Refrigerator], Maeil Kyŏngje, March 28, 1968, https://newslibrary.naver.com. “Putchŏng nŭn TV susanggi pogŭm chŏn’guk 150-man dae tolp’a” [Distribution of TV sets dramatically exceeds 1.5 million units nationwide], Kyung­ hyang, October 12, 1974, accessed January 30, 2018, https://newslibrary​ .naver.com. “Sobija nŭn kwanggo e pulman mant’a” [Consumers’ many dissatisfactions with advertising], Maeil Kyŏngje, September 12, 1975, accessed January 30, 2018, https://newslibrary.naver.com. While many advertising historians mention this development, none provide evidence that it was actualized, and their source appears to be Shin’s research. Inferring from the fact that advertisements from the early 1990s contained messages against excessive consumption, it is not implausible that the earlier ads did too. A 1991 commercial for Mastercard, for example, contains such a slogan. Mastercard, “Taekwondo,” TVCF, 1991, accessed August 6, 2019, https://play.tvcf.co.kr. At the time of the incident, Park’s government denied its involvement. In 2008, after a two-year investigation, South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee concluded that the responsibility for the Dong-A adver-



15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

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tising suppression lay with the Central Intelligence Agency, which acted on Park’s order (TRC 2010). Most media histories mention this advertisement as the first encouragement advertisement, however, in a later interview, Kim In-ho, the Dong-A advertising manager argued that Hong’s piece was an opinion article published in the advertising section because the advertisement that was supposed to be there was withdrawn. Moreover, Hong did not pay for the advertising space. According to Kim, the first encouragement advertisement was placed by Kim Dae-jung, the future South Korean president but then a renown dissident, who personally came to the newspaper office and paid for an advertisement. Under the title “Let’s protect the freedom of media,” Kim wrote, “As a citizen who desires freedom of media and restoration of democracy, I am paying for this advertisement to keep the candlelight of the freedom of media that started with a blaze.” The advertisement was signed “A citizen who wants to protect the freedom of media.” Yi Su-gang, “Tonga sat’ae ttae kyŏngnyŏ kwanggo ch’ŏt ch’amyoja nŭn DJ,” Midiŏ Onŭl, March 15, 2006, accessed October 5, 2011, http://www.mediatoday.co.kr. Yi, “Tonga sat’ae ttae kyŏngnyŏ.” “Chwadam: Kwanggo chayu ŏpsi ŏllon chayu ŏpta” [Debate: No freedom of press without freedom to advertise], Dong-A Ilbo, January 14, 1975, accessed January 19, 2018, https://newslibrary.naver.com. According to Michael Robinson, “public interest” in Chun’s vision was a rehabilitation of traditional Confucian values (1991, 219). While explicit discourses on media publicness begin with Chun, the ideas of media’s public duties run from the colonial period and are better explained by local media history (e.g., Kang 2005). “KBS, kongyŏng pangsŏng kwa kwanggo” [KBS, public broadcaster and advertising], Maeil Kyŏngje, February 28, 1981, accessed January 30, 2018, https://newslibrary.naver.com. “Kwanggo ŏmnŭn kongyŏng TV andoena” [Public TV without ads, please], Dong-A Ilbo, April 26, 1985, https://newslibrary.naver.com. “ ‘Sobija kongik usŏn twaeya’ pangsong kwanggo kongsa ‘kwanggo shimŭi’ semina” [‘Public interest of consumer must come first’: ‘Advertising review’ seminar at KOBACO], Dong-A Ilbo, September 17, 1982, accessed January 29, 2018, https://newslibrary.naver.com. “Supreme Court Upholds Rulings on Chun, Roh,” Korea Herald, April 18, 1997; “Chun Amassed W500 Billion Slush Fund while in Office,” Korea Times, January 10, 1996. “Han’guk ŏllon ŭi chŏnhwan’gi” [The turning point of Korean media], Dong-A

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26.

27.

28.

Notes to Pages 56–58

Ilbo, November 17, 1980, accessed January 30, 2018, https://newslibrary​ .naver.com. Dong Yule Kim’s (2003) dissertation details advertisers’ chilling influence on South Korean newsrooms. Most journalists Kim interviewed and surveyed admitted the business influence over editorial rooms and often compared it to the pressure exerted by the authoritarian government of the previous decades. One of them bitterly summed up the new reality, “Journalist is no longer a passionate fighter in this country. They are just another job like banker, mechanic, an [sic] supermarket salesman/saleswoman. You do not need to worry about your social position. No Korean journalists are working for the country’s better future or based on social responsibility model, which we honored in the past. We are working and living on chaebols’ advertising money” (Kim 2003, 150; Kim’s translation). To introduce a systematic collection of newspaper circulation data was an initiative by Shin In Sup, who, with a government subsidy, founded the Korea Audit Bureau of Circulations in 1989. In his official bio, he described the task as “the most challenging one in his advertising career,” because the newspapers withheld their circulation data and used their political sway to block audits. One area of contention where the press would not budge to advertisers’ pressure, the initiative took over two decades to succeed. It was not until 2012 that the first audit report on all South Korean newspapers was published (Shin and Shin 2013, 102). The heads and board members of the public broadcasters MBC and KBS were nominated or appointed either by the South Korean president directly or by semigovernment organizations staffed with government bureaucrats. Each incoming president installed his appointees in the leading media positions, and the latter in turn would pick their subordinates among those of similar allegiances, causing major organizational reshuffles. Nevertheless, public broadcasters have on occasion subjected the ruling party to critical scrutiny (Kwak 2012, 56–57). For a while, MBC proved to be the broadcasting counterpart of the muckraking Hankyoreh, and, while not quite as cantankerous, KBS also mustered critical reporting on important issues. The two broadcasters’ influential unions consistently took the “progressive” side. Considering the prominence of terrestrial broadcasting in the South Korean mediascape, the public channels somewhat balanced the pro-big business slant of mainstream print media. “Public interest commercial advertising” (kongiksŏng sangŏp kwanggo) is a term used by South Korea’s Public Information Office (Kongboch’ŏ) for advertising that, while paid for by commercial companies, serves public interest (Kyŏng et al. 1997, 382). The report authors explain that, similar



29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

Notes to Pages 58–62

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to public service announcements, such advertisements had been on the rise since 1981, when state-sponsored public interest advertising officially started in Korea. They elaborate, “Especially recently, when the situation of our society has become so that we need to cure such evils as inhumane crimes, deviations [il’t’al haengwi] and environmental issues, there has been a tendency for public interest advertising [kongiksŏng kwanggo], by businesses and by public organizations, to increase” (382). Details on commercials mentioned in this paragraph are provided in appendix 3. Choi Young-ho, “Viewpoint: Battle over TV Advertising Rights,” Korea Herald, February 24, 1998. The KARB was established in 1991 as a self-regulatory body under the control of the KAA. Internationally, CSR initiatives became significant from the 1980s onward, being coeval with neoliberal globalization, though their theoretical grounds were formulated by large corporations in the United States in the 1920s, to prevent the unionization and regulation of workplaces with managerial voluntarism (Marens 2013). The fundamental assumption behind CSR initiatives is that making a profit does not have to come at the expense of exploitation of people and the environment, and that socially responsible corporations can balance profit seeking with ethical conduct so as to positively contribute to the communities within which they operate, resulting in win-win situations. In 1991, an electronics company discharged thirty tons of a toxic chemical into the Naktong River, contaminating the water supply of two million people (KAIST 2006, 17–18). In June 1995, over five hundred people were killed and nine hundred were injured when the Sampoong Department Store collapsed due to the owner’s negligence and avarice. One month later, in July 1995, South Korea suffered what was then the biggest pollution incident in its history, when a South Korean tanker spilled five thousand tons of oil, a disaster that took five months to clean up. Yet perhaps the most damaging to the chaebol’s already tarnished reputation was an investigation by president Kim Young-sam (1993–1998) that detailed how the chaebol financed the slush funds of two former presidents, Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo (1988–1993), with “informal donations.” In the course of the investigation, thirty-five chaebol chairmen were summoned, and twenty-six were accused of giving bribes to Roh, of whom seven—Samsung, Daewoo, Dong-A, Daelim, Dongbu, Jinro, and Daeho Construction—were indicted (KAIST 2006, 18). In addition to revealing the scale of the business-government collusion, the scandal also exposed

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35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

Notes to Pages 62–66

an alarming degree of intermarriage of the chaebol heirs and politicians’ offspring (Kong 2013, 200–201). Korean advertising scholars distinguish “corporate-produced public service ads” from corporate image advertising and the advertising of CSR activities. “Corporate-produced public service ads” are treated as a part of CSR itself—an act of CSR and evidence of CSR consciousness (e.g., Yun 2005; An 2011, 273). Exemplars of humanist advertising are discussed under that rubric. Korean CSR scholars, however, follow English-language literature and do not include advertising in their analyses. Rachael Miyung Joo (2012, 135–136) offers an insightful analysis of an Anycall commercial with the South Korean golfer Park Seri, whose international victories in the wake of the IMF Crisis restored hurt national pride and gave hope to many Koreans. In a content analysis of corporate public service TV advertisements from 1980 to 2006, Chi Lin Lin (2007) identifies “human dignity” and “national harmony” as the prevalent themes of postcrisis corporate advertising, while the topic of family is on the rise after 2000. The case was brought up in 2005 by one Mr. Kim, whose commercial for dried seafood was rejected by a news channel. He challenged in the Constitutional Court the article of the Broadcast Law that prohibited terrestrial channels from accepting advertising without the KARB’s approval certificate. Mr. Kim claimed that the Broadcast Law violated his right to freedom of expression and that before-the-fact review (simŭi) amounted to censorship (kŏmyŏl). Even though the KARB was a self-governing organization, he argued, it received its censorial mandate from a government agency and therefore its review was no different from a review by an administrative institution, which violated the principles of freedom of speech (Kim S. 2009). Korea Broadcast Advertising Corporation’s Monopoly of Advertising Agency Work for Terrestrial Broadcasters Case, 20-2(B) KCCR 367, 2­ 006Hun-Ma352, November 27, 2008, www.ccourt.go.kr. “KOBABO Monopoly ‘Incompatible with the Constitution’: Court,” Hankyoreh, November 28, 2008, accessed August 25, 2009, http://english.hani.co​.kr. Cho Hyŏn-ho, “MBC SBS much’aegim igijŏgin k’obak’o podo” [Irresponsible and selfish reporting on KOBACO by MBC and SBS], Midiŏ Onŭl, November 28, 2008, accessed October 21, 2009, http://www.mediatoday.co.kr. “In addition, the three major dailies, which boast the greatest circulation, have competed by providing ‘premiums’ within the price range of one hundred thousand won, such as electric fans, refrigerators, and bicycles, to new subscribers so as to increase circulation. Due to such unfair practices in the newspaper market, the market share occupied by these three dailies has increased and small newspapers are barely surviving” (Kang 2005, 85).



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41. Live Forever blog, July 26, 2008, accessed April 15, 2008, mihare3.blog.me​ /110033362590.

C h a p te r 2: Th e D r e a m s an d Re al itie s o f A dv e rtising Pr acti tio n er s   Epigraphs. Ad Genius Yi Thae-baek, KBS 2TV miniseries, 2013, episode 1. Yi Jeseok in Paek Ŭn-yŏng, “Segye kwanggoje rŭl hwipssŭn ‘rujŏ’ Yi Che-sŏk ŭi sŏnggonggi” [The success story of “loser” Yi Jeseok who swept the world advertising festivals]. Yŏsŏng Chosŏn, May 14, 2010, accessed August 27, 2011. http://danmee.chosun​.com. 1. As discussed in the introduction, studies of advertising production have repeatedly demonstrated that ads are outcomes of complex interactions between junior and midcareer advertising workers, their bosses at the agency, and their clients, compounded by such contingencies as tight production schedules, celebrity availability, the personal dispositions of the parties involved, and recent industry fads. See Cronin 2004; Moeran 1996; Miller 1997; Mazzarella 2003. 2. Quoted in Shin In Sup, “Thoughts of the Times,” Korea Times, July 12, 1972; italics added. 3. For an explanation of the values of student movements of the 1980s, see Lee 2007. For details on Generation 386, in the 1980s but particularly in the 2000s, see Park 2014. 4. An Ch’ang-yŏng, “111029 Ch’angŏp k’onsŏt’ŭ chŏngni” [Summary of startup concert on October 29, 2011], Vincenahn’s Story (blog), November 28, 2011, accessed April 30, 2015, http://vincenahn.tistory.com. 5. Pak Hyŏng-yŏng, and Pak Ung-hyŏn, “ ‘Chal cha! nae kkum kkwŏ’ ŭi kwanggojaengi Pak Ung-hyŏn” [Kwanggojaengi Park Woong-hyun behind “Sleep well! Dream of me”], JoongAng Ilbo, May 14, 2011, accessed September 26, 2016, http://news.joins.com. 6. An Ch’ang-yŏng, “111029 Ch’angŏp k’onsŏt’ŭ chŏngni” [Summary of startup concert on October 29, 2011], Vincenahn’s Story (blog), November 28, 2011, accessed April 30, 2015, http://vincenahn.tistory.com. 7. In addition to public curiosity about well-loved campaigns, there were additional incentives for print publications to run stories about advertising. As the competition for advertisers’ money dramatically increased after the liberalization of media in the late 1980s, sympathetic coverage of an advertising campaign often increased the chances of getting advertising contracts from the advertiser.

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8. “Creativity” in particular became a buzzword after the IMF Crisis, when at least one influential report pointed to stimulating creativity as a way toward the renewal of economic growth (Choe 2006). 9. Widŭ mak’et’ing (withmkt), “Segye ga injŏnghan kwanggoin Yi Che-sŏk” [World-renowned ad man Yi Jeseok], Naver Blog, March 4, 2010 (14:05), accessed August 30, 2011, http://blog.naver.com. 10. “[Kwanggojaengi sijŭn 2] Op’ŭrain kwanggojaeng’i 10 ki rŭl mojip hamnida,” Kwanggojaengi Taŭm K’ap’e, October 27, 2009, accessed August 30, 2011, http://cafe306.daum.net. 11. Advertising is All website, accessed September 7, 2011, http://www.aia.or.kr. 12. TBWA Korea began in December 1998, when TBWA Worldwide, a part of Omnicom Group, took over SK Group’s advertising agency Taekwang Mŏlt’i Aedŭ and established TBWA Korea. Competing against in-house chaebol agencies, TBWA Korea differentiated itself by cultivating a reputation for creative advertising. In the 2000s, TBWA Korea was recognized as the most creative agency of Korea, admired for the creativity of its campaigns as well as for emulating Western creative practices and work environment, such as offering flexible work hours and not tying promotions to seniority (Lee 2013, 148–149). As Park explained his career move, he became apprehensive when the time came for him to be promoted to the executive level at Cheil; he did not want to be doing administration instead of advertising (Kim C. 2013). 13. T’ae Wŏn-jun, “Ch’wiŏp chunbi saeng Pak Ch’ang-uk ssi ŭi chajŏn’gŏ GPS tŭroing . . . 2155 km kkum ŭl kŭrida” [Job seeker Pak Ch’ang-uk’s bicycle GPS drawing . . . draws 2155 km dream], Kukmin Ilbo, September 30, 2010, accessed September 5, 2011, http://news.kukinews.com. 14. Yi Hyŏn-su, and Ch’oe U-yŏng, “Namdŭl chŏrŏm sangsik, yŏngŏ man maetallyŏtta myŏn ‘nai nŭn sutcha e pulgwa’ k’ap’i nawasŭlkka?’ ” [If, like others, he stuck to common sense and English, would the copy of “age is just a number” have come out?], Daum News, September 21, 2011, accessed August 1, 2018, http://v.media.daum.net. 15. Historically in activist circles, minjung and taejung were often contrasted, and only the former was presented as being in possession of history-­altering political subjectivity (Lee 2007, 298; Park 2011, 386). In common parlance, however, and certainly by the twenty-first century, when the minjung movement seemed buried in the debris of South Korean democratization, taejung was widely used (Lee 2007, 52), blended with “popular,” as for example, in popular culture (taejung munhwa). 16. Tellingly, when Park was not elaborating on his 386er identity, he identified as a “bobo,” short for “bourgeois bohemian.” The term originates in journal-



17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

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ist David Brooks’ book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2000), which presents a loving portrait of what Brooks sees as a new upper class, which, he argues, arose from the late 1970s as “a fusion between the bourgeois world of capitalist enterprise and the hippie values of the bohemian counterculture.” Brooks’ diagnosis—though not his positive appraisal—resonates with Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s critique in New Spirit of Capitalism (2005), in which they track how capitalism incorporated the 1960s’ critique and evolved to become more flexible and creative—but no less exploitative. Fans of Mad Men would be familiar with this script from one of the series’ subplots, the ongoing tensions between creative Don Draper and account executive Peter Campbell. That Draper would almost always have the upper hand is consistent not only with Draper being the series protagonist but also with the transatlantic ideologies of advertising work that privileges the creative. Märchen and Hongbok Confectionaries are pseudonyms. Roger Janelli’s (1993) ethnography of work at a Korean chaebol offers a fair representation of those dynamics despite the passage of time. I was first instructed in the unwritten rules of office work in South Korea when I worked as a contract translator and interpreter for a South Korean software company from December 1998 through January 1999 and in May 1999. See Fedorenko (2015, 485–487) for how one successful adwoman navigated this sexist landscape. I discuss gender dynamics at the Agency and women’s strategies to be recognized as equal professionals in Fedorenko 2015. Workplace relations in Korea have been modeled after the military service (Janelli 1993), which was mandatory for all Korean men and was constructed as a key axis of Korean men’s identity and citizenship (Moon 2005). The military idiom implies a strict chain of command, rigid hierarchies, and absolute obedience to superiors’ orders. In South Korean dramas about office life, the same character often appears as subservient and meek in front of his superiors and despotic and brazen toward his subordinates; the meanness and meekness thus appear not as personality traits but as effects of organizational hierarchies. According to Kee Woong Lee (2013, 156–159, 162–166), the kap-ŭl relations in advertising are an effect of the in-house status of most advertising agencies, which are thus treated not as independent actors but as subordinates; of clients’ overcompensating for lack of knowledge about advertising and marketing; of the lack of the decision-making authority of clients’ junior managers, who are the ones liaising with the agency; and of the opportunity to shift the anxieties and burdens associated with marketing effort to

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27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

Notes to Pages 92–104

the agency. The stories shared by my informants suggest that kap-ŭl practices are also driven by the sheer pleasure of the exercise of arbitrary power with no consequences. McCreery (2001, 164–165) mentions a similar dynamic in Japanese advertising. In 2009, observers commented on a striking similarity between a recent advertisement for Lotte whisky and an advertisement for Louis Vuitton bags: both featured a young man in a casual outfit enjoying the outdoors—in the former advertisement presenting a bottle of whiskey, and in the latter a bag as a focal prop in the idyllic scene. Also in 2009, LG had to pull a campaign after it ran for only five days as it was found to have plagiarized the work of a Japanese artist. Nevertheless, despite the laments of South Korean ad workers, the creative conservatism of advertisers is not a uniquely Korean challenge, as Nixon’s (2003, 40–56), research into the world of British advertising creatives suggests. Globally, few advertisers are open to advertising that breaks the mold and lives up to creatives’ standards. Moreover, this is not a problem unique to advertising, and can be found in most areas of commercially driven cultural production. Such, for example, was the experience of TV drama scriptwriters in Japan in the 1990s (Lukács 2010, 112–113). The competition route was, for example, pursued by Min-yŏng, a junior copywriter with a small advertising agency. An ambitious woman in her twenties, Min-yŏng explained during our interview that she really wanted to win prizes in advertising festivals, but it was hard because the advertisements her agency produced were what advertisers wanted and their solutions were not necessarily the best thing from the creative point of view. Min-yŏng’s entry to the Busan International Advertising Festival in 2009 made it to the final round, yet it was not an actual campaign but rather a special festival entry made as a mock advertisement for one of her agency’s accounts. Kim Hun-nam, “Aidiŏ kwanggo ro nyuyok chŏngbok 20-tae nam” [The man in his twenties who conqured New York with advertising ideas], Mŏni t›udei, October 23, accessed August 27, 2011, http://news.mt.co.kr. Paek, “Segye kwanggoje rŭl hwipssŭn ‘rujŏ.’ ” Yi’s campaigns can be viewed at his website http://www.jeski.org.

C h a p te r 3 : Th e Q uandar ie s o f A dv e rtising C e ns or sh ip   Pak, Chŏng, and Song, 2009, 11. 1. For censors as intellectuals, see Boyer 2003.



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2. This argument hinges on paying equal attention to what censorship silences and to what it enables. As it has been repeatedly demonstrated, censorship is not simply repressive but is also productive: of power-knowledge regimes (Jansen 1991; Post 1998; Boyer 2003); of the domain of the sayable and of subjects who come into existence within that domain (Butler 1997); and of “normative modes of desiring, of acting, of being in the world” (Kaur and Mazzarella 2009, 5). 3. The Constitutional Court ruled advertising to be a type of protected speech for the first time in 1998, arguing that advertising, in addition to being “marketing communication,” also carried “ideas, knowledge, and information” and thus qualified for freedom of speech protection (An 2014, 196–197); however, the decision did not lead to substantive changes in advertising review structures. It was not until the 2008 ruling that this reframing of advertising had practical consequences for advertising regulation. 4. Distinguishing censorship from review on the grounds that the former is enforced by the coercive state apparatus presumes a clear dichotomy between state and civil society, something that has been demonstrated to be problematic in practice, as what is inside and outside of the state is constantly negotiated (Gramsci 1992, 159–160). Such a distinction ignores how often censorship works not by minute scrutiny and external coercion but by the censor’s gaze becoming internalized by the censored, who then “voluntarily” complies with the censor’s requirements and sometimes surpasses them in strictness to prevent external intervention (Butler 1997, 128–129; Ganti 2009). The theoretical reinstitution of censorship as a case of cultural regulation further blurs this boundary (Burt 1994; Post 1998; Kaur and Mazzarella 2009). Consequently, to avoid ambiguity, I use “review” and “censorship” interchangeably, opting for “review” when exploring actual practices, to respect the sensibilities of the people involved, and preferring “censorship” when talking about the practices of policing advertising content in general. 5. Kang Kyŏng-yong, “Ihae hal su ŏmnŭn kwanggo” [Incomprehensible advertising], comment to KCSC’s public forum, April 7, 2009, accessed October 21, 2009, https://www.kocsc.or.kr. 6. Kim Sŏng-hun, “KT Qook kwanggo e taehan tappyŏn yoch’ŏng” [Request for response regarding KT Qook advertising], customer suggestions board at KOBACO website, March 31, 2009, accessed October 21, 2009, http://​ www.kobaco.co.kr. 7. Comment by Kang Kwang-sŏng (akse****, 2009.04.07 14:44:09) to Kim H. 2009, accessed October 17, 2009, http://biz.chosun.com. The moderators eventually blotted out the “dog-like” expression.

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8. I refer to the KCSC public representatives by such occupation-based pseudonyms to make it easier for the reader to keep track of the many characters who appear in this chapter but also to reflect their backgrounds. I have slightly modified some of the occupations to mask identities. 9. Here and in the following vignettes the quotes from the meeting discussions are not documentary minutes or transcriptions but reconstructions from my fieldnotes, which were made during and immediately after those meetings. 10. The term “problematic use of music” usually referred to using folk songs or children’s songs in advertising, both of which are explicitly prohibited. 11. Pak Myŏng-hŭi, “Kongjŏnghan sijang mandŭlgi churyŏk,” interview by Pak Ingyu, PRESSian, October 24, 2007, accessed September 17, 2015, http://​ www.pressian.com. 12. The problematic of distancing in relation to media texts has been explored through the concept of “proper distance,” advanced by Roger Silverstone (2003) to reflect on ethics of media representations, and further developed by Lilie Chouliaraki (2013) to critique distancing media representations of vulnerable others in need of humanitarian solidarity. Those arguments explore the mediated proximity of others and draw attention to how communicative failures have dire consequences for possibilities to adequately act upon the world, such as for meaningful solidarity with distant suffering. While sharing an interest in the problem of mediation, this study prioritizes the effects of the mediating medium itself over mediated content—“proper distance” as determined not only by the mediated content but also by the McLuhanian message of the medium. 13. I detail this argument in Fedorenko 2016. 14. From what I observed, violating advertisements by big advertisers seemed more likely to be treated as “honest mistakes” stemming form ignorance of the rules, whereas advertisements by small companies were more likely to be interpreted as opportunistic violations and thus given stricter sanctions. In the interviews with commissioners, however, most of them said that they generally tried to be stricter with bigger companies, because they had more resources and more responsibility to the Korean people, and to give a break to the little guy. Their responses supported the arguments about the shaky moral-economic standing of South Korean big capital, though their actions reproduced its preferential treatment. 15. In the 1990s, the clothing company Benetton ran a series of graphic advertisements that engaged with social issues of the day, such as opposing racism, supporting homosexual relations, and confronting the stigma of HIV. Among those ads were photographs of a blood-covered newborn, still attached to the umbilical cord; a nun kissing a priest, both in clerical vest-



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ments; a black woman and a white woman as a lesbian couple holding an Asian baby; and an AIDS victim on his death bed. Many of these ads were censored in different countries and were refused by many venues—which added to the publicity of the campaign. The images can be viewed at the Benetton website, http://www.benettongroup.com. For an analysis of the campaign, see Falk 1997.

C hap te r 4 : A dv e rtisin g P ubl ic s   Epigraphs. Myoung Jin Won, quoted in Barlow 2005, 25.   Hongja ttŏnanŭn yŏhaeng [Solo travel] (blog), September 29, 2007, http://​ dusl1984.blog.me/60042665579. 1. For a social-constructivist approach to emotions, see Hochschild 1979; Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990. 2. I am borrowing the term “ethnographic refusal” from Sherry Ortner’s (1995) critique of ethnographic thinness in the anthropological studies of resistance. 3. Misidentification differs from disidentification, a notion theorized in the studies of gendered identities and queer subjectivities. While there are differences among analysts, in general, disidentificaiton implies an active affective investment in the distance from the identity that the subject rejects, often in the form of an antagonistic counteridentification (Butler 1993; Dean 2008; Greer 2014; Muñoz 1999). In relation to advertising, it would make sense to talk about the disidentification of advertising critics engaged in its energetic repudiations—a critique that negotiates the critic’s social existence within consumerist capitalism. 4. Positing gullible others—the young, the poor, the uneducated—is a common move to mediate anxiety about media power, recognizing it yet asserting the speaker’s own immunity to it, as Richard Wilk (2002) argues in relation to television in Belize in the 1990s. 5. This situation notably differed from that of Japan, where transition to a postFordist organization of production in the 1990s resulted in increasingly fine segmentation of media audiences (Lukács 2010). 6. I conducted in-depth unstructured interviews with a dozen Koreans who could be seen as the regular advertising audience: undergraduate students from Hanyang University and also from the less prestigious Induk University and Seokyeong University, all in Seoul; a successful small-business owner and his homemaker wife; an ambitious working mom employed by an international company; two precariously employed young women, one between jobs and the other seeking an escape from the willfulness of the

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owner-manager of a small international trading company; and three male government employees of midlevel seniority. In addition, I asked general questions about advertising of whomever I was interviewing, from advertising regulators to advertising producers, since in addition to their official capacities, all of them were expert consumers of advertising by virtue of living in the contemporary society. Overall, I recorded and analyzed about forty interviews in which engagement with advertising was either the primary topic or an important theme. 7. For arguments against the separation of online and offline practices, see Dong 2017 and Postill and Pink 2012. 8. Kim Chin-u, “Taepuŏp CM ch’am pol ttae mada” [Every time I see a moneylender’s commercial], Live forever (blog), July 26, 2008, accessed April 15, 2018, mihare3.blog.me. 9. Sarang panŭn ae, “CM song i tŭrŏgan pogi sirŭn kwanggo vs. tasi pogo sip’ŭn kwanggo” [Advertising with songs which I dislike and like], Pobae dŭrim, October 7, 2010, accessed November 13, 2010, http://www.bobaedream​ .co.kr. 10. Nanŭnya ppittagi, “Tulli yugam” [Regrets about Dooly], Munhwa konggam (blog), October 25, 2009, accessed May 17, 2010, http://blog.naver.com​ /esluxmea. 11. I use the term “popular culture” primarily descriptively, to capture broadly resonant media productions, though my following analysis preserves the term’s cultural-Marxist implications to consider how popular culture—advertising in this case—mediates antagonistic material interests, being “the field of force of the relations of cultural power and domination” (Hall 1998, 447). For a discussion of advertising as popular culture, see Fedorenko 2014. 12. In “Dooly-chan,” “-chan” is an informal suffix of endearment borrowed from Japanese. 13. Igyŏtta!, “Tulli taeri unjŏn kwanggo tchigŏttŏnde Tulli ga t’arakhangŏngayo?” [Dooly did a commercial for a substitute driver service, has he become corrupted?], Aeni-han’guk kaellŏri dcinside.com, July 23, 2010, accessed November 13, 2010, http://gall.dcinside.com/korea_ani/10937. 14. Ch’aehanuri, “Tulli do mŏkko sarayaji” [Dooly too must eat to live], Ch’aehanuri (blog), June 12, 2010, accessed November 12, 2010, http://​ chu9400.blog.me/98545205. 15. Nanŭnya ppittagi, “Tulli yugam.” 16. This interpretation of ironic viewing departs from Ien Ang’s (1985) classic analysis of viewers’ experiences of watching the popular US soap opera Dallas. For Ang, irony is a “defence mechanism against the ideology of mass culture” (107), which looks down upon popular-cultural pleasures and amounts to



17. 18. 19.

20.

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judgmental “accounting for taste.” Ang identifies two types of ironic viewers. The first type maintains a distance from the program itself—those viewers derive pleasure from the text by inverting its meaning with their witty commentary and thus exorcise it (97–99). The other type maintains a distance from their own pleasure in watching the program—their “surface irony” functions to mask their pleasure in the face of their inability to justify it rationally because they are “pushed into a corner by the ideology of mass culture” (110). Ironic viewing of advertising, as exemplified by reactions to the Dooly case and, to a degree, by the discussions at the KCSC’s censorial meetings in the previous chapter, is rarely about ironists being conflicted about the pleasure they derive from watching advertising. Irony about advertising usually mediates annoyance and discomfort, whose remedy, however, is impractical. There are few venues for recourse for offended Dooly fans, and those available are time-consuming and likely ineffectual. Irony also mediates participation in the behaviors advertising prescribes—consumption of particular items and, more generally, placing desire in commodities—despite a conscious disbelief in advertising messages and convictions of the rationality of one’s consumer choices. Being ironic about the Dooly commercial, in other words, has little to do with liking it and being forced into hypocrisy about one’s pleasure, contrary to what Ang’s theorizations predict. Nanŭnya ppittagi, “Tulli yugam.” Ŏm Min-u, “Ppororo ro 8000-ŏk pŏrŏtta . . . .  taebak pigyŏl ŭn?” [I made 800 billion from Pororo . . . . What’s the secret of success?,” Daŭm Nyusŭ, April 22, 2011, accessed May 12, 2014, https://news.v.daum.net/. Alperstein (2001) analyzed the self-reports and interviews of Americans and showed how people use advertising as a resource for their self-talk, dreams, and everyday conversations and how the individual meanings of advertising can go in unpredictable directions. One of Alperstein’s informants, for example, reported that after watching a detergent commercial she was reminded that she hated doing laundry and got annoyed with the advertising company for telling her that cleaning is her job (53); another informant said that seeing a car commercial triggered thoughts of the failure of her marriage because the car in the commercial was going over a bridge that reminded her of a place where she went for her honeymoon (58–59); ­another woman reported that seeing a beer commercial made her think about her romantic life because the muscular physique of the model was similar to that of her boyfriend (56). Those accounts are most reminiscent of free association in psychoanalysis. Such a role of the mass media is detailed in, for example, Abu-Lughod 2005; Mankekar 2002; and Rajagopal 2001.

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21. Ku Pon-kwŏn, “Kongnyong imiji pŏkko, chŏmko chŭlgŏpke ‘olle’ ” [Having shed the dinosaur image, young and joyful “olleh”], Hankyoreh, July 28, 2009, accessed October 6, 2009, http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/economy​ /marketing/368295.html. 22. A public opinion poll of six thousand people conducted by the Korea Broadcast Advertising Corporation as a part of its yearly research into consumer behavior showed that 5.9 percent of the three thousand respondents in the second half of 2009 chose the “Olleh” campaign as the most memorable. The most memorable campaign, “Qook,” also by KT, was chosen by 10.4 percent of respondents (KOBACO newsletter #72, January 2010). 23. Rokko (sseomi), “KT olle kwanggo mwonga . . .” [Something about KT olleh ad], Yu’tti’ae’misŏ’mi’k’ong (blog), July 15, 2009, accessed January 1, 2011, http://sseomi.blog.me/80075336926. 24. K’ohubogi, “Aidŭl nun e pich’in KT ‘olle’ kwanggo” [KT olleh ad as seen by children], Hangil’s blog, July 27, 2009, accessed October 6, 2009, http://​ www.mediawho.net/419. 25. Chŏng Ho-chae, “KT olle kwanggo ŭn’gŭnsŭltchŏk sŏng ch’abyŏl?” [KT “olleh” advertising, gender discrimination on the sly?], Dong-A Ilbo, August 2, 2009, accessed May 25, 2018, www.donga.com/news. 26. Sallang sallang, “SK t’ellek’om kwanggo ♡” [SK Telecom ad], How Are You? (blog), June 8, 2007, accessed January 9, 2011, http://blog.naver.com​ /pp61478 130018690139. 27. Brooks notes about writers of melodramatic novels, “Precisely to the extent that they feel themselves dealing in concepts and issues that have no certain status or justification, they have recourse to the demonstrative, heightened representations of melodrama” (1995, 21). Advertising producers as well often deal “in concepts and issues that have no certain status or justification” as they claim superiority and desirability for particular products/ services, which are only superficially different from the ones offered by competitors. Melodramatic excess is one of the strategies through which advertising campaigns attempt to produce such differences. Even outside South Korea, most of advertising is melodramatic at some level. Melodramatic idioms—emotional excesses, extravagant hyperboles, stock characters, and clichéd situations—are all the usual stock of advertising. Fitting with the melodramatic conventions are stereotypical advertising characters defined as social types (“loving mother,” “hard-working employee,” “romantic lover,” “everyday hero,” etc.); polarity between good and bad (darkgrey “manly” phone—good, pink “girly” phone—bad); and in concern with private everyday life situations, where these conflicts play out. Advertising



28.

29.

30.

31.

Notes to Pages 161–162

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plots also follow melodramatic conventions. Many an advertising campaign stages a melodramatic conflict to show its eventual resolution through consumption of the advertised commodity, while exaggerating the satisfaction that could be obtained from consumption. Barbara Stern (1991) provides such a “melodramatic” reading of a detergent commercial, where the housewife is shown first as lacking due to the dull smell of her laundry and then wins back the love of her husband and restores familial happiness by doing laundry with the advertised product, which makes the laundry smell particularly nice. Melodramatic excess can be found also in dramatic comparisons between the superior advertised product and hopelessly inferior “other brands,” which never can make the laundry white enough. To expand this cross-cultural comparison with anecdotal evidence, when I showed those humanist commercials to my North American acquaintances, they were similarly incredulous at both their intense sentimentality and exuberant praise they attracted in South Korea. The sentimentalism of these ads and their publics might be incomprehensible and uncomfortable when it does not fit with cultural “feeling rules” (Hochschild 1979, 563). While there has been a tradition of a sentimental public in the United States around certain cultural productions (Berlant 2008), for most of my North American acquaintances, as for myself, engaging with advertising through humor and irony was the norm. We appreciated advertising jokes, and we also were ready to laugh at advertising. Commercials that trafficked in excessive sentimentality were a prime target for such ironic readings. What seemed naive and possibly embarrassing was to sob at such ads. As Jay Magill argues, the culturally proper emotional regime in North America is that of “cool,” the opposite of Victorian emotionality (2007, 47). In other words, for North Americans, those humanist ads exceed the extent of culturally permissible emotion toward advertising. As Brooks explains, “The moral occult is not a metaphysical system; it is rather the repository of the fragmentary and desacralized remnants of sacred myth. It bears comparison to unconscious mind, for it is a sphere of being where our most basic desires and interdictions lie, a realm which in quotidian existence may appear closed off from us, but which we must accede to since it is the realm of meaning and value” (1995, 5). According to Brooks, “Ethical imperatives in the post-sacred universe have been sentimentalized, have come to be identified with emotional states and psychic relationships, so that the expression of emotion and moral integers is indistinguishable” (1995, 42). Korea’s first modern steel plant, POSCO was started with the reparation

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33. 34. 35.

Notes to Page 163

money paid by Japan as a part of the normalization agreement in 1965. Koreans forcefully drafted to work at Japanese factories during the colonial period received no compensation, and their individual claims for unpaid wages were rendered null and void. Their attempts to receive money from POSCO failed. See Jung Dae-ha, “For POSCO, 1 Percent Is Too Much to Give,” Hankyoreh, May 31, 2012, http://english.hani.co.kr; and Ser Myo-ja, “Constitutional Court Dismisses Conscript Suit,” JoongAng Daily, December 24, 2015, http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com. For details, see Jatindra Dash, “Thousands Protest against POSCO Steel Plant in India,” Reuters, September 2, 2008, https://www.reuters.com; Terra ­Lawson-Remer, “POSCO vs. The People: Transnational Investments Threaten Forced Evictions in India,” Huffington Post (blog), October 9, 2013, https://​www.huffingtonpost.com. Lee Yong-il, “SK t’ellek’om kwanggo, ‘Saram ŭl hyanghamnida’ ” [SK Telecom ad “Toward People”], My youth story (blog), March 18, 2009, accessed March 7, 2013, http://openable.net/xe/8994. Park Eun-jee, “Convicted Business Tycoons Returned to Boards,” Korea ­JoongAng Daily, March 19, 2016, http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com. It is by organizing enjoyment—not by indoctrinating with misinformation or producing “false consciousness”—that ideologies get ahold of subjects and reproduce relations of domination, Slavoj Žižek (1999) argues. Within a psychoanalytic framework, enjoyment (Lacanian jouissance) is necessarily experienced as always-already lost, while the subject is defined by this lack of enjoyment, which ultimately stands for the split that is an ontological condition of subjectivity (Glynos and Stavrakakis 2008, 260; Dean 2006, 4–6). Žižek applies the idea of the constitutive split to society as a whole, which he sees as ruptured by the antagonism of class struggle. He proposes to understand ideological formations—socialist, capitalist, ­fascist—as economies of enjoyment, which promise to bridge the split and recapture the lost/impossible enjoyment in a particular way. Economies of enjoyment are supported by a fantastic explanation of what stands between the subject and full enjoyment, between the society and its perfect fullness, while providing enjoyable ways to comply with the ideological injunctions—and keep the subject locked in the relations and hierarchies thus organized (Glynos and Stavrakakis 2008, 261–262; Dean 2006, 8–19). Scholars have detailed how seeking satisfaction through commodity consumption is such an economy of enjoyment that supports late capitalism (Johnston 2004; Mikkonen, Moisander, and Fırat 2011; Stavrakakis 2006). The implications of these arguments for advertising are explored in Fedorenko 2016.



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C h a p te r 5 : A dv e rtisin g Suppr e ssio n and C o nsume r C i tiz en sh ip   Epigraphs. Kim Sŏng-ho, “Samsung, It Is Time to Stop Advertising Suppression” [Samsŏng, ije kwanggo t’anap kŭman tul ttae toitta], OhmyNews, July 14, 2009. Žižek 2013. 1. The official English translation of the organization’s name was “Korea Press Consumerism Organization,” but the literal translation of the Korean name is “Korean Media Consumer Sovereignty Campaign.” 2. Ŏnsoju, “Chosŭn ilbo rŭl kwanggo ŏpche e taehan pulmae undong sŏnŏn handa” [Declaring a boycott of companies that advertise in the Chosun llbo], script from press conference on June 8, 2009, accessed June 9, 2009, http://agora.media.daum.net. 3. “Cho chung tong e man kwanggo pulmae undong p’ajang” [Boycott wave of ChoJoongDong-only advertisers], MBC News, June 17, 2009. 4. Kim rose to fame as the prosecutor who led the case of the corruption charges against Chun Doo-hwan. In 1997, Kim joined Samsung and eventually become the head of Samsung’s legal department, but quit in 2004. 5. Choe Sang-Hun, “Corruption Scandal Snowballs at Samsung Group in South Korea,” New York Times, November 6, 2007, accessed December 29, 2011, www.nytimes.com; “Document Shows Samsung’s Heir Gained Control through Shady Deals, Father’s Money,” Hankyoreh, November 13, 2007, accessed September 7, 2015, https://english.hani.co.kr; “Prosecutor GeneralDesignate Accused of Taking Kickbacks from Samsung Group,” Hankyoreh, November 13, 2007, accessed September 7, 2015, https://english​.hani.co.kr. 6. The number is based on the unofficial data provided by the Hankyoreh via personal correspondence. 7. Advertising spending by other big companies also fluctuated depending on extra-marketing concerns. Hyundai Group, for example, was found to dramatically increase its advertising in fourteen major newspapers when its chairman, Chung Mong-koo (Chŏng Mong-ku), was under investigation for embezzlement in 2006, and then drop its advertising expenditures after Chung was released (Che and Yi 2007, quoted in Yi S. 2010, 18). See Yi S. (2010, 18–19) for similar episodes with the Doosan Group and the Hanwha Group. 8. Cho Hyŏn-ho, “Samsung kwanggo t’anap ŭn chŏyŏlhan sajŏk pobok” [Samsung’s advertising suppression is a vulgar private retaliation], Midiŏ Onŭl, January 16, 2008, accessed November 12, 2011, http://www.mediatoday​.co.kr.

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9. Cho, “Samsung kwanggo t’anap.” 10. Kim Sŏng-ho, “Samsŏng, ije kwanggo t’anap kŭman tul ttae toitta” [Samsung, it is time to stop advertising suppression], OhmyNews, July 14, 2009, accessed November 12, 2011, http://www.ohmynews.com. 11. The numbers are based on the unofficial data provided by the Hankyoreh via personal correspondence. The years 2008 and 2009 were also the ones when the effects of the global financial crisis were felt in South Korea, but even accounting for that, the relative drop in Samsung’s share is indicative of the newspaper’s financial predicament. 12. Park Si-soo, “Lee Kun-hee Convicted over Bond Deal,” Korea Times, August 14, 2009, accessed December 29, 2011, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr; Jaeyeon Woo, “South Korea Plans to Pardon Former Samsung Chairman,” Wall Street Journal Online, December 29, 2009, accessed December 29, 2011, http://online.wsj.com. 13. Simon Mundy, “Samsung Whistleblower Returns to Court,” Financial Times, April 14, 2014, accessed September 17, 2017, https://www.ft.com. 14. On a visit to the United States in April 2008, Lee signed an agreement that reversed the earlier ban on imports of American beef. The imports were halted in 2003 after American cattle were found to be infected with the socalled mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy). Lee’s decision to resume the US beef imports fed into already circulating critiques of Lee’s government among young people, who were anxious about their subjection to extreme educational competition and their limited opportunities for comfortable livelihoods, now aggravated by fears of exposure to a fatal disease. Those fears were fanned when MBC aired an investigative program alerting the national public to the alleged dangers of the US beef. Soon the health scare provoked mass protests in downtown Seoul. Triggered by Internet-savvy teenagers, they soon drew in college students, the aging 386 Generation, and many other heterogeneous groups, which shared in their vulnerability to deregulation. According to the Korea Economic Research Institute and the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office, over two thousand separate rallies took place, drawing more than nine hundred thousand protesters. “White Paper Tallies Damage from Beef Protests,” Chosun Ilbo (English ed.), August 31, 2009, http://english.chosun.com. 15. “Sasŏl: Kwangubyŏng ch’otpul chip’oe paehu seryŏng nuguin’ga” [Editorial: Who is the de facto power behind the candlelight vigils?], Dong-A Ilbo, May 10, 2008, accessed October 20, 2011, donga.com/news. 16. For accounts of the 2008 candlelight protests, see Chae and Kim 2010; and Kang 2016. 17. See Lee 2016 for details on the fluid composition of the group at its emer-



18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

Notes to Pages 179–181

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gence, its horizontal structure, and its evolution at the pressure of external factors. As Jim McGuigan explains, “Officially, the sovereign consumer is the monarch of cool capitalism [McGuigan’s term for mass consumerist ideologies]. Great corporations only exist, so it is said, in order to service our every need and desire. They strive to divine our wants and then supply them. It is routine in capitalist rhetoric to attribute productive agency to consumers” (2009, 85). McGuigan’s point is to critique “consumer sovereignty” as an ideological fiction (99–100). Jason Hickel and Arsalan Khan modify McGuigan’s argument to link the “sovereign consumer” specifically to neoliberalism: “If embedded liberalism was represented by the figure of the middle-class worker, the producer of national culture and collective wellbeing, then the touchstone of neoliberalism has become the all-powerful consumer” (2012, 210). Bae Ji-sook, “Ad Boycott Campaign Legal or Not?,” Korea Times, June 23, 2008, accessed June 29, 2009, www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation​ /2008/06/117_26363.html. Kim Rahn, “Prosecution to Disclose Names of Ad Boycott Drive Victims,” Korea Herald, September 17, 2008, accessed July 2, 2009, www.koreatimes​ .co.kr/www/news/nation/2008/09/117_31211.html. Yi Min-sŏn, “Kŏmch’al i sege naomyŏn ŏnsoju hoewon to nŭrŏyo” [If the prosecution gets stronger, the number of Eonsoju members will also increase], Ohmy­News, June 27, 2009, accessed July 2, 2009, http://www.ohmynews​.com/. Bae Ji-sook, “Ad Boycott Campaign Legal or Not?,” Korea Times, June 23, 2008, accessed June 29, 2009, www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation​ /2008/06/117_26363.html. An Kyŏng-suk and Kim Sang-man, “Chojungdong kwanggo maech’ul ttuk yenyŏn ŭi 40–50% sujun” [ChoJoongDong advertising down 40–50% from the previous year’s level], Midiŏ Onŭl, June 18, 2008, accessed May 27, 2010, http://www.mediatoday.co.kr. Simultaneously, the police started investigations into the organizers of the anti-US-beef protests, whereas the Korea Communications Commission investigated the truthfulness of reporting at the “PD notebook” program, which sparked the unrest. “Lawlessness in Downtown Seoul,” Chosun Ilbo, June 27, 2008, accessed June 15, 2009, http://english.chosun.com. Kim Rahn, “Arrest Warrant Issued for 2 Newspaper Ad Boycotters,” Korea Times, August 21, 2008, accessed June 15, 2009, www.koreatimes.co.kr. “Obstruction of business” (ŏmmu panghae choe, sometimes translated as “interference with business”) is article 314 within chapter 34, “Crimes against

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Credit, Business and Auction,” of South Korea’s Criminal Act (as amended in 2005). It defines “obstruction of business” as interfering with the business of another either by injuring their credit by circulating false facts or by other fraudulent means; or by threat of force, or by damaging records and record-keeping equipment. Violations of the article are punished by imprisonment of up to five years or a fine of up to fifteen million won (Criminal Act 2005, articles 313, 314). This article has often been used to break and criminalize the organized resistance of South Korean workers, and recently of migrant workers (e.g., Chang 2011; Ko Robinson 2011). Carter Eckert mentions that, during the colonial period, “obstruction of business” was quoted as an offense under the Peace Preservation Law of 1925 to break down strikes by Korean workers (1991, 204). 28. Suspended sentences are frequently assigned by South Korean courts for first-time offenders or in mitigating circumstances. A suspended sentence means that the imposed jail sentence is not served as long as the sentenced person commits no other crimes and adheres to other conditions imposed by the court. 29. “Citizens Who Led Ad Company Boycott Get Criminal Convictions,” Hankyoreh, February 2009, accessed May 28, 2010, http://english.hani.co.kr. 30. Ch’a Tae-un, “Kwanggo chungdan undong ŏnsoju taep’yo kiso” [Indictement of the representative of the advertising halt movement Ŏnsoju], Yonhap News, July 29, 2009, accessed May 27, 2010, www.yonhapnews.co.kr. 31. “Ŏnsoju, pulmae undong 2-ho ro Samsŏng gŭrup ŭl chehan hamnida” [Ŏnsoju limits the second round of boycott movement to Samsung Group], Agora, June 11, 2009, accessed June 12, 2009, http://agora.media.daum.net. 32. For details, see Kim 2016, 134–135. 33. “Ŏnsoju, pulmae undong 2-ho ro Samsŏng gŭrup ŭl chehan hamnida” [Ŏnsoju limits the second round of boycott movement to Samsung Group], Agora, June 11, 2009, accessed June 12, 2009, http://agora.media.daum.net. 34. E.g., Kim Pognee, and Geoffrey Cain, “[Interview] American Journalist Seeks to Pull Back the Curtain on ‘Samsung Empire,’ ” Hankyoreh, December 2017, https://english.hani.co.kr. 35. In the midst of the boycott controversy, the ChoJoongDong alleged that Kim had had a conviction and served a jail term in violation of the National Security Law, which would be a clear indicator of Kim’s activist past. Kim sued the newspapers for libel but lost. 36. “Oekukin dŭl ege kuksanp’um pulmae undong hagettago?” [Telling foreigners to boycott domestic products?], JoongAng Ilbo, June 16, 2009, accessed November 27, 2011, https://www.joongang.co.kr. 37. The Ŏnsoju’s demand that KwangDong Pharmaceutical display a pop-up



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window on its website to announce a change in its advertising practices was framed as “a conspiracy to commit coercion,” whereas the demanded 7.56 million won (about US$7 thousand) worth of advertising in the Hankyoreh and the Kyunghyang was a ransom within a “conspiracy to intimidate.” See “Prosecutors Book Two Press Consumer Leaders for Their Campaign against Distorted Reporting,” Hankyoreh, June 30, 2009, accessed June 30, 2009, http://www.hani.co.kr; Kim Hwan, “Ŏnsoju, Kwangdong Cheyak e kangapchŏk yogu haji anatta” [Ŏnsoju did not make forceful demands on KwangDong Pharmaceutical], OhmyNews, June 30, 2009, accessed June 30, 2009, http://www.ohmynews.com. 38. “Chojungdong pulmae undong ch’ŏbŏl ŭn ‘haphŏn” [The punishment of ChoJoongDong boycott movement is constitutional], MediaUs, January 2, 2012, accessed June 5, 2012, http://mediaus.co.kr. 39. Ŏnsoju, “8-wol 31-il kijun samsŏng pulmae nujŏk kŭmaek 115-ŏk 2,466-man won, ch’amyŏ inwon 1,436-myŏng)” [The total amount of Samsung boycott as of August 31, 1,152,466 million won, 1,436 participants], September 1, 2011, accessed December 8, 2011, http://cafe.daum.net.

E pil o g ue 1. These numbers are calculated based on KPF 2008; Cheil 2016, and Cheil Worldwide 2013. For a summary of literature on the broadcast advertising slump, see Yi and Kim 2017. 2. Beyond the technological shift, Henry Jenkins (2001) draws attention to a reconfiguration of the media landscape and of the underlying power and economic relations, highlighting other convergences: economic (“horizontal integration of the entertainment industry”), social/organic (simultaneous multidevice patterns of media use), cultural (“fanification”/participatory engagement of media users and audiences), and global (intensified cultural hybridity and international media circulation). 3. Chŏng Hae-yŏng, “Imp’ŭllant’ŭ kwanggo, anhamyŏn andoena?” [Can we do without implant advertising?], Cyworld, June 30, 2010, accessed August 29, 2010, http://minihp.cyworld.com. 4. Hong C, “Cable Show Reveals the Truth behind Product Placements in ‘Descendants of the Sun,’ ” Soompi (blog), May 3, 2016, accessed June 15, 2018, https://www.soompi.com. 5. Ahn Sung-mi, “ ‘Descendants of the Sun’ under Fire for Too Much PPL,” Korea Herald, April 7, 2016, accessed June 15, 2018, http://kpopherald​ .koreaherald.com.

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6. Kim Tong-hyung, “IPhone-Backed KT Flexes Mobile Muscle,” Korea Times, May 19, 2010, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr. 7. Jacob Poushter, “Smartphone Ownership and Internet Usage Continues to Climb in Emerging Economies,” Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project (blog), February 22, 2016, http://www.pewglobal.org.

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Inde x

Page numbers in boldface type refer to illustrations. Abelmann, Nancy, 143, 160–161 account executive (AE), 83–84 acronyms, 210 activist, 166–167, 173; civil society, 176; Hankyoreh as, 56; media, 191–192; Ŏnsoju as, 179–184, 186, 190–194; orientations toward advertising, 149–152 AdBusters, 130 Ad Genius Yi Thae-baek (TV series), 70–73, 96–97 Adidas, 94 ad makers, 14, 76, 83, 97; advertisers vs., 72–73, 84–85, 86–87, 91–96; aspirations of, 70–71, 75, 79, 82; career path of, 77–78, 84 adman. See ad makers adumentary, 204–205 advertisements, “social life” of, 6, 219n19 advertisers, 217n3; ad makers vs., 72–73, 84–85, 86–87, 91–96; citizens vs., 141, 148–149, 177, 178–179, 187; competition for accounts of, 90–91, 92, 96; consumers vs., 99, 127, 131–132, 148–149, 195– 196; details of, 211–216; international, in South Korea, 27–28, 80; media and, 11–12, 175; South Korean, abroad, 25, 27; South Korean, in South Korea, 26–27 advertising (kwanggo), 5, 6, 34, 218n6,

222n42; aesthetics of, 3; affectivity of, 79, 81–82, 124, 130–131, 137–138, 163– 164; ambiguities of truth in, 120–124; ambivalence in, 29, 49, 76, 82, 220n30; anthropology of, 10–18, 104, 195, 205, 219n20; capitalism in, 32–33, 67–68, 148; capitalist, 7–8, 11–12, 20, 137; censorship of, 105–108; of chaebol, 26–27, 32, 43, 74; commerciality of, 39–44; communication in, 79–83; creativity of, 79, 220n29; culture in, 1–3, 4; defined, 218n12; deregulation of, 25–26, 62–67, 68; discourse of, 78–79, 86, 117; emotion in, 136–141; exaggeration in, 127, 130; extra-marketing purposes of, 39, 138–139; freedom in, 106, 119, 157, 188; freedom struggles in, 37–69; gender in, 15, 86, 102, 150, 156–158; humanist, 29–33, 72, 76, 79, 134, 160–164; humor in, 154–156; ideology in, 60–61, 82, 84, 171; imperialism linked to, 6; industry global, 25–26; industry in South Korea, 25–28, 41–42; Internet and, 34, 197– 206; kind, 96–99; lenience of censorship in, 129–132; as media form, 99–100, 201–202; megagroups in, 25, 220n23; meta-message, 22–23; metaphor for, 6–10; money, 11–12, 19, 46, 53, 55,

271

272 Index

68, 162, 167–168, 175, 176, 194–196; practitioners of, 70–100 (See also ad makers); publicness and privateness of, 18–24, 30, 52–54, 64–65; publics, 21–22, 133–165, 219n22; public-service advertising, 6, 50, 52, 72, 79, 161–162, 227n28; realities of work in, 87–91; reception of, 23, 35, 124, 135, 141, 142, 164; sexuality in, 86, 101–102, 110, 113, 114–120, 130–131; as social actor, 25–26; as social institution, 3, 10, 23, 34, 67, 100, 104, 195, 205; social justice in, 98; in South Korea, 1–36, 207–209, 217n2, 223n4; suppression of, 45–48, 166–196 Advertising Genius Yi Jeseok (Yi), 97–98 Advertising in Everyday Life (Alperstein), 138 Advertising in Korea (Shin & Shin), 7, 8 Advertising Is All (AIA), 78–79 advertising person (kwanggoin), 74 advertising pollution (kwanggo konghae), 42–43, 52, 106 Advertising Research Lab, 97 “advertising talk,” 35, 223n44 Advertising through the Humanities (Park & Kang), 80, 84, 94 advertising-unlike advertising (kwanggo tapchi annŭn kwanggo), 29, 220n30. See also unlikely advertising AE. See account executive aedo kwanggo. See condolence aesthetics, of advertising, 3 affective world making, 29, 137, 221n32 the Agency, 87; lunch hour at, 89; office culture of, 88–91; overtime at, 88 AIA. See Advertising Is All Alperstein, Neil, 138, 140, 149, 237n19 ambivalence, 72; in advertising, 29, 49, 76, 82, 220n30; toward capitalism, 32; in censorship, 109–114; of KCSC, 109–110 Ang, Ien, 236n16 An Ho-sang, 29–30 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 81

“Another Family” (campaign), 32–33, 58, 164 anthropology: of advertising, 10–18, 104, 195, 205; of media, 17; sociolinguistic, 22 anti-communism, 57, 171 anti-US-beef protests, 178, 186, 243n24 Asian financial crisis (1997), 4, 57, 59; global advertising agencies and, 27–28. See also IMF crisis Asia-Pacific Regional Marketing Conference (1971), 74 Association of Regional Broadcasters, 64 banner ads, 199 Barbarian Group, 27 Basic Press Act (1980), 49, 51, 56 BBDO, 37 Beattie McGuinness Bungay, 27 before-the-fact review (sajŏn simŭi), 63, 103, 105–106, 113, 229n36. See also censorship Benetton, 130, 234n15 Benjamin, Walter, 20 Bourdieu, Pierre, 93 boycott, 166–167, 168, 169, 191–192; KCSC on, 181; Kim Sŏng-kyun on, 182 Boyer, Dominic, 109 Boys over Flowers (TV series), 31–32, 93 broadcast advertising, 33, 40–41, 43–44, 67, 103, 105; KOBACO as consignee of, 50–55 Broadcast Advertising Ethics Committee, 43–44 broadcasting, 40, 50, 51–52; dignity of, 118, 156 Broadcasting Act (2000), 60, 65 Broadcasting Act (2009), 33, 44, 66, 67 Broadcasting and Communications Commission, 180–181 Broadcast Law, 43, 63, 228n36 Brooks, David, 230n16 Brooks, Peter, 160, 162, 238n27, 239n30 Busan International Advertising Festival, 222n43, 232n28

Index

Busan Metropolitan Police, 99 business culture, of South Korea, 87–90, 92, 231n19, 231n20, 231n23 Butler, Judith, 22 Camus, Albert, 81 Cannes Lions Awards, 82, 84 capitalism, 157, 235n3; in advertising, 67–68, 148; advertising and, 7–8, 137; ambivalence toward, 32; critiques of, 13, 75; humanist, 29–33, 194; ideology of, in South Korea, 23–24; injustices of, 163– 164; logic of, 205–206; media control under, 11–12, 50, 175; “really existing,” 20, 189. See also flower of capitalism capitalist modernity, 30, 221n35 capitalist realism, 20, 22, 43, 104, 121 celebrity endorsements, 3–4, 92–93, 95, 151 censorship (kŏmyŏl), 43, 50, 102–103, 104, 107, 120, 233n2; advertising, 105–108; ambivalence in, 109–114; consumerism and, 43–44; of KCSC, 128–129, 131; lenience of advertising, 129–132; neoliberalism and, 118–119; progressivism and, 109–110. See also before-the-fact review chabonchuŭi ŭi kkot. See flower of capitalism chaebol, 31, 168, 172, 174–175, 226n25, 227n33; as advertisers, 26, 57, 59 172; advertising of, 26–27, 32, 43, 54, 74, 220n25; after Asian financial crisis, 28; Chun Doo-hwan and, 50–51, 55, 68; economic success of, 31; Hankyoreh and, 173; in-house advertising agencies of, 26–27, 28, 74, 89–90; KOBACO and, 51–52; master-servant (kap-ŭl) relationship with, 91–92; media control and, 49, 64; negative reputation of, 31–32, 62, 162, 170, 227n33; Park Chung-hee and, 50. See also specific conglomerates Chaebol Republic, 50, 171 ch’akhan kwanggo. See kind advertising

273

Cha Tae-hyun, 126–127 Cheil Communications, 26–27, 51–52, 170–171, 230n12; Park Woong-hyun joining, 75 Cheil Worldwide, 153 Chiapello, Eve, 230n16 Chi Lin Lin, 228n35 Choase (BeautifulWorld with out the Chosun Ilbo), 66, 186 Choe, Youngmin, 129 Choi Jang Jip, 49, 57, 61–62, 186 ChoJoongDong, 184, 185–186, 189, 193, 244n35; expansion into broadcasting of, 170–171; against progressivism, 66–67, 173–174, 177–178 Chosun Ilbo, 45, 49, 56–57, 66, 166–167, 172, 180 Chouliaraki, Lilie, 234n12 Chowdhry, Angad, 15 Christian Broadcasting System, 49 Chun Doo-hwan, 48–49, 50, 54–55, 107, 225n19, 227n33, 241n4; chaebol and, 55, 68; media reforms of, 51–52, 55; neoliberalism of, 51, 58–59 Chung Mong-koo, 241n7 Chu Ŭ-nu, 129 Citizens Alliance Against the Chosun Ilbo, 66, 186 Citizens United for Better Society, 190 class, taste determined by, 93–94 classifieds (saenghwal kwanggo), 6 client, 88, 89, 220n23, 220n29; divergent interests between advertising agencies and, 93–95; relationship between advertising agencies and, 13–14, 72, 87–89, 91–93, 96, 231n24. See also advertisers Cluley, Robert, 149 Coca-Cola, 41–42 Coffee, Copy, Nosebleed (TV series), 77 colonialism, 82, 111; advertising during, 15, 25, 223n5; in Korea, 30, 39–40 commerciality, 6–7, 49–50, 52, 54, 114, 137;

274 Index

of advertising, 39–44; neoliberalism and, 12–13, 19 commercial speech, 58–59, 105–106; freedom of, 105–107, 223n3. See also freedom in advertising commodity aesthetics, 11, 95–96, 111–112, 122, 132, 145, 147; consumption in, 149 commodity fetishism, 11, 22–23, 224n13 concept (marketing), 146–147 condolence (aedo kwanggo), 6, 218n9 conservatism (posujŏk), 110, 117; conservative camp, 63, 171, 180–181, 187, 190, 193; conservative democracy, 61; conservative press, 57, 60, 171, 177, 186. See also Right (political group) Constitution (of Republic of Korea), 106– 107; Yusin, 44, 51 Constitutional Court, 67–68, 108–109, 157, 169, 181–182, 228n35, 233n8; on freedom of speech, 33, 103; KAA challenging, 59; on KARB, 102, 228n36; on KOBACO, 64 consumer: as apolitical, 24, 187–188, 192; as concept, 219n22; media consumer, 178–179; movements in South Korea, 53, 61; neoliberalism and, 157, 169, 177, 179, 186, 243n18; niches, 139–140, 158; politics, 23–24; smart, 125–129, 130, 132, 202–203 consumer citizenship, 177–184; advertising suppression and, 166–196; of Ŏnsoju, 184–190. See also consumerism consumerism (k’ŏnsyumŏrijŭm), 24, 53, 144, 157, 163–164, 235n3; arrival of, in South Korea, 41–42; censorship and, 43–44; cynicism of, 13, 149, 222n39; media, 190– 196; misidentification and, 139–140. See also consumer sovereignty Consumer Protection Act, 125 consumer sovereignty, 24, 53, 105, 125, 169, 174, 176–177, 178, 183, 243n18; corporate sovereignty vs., 24, 61, 169, 176, 178, 189, 192–193; neoliberalism

and, 186–187, 193; as popular sovereignty, 176, 181 consumption, in commodity aesthetics, 149; anti-consumption propaganda, 42, 43–44, 224n13; as concept, 219n22 Cool soju (advertisement), 86, 102, 212 corporate citizenship, of Samsung, 170–177 corporate social responsibility (CSR), 61–62, 174, 176, 227n32, 227n33 corporate sovereignty, 24, 174, 176, 181, 183, 189; consumer sovereignty vs., 24, 61, 169, 176, 178, 189, 192–193 counterhegemony, 29–30 creativity, 95–96, 230n8; of advertising, 79, 220n29; discourse on, 77 crime, in media, 188–189 critical theory, 10–11 Cronin, Anne, 14, 15–16, 19 CSR. See corporate social responsibility cultural logic, 217n2; of advertising, 2–4, 9, 33, 68, 76, 126, 168, 196, 205 culture: in advertising, 1–3, 4; business, 89; cultural ignition, 151, 180; drinking, of South Korea, 127–128 Curran, James, 11 cynicism, 129–131, 136, 162. See also politics of “as if ” Cyworld, 199 Daehan Broadcasting Corporation (DBCTV), 224n8 Daehong Communications, 85–86, 212, 213 Daum, 58, 177–178, 212 DBC-TV. See Daehan Broadcasting Corporation DC Inside, 141 Declaration of Democratization and Reform (1987), 56 Del Monte, 153 democracy: conservative, 61; economic, 195–196; social, 12–13, 46–47, 53–54, 75, 188; substantive, 186 democratization, 30, 36, 56–57, 106, 111, 201

Index

deregulation, 107, 187, 192; in advertising, 25–26, 62–67, 68 Descendants of the Sun (TV series), 202–203 Diamond Ad, 28 Dillon, Tom, 37, 46–48 Director Ryu, 83–87, 88–89, 94–95 discourse: of advertising, 78–79, 86, 117; on creativity, 77; neoliberal, 176, 187 disidentification, 235n3 Dong-A Broadcasting Station, 224n9, 224n14 Dong-A Ilbo (newspaper), 9, 37, 156, 172, 177, 181 Dong-A Ilbo White Pages Incident (19741975), 44–48, 68, 106–107, 168, 174, 180, 190 Dong-A Yŏsŏng (magazine), 45 Dooly (fictional character), 143–147, 154, 236n16 Doosan, 26, 241n7 Draper, Don (fictional character), 231n17 dream image, 20, 119 drinking culture, of South Korea, 127–128 Dunne, Stephen, 149 Eckert, Carter, 30, 221n37 economy, political, of media, 10 elitism, 91 emotion, in advertising, 136–141 emotional identification (konggam), 81, 113, 137, 160 empiricist realism, 126–127 encouragement advertisements (kyŏngnyŏ kwanggo), 45–48, 68 ethnography, 13–14, 16, 17–18, 70–100, 104; ethnographic refusal, 137–138; multi-sited, 17, 222n42 Fair Trade chocolate (advertisement), 98 Fair Trade Commission, 59, 63 Federation of Korean Industries, 59 “Feeling Unwell Today” (advertisement), 8–9, 9, 10, 29, 54

275

financial crisis (2008), 153–154 “Five Dollar Bicycle” (advertisement), 134, 141, 163 “Flip the Usual Way” (advertisement), 158, 159 flower of capitalism (chabonchuŭi ŭi kkot), 7, 196, 199 Foucault, Michel, 105, 120 freedom: in advertising, 58, 106–107, 119, 157; of capital, 4–5, 64, 113; Dong-A Ilbo on, 37; good, vs. bad oppression, 105; in private life, 118; publicness and, 113; Shin In Sup on, 39, 46–47; of speech, 33, 44–45, 103, 112–113; struggles in advertising, 37–69 free market, 19, 51 Galaxy Note (advertisement), 200–201 “Gangnam Style,” 204 gender, 105; in advertising, 15, 150; equality, 90–91 German Democratic Republic, 109 Give Up Three Generation (samp’o sedae), 142–143 “Golden Axe” (advertisement), 154–155, 157 GoldStar, 224n7 Hallyu, 4, 126–127 Han Ga-in, 204 Han’guk Kyŏngjae, 29 Hankook Ilbo, 224n8 Hankyoreh, 167, 172, 174–175, 177–178, 226n27, 242n11; activism of, 56; chaebol and, 173; progressivism of, 171 Hardy, Jonathan, 201 Harms, John, 1 Hart, Dennis, 15 Haug, Wolfgang Fritz, 11, 53 Help Center for Enterprises Subjected to Advertiser Boycott, 190 Hickel, Jason, 243n18 Hobart, Mark, 17

276 Index

Honam Oil Refinery Company, 37, 43 Hongbok Confectionaries, 84–85 Hong Chong-in, 45–46 hongikin’gan, 29–30 Hong Sŏk-hyŏn, 171 huckster (kwanggojaengi), 73–79, 80, 84, 88, 100 human capital, 142–143 humanist advertising (in’ganjuŭijŏk kwanggo), 29–33, 72, 76, 79, 121, 160– 164; melodrama and, 162; nationalism in, 139–140; sentimentalism of, 2, 23, 79, 82, 135, 160, 162–163, 196 humanities, 77–78 “Human-Tech” (advertisement), 54 humor, in advertising, 154–156 Hyundai, 26, 31, 101–102, 201, 241n7 identification, 99, 160–165 identity politics: in South Korea, 14; in UK, 14 ideology, 67, 99–100; in advertising, 60–61, 82, 84, 171; of capitalism, 23–24; critique of, 13; hegemonic, 20, 169–170, 192–193; of neoliberalism, 195–196; occupational, 73; of Park Chung-hee, 42; of transatlantic advertising, 82 IMF. See International Monetary Fund IMF crisis, 59–60, 62, 129, 153–154, 228n35, 230n8. See also Asian financial crisis (1997) imperialism: advertising linked to, 6; in Korea, 6 in’ganjuŭijŏk kwanggo. See humanist advertising Intel 386, 74–75 International Advertising Association, 37, 47, 74 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 59–60, 77 Internet, 5, 33–34, 58, 141, 198, 203–204; advertising, 16, 34, 197, 199–200; “cultural ignition” on, 151, 180, 187

iPhone, 203 ironic public, 145–146 Janelli, Roger, 231n19 Japan, 30; Treaty of Kanghwa, 221n35 Jenkins, Henry, 245n2 Joo, Rachael Miyung, 228n35 JoongAng Ilbo, 49, 57, 60, 66, 171, 194 Journalists Association of Korea, 180 Jung Woo-sung, 200 Jun Ji-Hyun, 200 KAA. See Korean Advertisers Association KAA Journal, 59, 61, 107 kaebangjŏk. See open-mindedness KakaoTalk, 204 kamsŏng kwanggo. See sentimental advertising Kang, Jiyeon, 187 Kang Ch’ang-rae, 80 kap-ŭl. See master-servant relationship KARB. See Korea Advertising Review Board KBS. See Korea Broadcasting System KCSC. See Korea Communications Standards Commission K-drama, 31–32, 71–72, 202 Kellner, Douglas, 1 Kemper, Steven, 14 Khan, Arsalan, 243n18 Kim, Hyunhee, 143 Kim Dae-jung, 57, 60, 61, 178, 225n15 Kim In-ho, 225n15 Kim Min-ki, 111 Kim Sŏng-ho, 166 Kim Sŏng-kyun, 167, 184, 189, 190–191; on boycott, 182; on politics, 187 Kim Sŏng-su, 221n37 Kim So-wŏl, 54 Kim Yong-ch’ŏl, 170, 175–176, 241n4 Kim Yuna, 175 kind advertising (ch’akhan kwanggo), 29 KOBACO. See Korea Broadcast Advertising Corporation

Index

kong (公), 21 kongik. See public interest kongiksŏng kwanggo. See public interest advertising kongiksŏng sangŏp kwanggo. See public interest commercial advertising kongkong iik. See public interest kongkong kwanggo. See public advertising kongkong munhwa. See public culture kongkongsŏng. See publicness KORCAD. See Korea Office Radio Corporation of America Distributor Korea, 30, 39; in World War II, 40 Korea Advertising Review Board (KARB), 60–61, 63–64, 65, 107–108, 111; closure of, 102–103 Korea Broadcast Advertising Corporation (KOBACO), 28, 48–55, 57–58, 59–60, 168; abolition of, 66–67; censorship and, 108; chaebol and, 51–52; as consignee of advertising, 50–55; Constitutional Court case against, 64; Media Consumer Research report of, 139–140; monopoly of, 64–66 Korea Broadcasting System (KBS), 41, 49, 52, 224n8, 226n27; boycott of KBS subscription fees, 53, 58; position on advertising, 52–53, 65 Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC), 63, 111–116, 117, 234n8, 243n24; ambivalence of, 109–110; on boycott, 181; censorship of, 128–129, 131; on Qook, 108; on “Sexy Utility Vehicle,” 101–104; on truth, 120–124 Korea Consumer Agency, 125 Korean Advertisers Association (KAA), 26; Constitutional Court and, 59 Korean Air (advertisement), 204 Koreanness, 7 Korean War, 40 Korea Office Radio Corporation of America Distributor (KORCAD), 223n6 Korea Telecom (KT), 26, 108, 203;

277

marketing of, 159; “Olleh” campaign, 121–124, 152–159, 223n44, 238n22; on sexism, 121–122 Korea Telecom FreeTel (campaign), 80, 214 Korea University, 75, 185 KT. See Korea Telecom KwangDong Pharmaceutical, 166–167, 182, 244n37 kwanggo. See advertising kwanggoin. See advertising person kwanggojaengi. See huckster kwanggo konghae. See advertising pollution kwanggo tapchi annŭn kwanggo. See advertising-unlike advertising Kwangju Uprising (1980), 48 Kyongdong Boiler, 58, 214 kyŏngnyŏ kwanggo. See encouragement advertisements Kyunghyang, 167, 171, 172, 173–174, 177, 178 Larkin, Brian, 12, 16, 38–39 Lasn, Kalle, 130 Lee, Kee Wong, 28, 77, 91, 231n24 Lee Jae-yong, 182 Lee Kun-hee, 31–32, 171, 174, 242n14 Lee Min-ho, 93 Lee Myung-bak, 63, 109–110, 186–187, 192, 199; neoliberalism of, 177 Lee Seo-hyun, 27 Left (political group), 11–12, 82–83, 167, 171–173, 177, 186; press of, 64. See also progressivism “Let It Be” (song), 1–2, 161 LG, 26, 31, 51, 232n26 life advertising (saenghwal kwanggo), 52 Lotte, 26, 232n26 Louis Vuitton, 232n26 Lucky, 224n7 Lukács, Gabriella, 139 Lunar New Year, 158 Ma Chin-ka (fictional character), 71 Ma Chŏng-mi, 46

278 Index

MacRury, Iain, 201, 202–203 mad cow disease, 242n14 Mad Men (TV series), 70–71, 72, 231n17 Maeil Broadcasting Network, 56 Maeil Kyŏngje, 56, 193 Magill, Jay, 239n28 Maliangkay, Roald, 15 Marcus, George, 17 marketing, 92, 96, 139, 146, 200–201; communication, 106; extra-marketing concerns in advertising, 39, 139, 171, 195, 241n7; of KT, 159; subjectivization and, 148–149 Marx, Karl, 83 Marxism, 11, 53, 83 Marxism-Leninism, 75 masses (taejung), 81–82, 86, 98–99, 230n15. See also minjung master-servant relationship (kap-ŭl), 96, 100, 231n24; with chaebol, 91–92 Mattelart, Armand, 12, 25 Maxim T.O.P. (advertisement), 23 Mazzarella, William, 14, 15, 91, 111 McGuigan, Jim, 243n18 media, 148; activism, 191–192; anthropology of, 17, 219n21; capital controlling, 11–12, 50, 175; consumerism, 190–196; content, 75, 202–203; crime in, 188–189; critical media scholarship, 11–12, 202–203, 205– 206; ecology of, 197–198; liberalization of, 58; media consumer citizens, 178– 179; and neoliberalism, 199; political economy of, 10; reforms of Chun Doohwan, 51–52, 55; Right, 193; as social actor, 105–106; technology and, 197–206 Media Consumer Research report, of KOBACO, 139–140 megagroups, 25–26; in advertising, 25, 220n23 melodrama, 160–162, 200, 238n27; advertising and, 141, 239n27; melodramatization of social actors, 189

meritocracy, 90 metaphor, for advertising, 6–10 Midiŏ Onŭl, 65 Miller, Daniel, 13–14 “Millionaire” (advertisement), 157 minjung, 82, 230n15 misidentification, 23, 138, 144, 169, 192, 235n3; consumerism and, 139–140; disidentification vs., 235n3 mobilization, 24, 39, 156–157, 174, 184– 185; of media consumer citizens, 178– 179; and “Olleh” campaign, 152– 159 modern advertising, 218n8 Moeran, Brian, 13 moneylender, 4, 108, 149 monopoly, of KOBACO, 64–66 Moon, Seungsook, 30, 61 moral critique, 7, 24, 39, 61, 169 moral economy, 3, 21, 30–32, 135–136, 168, 172–173, 176, 178, 179, 182, 190, 193– 194, 200–201, 217n4 moral occult, 32, 162, 239n29 Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation, 49 National Assembly, 193 National Campaign for Media Consumer Sovereignty (Ŏnsoju), 66, 166–169, 177, 178; as activist, 179–184, 186, 190–194; consumer citizenship of, 184–190 National Council of Churches, 53 nationalism: in humanist advertising, 139– 140; in South Korea, 31 national public, 117, 139, 144, 155, 160 National Security Law, 106–107 National Union of Mediaworkers, 65, 173–174 nation-building, 29–30 Nava, Mica, 13 Nelson, Laura, 42 neo-Confucianism, 21, 160 neoliberalism, 47, 107, 112, 129, 157, 169, 186, 194; censorship and, 118–

Index

119; of Chun Doo-hwan, 51, 58–59; commerciality and, 12–13, 19; consumer in, 169–170, 179; discourse of, 176, 187; hegemonic, 179; ideology of, 4, 19, 169, 186–187, 195–196; of Lee Myung-bak, 177, 199; and media, 199; in South Korea, 4–5, 51; sovereignty and, 24, 188–189; subjectivity, 119, 125–126, 148–149, 219n22 newspaper advertising, 11, 19, 28, 56–57, 140, 166–190; cartel in, 171–172 NGOs. See nongovernmental organizations Nixon, Sean, 86, 91, 232n27 “No Freedom without Freedom to Advertise” (article), 46–47 nonbanking loan ads (taepuŏp kwanggo), 129–130 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 18, 60–61, 63, 102, 107, 109–110, 112– 113; interventions of, 151–152 Nongshim Ramen (advertisement), 42 North Korea, 46, 106 Nosamo (Gathering of people who love Roh Moo-hyun), 186 obscenity: in advertising, 115–116, 120; regulation of, 102–120 “obstruction of business,” 243n27 office culture, of the Agency, 88–91 Oglivy, David, 96, 121 OhmyNews, 174–175 “Olleh” (campaign), 121–124, 238n22; mobilization and, 152–159 Omnicom Group, 27, 230n12 “On Review Standards for Advertising for Realizing Wholesome Living” (resolution), 43–44 Ŏnsoju. See National Campaign for Media Consumer Sovereignty open-mindedness (kaebangjŏk), 110 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 25 Ŏrini Dong-A, 7–8

279

Pak Hyo-sin, 8–9, 29, 81 Pak Myŏng-hŭi, 125 Pak U-dŏk, 76 Paris Baguette, 204, 215 Park Chung-hee, 37–38, 41, 43–45, 47, 51, 107, 168; ideology of, 42; Yusin Constitution of, 44, 51 Park So Jin, 143 Park Woong-hyun, 73, 78–82, 84–86, 94, 98–99, 185; joining Cheil Communications, 75 “PD notebook”(program), 243n24 People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, 61–62 performativity, 22, 35, 135, 137, 148, 206 Phoenix Communications, 77 Pohang Iron and Steel Company (POSCO), 134, 134, 137–138, 141, 161–163, 239n31 politics: of advertising, 3, 135, 194; of “as if,” 126, 163–164, 189, 192–193, 222n39; Kim Sŏng-kyun on, 187 popular culture: advertising as, 236n11; public of popular culture experts, 144– 146, 148, 158 Pororo (fictional character), 143 POSCO. See Pohang Iron and Steel Company post-Fordism, 22, 220n24 poststructuralism, 22 posujŏk. See conservatism “power-press complex,” 49, 57 press, of Left, 64; advertising in, 57, 167, 171, 178; chaebol and, 57, 171–174, 175 Prieler, Michael, 15 private (sa), 21 private life, freedom in, 118 privateness, publicness and, of advertising, 18–24, 30 Procter & Gamble, 26 product placement, 202–203 progressivism, 139, 159, 183, 187–188, 194, 226n27; censorship and, 109–110; ChoJoongDong against, 66–67, 173–174,

280 Index

177–178; of Hankyoreh, 171; progressive decade, 61; Samsung withdrawal from progressive dailies, 178 propaganda, 20, 42; chaebol and, 43 Pro-Specs (advertisement), 58 Psy, 204 public, 21–22, 179; of advertising, 34, 120, 133–165, 219n22; ironic, 145–146; national, 117, 139, 144, 155, 160; of popular culture experts, 144–146, 148, 158; sentimental, 162–163, 239n28; world making and, 22 public advertising (kongkong kwanggo), 52, 133–165 public culture, 20; advertising as, 6–7, 9, 29, 104, 136 public interest (kongik kongkongiik), 3, 21, 43, 59, 67, 99, 104, 134; as universal vs. particular interests, 24, 179, 187 public interest advertising (kongiksŏng kwanggo), 226n28 public interest commercial advertising (kongiksŏng sangŏp kwanggo), 29–30, 76, 134, 226n28 publicness (kongkongsŏng), 3–5, 39, 52, 69, 103, 106, 135–136, 168–169, 195; freedom and, 113; privateness and, of advertising, 18–24, 30 public relations (PR), 202 public-service advertising, 6, 50, 52, 72, 79, 161–162, 227n28 public-service announcement. See public service advertising Pukka (fictional character), 143 Qook (campaign), 108, 238n22; KCSC on, 108 Rajagopal, Arvind, 16 reception, of advertising, 23, 35, 124, 135, 137–138, 141, 142, 164–165; of media, 137–138, 219n21, 236–237n16 review (simŭi), 107; before-the-fact, 63,

103, 105–106, 113, 229n36. See also censorship Right (political group), 56–58, 60–61, 63, 66, 94, 166, 171–172, 177, 180, 188. See also conservatism Roh Moo-Hyun, 61, 178 sa (私). See private saenghwal kwanggo. See classifieds; life advertising sajŏn simŭi. See before-the-fact review Sampoong Department Store, 227n33 samp’o sedae. See Give Up Three Generation Samsung, 26–27, 31, 32, 51, 75, 169, 182, 191–192, 200–201, 242n11; advertising agency of, 26–27, 51–52, 153, 170–171, 230n12; corporate citizenship of, 171, 172–173; “humanist” advertising of, 32, 222n40; iPhone compared to, 203; Kim Yong-ch’ŏl at, 242n4; slush fund scandal at, 170–171, 173; withdrawal from progressive dailies, 171, 173–174, 175, 178 SBS. See Seoul Broadcasting Station Schmid, Andre, 221n35 Schudson, Michael, 20, 22 Scott, James, 99 Seaton, Jean, 11 seksŭ. See sex seksŭ k’odŭ. See sex code semiotics, 13 sentimental advertising (kamsŏng kwanggo), 29, 76, 94, 136–141 sentimentalism, 23, 29, 136–141; identification and, 160–165 Seoul Broadcasting Station (SBS), 56 Seoul Central District Court, 181 Seoul Central Prosecutors’ Office, 191–192 Seoul Olympics (1988), 56 Seoul YMCA, 152 sex code (seksŭ k’odŭ), 116, 118–119 sexism, 150–151, 155; KT on, 121–122 sexuality, 105; in advertising, 86, 101–102, 110, 113, 114–120, 130–131

Index

“Sexy Utility Vehicle” (campaign), 106, 111, 114–120, 201; KCSC on, 101–104 Shin, Kie Hyuk, 8, 8, 223n6 Shin In Sup, 7, 8, 37–38, 54, 223n4, 223n6, 226n26; advertising copy by, 43; on freedom, 39, 46–47; on kwanggojaengi, 74 Silverstone, Roger, 234n12 simŭi. See review SK Telecom, 2, 2, 26, 27, 31, 54, 160, 163 Skylife, 28 slacktivism, 180 smart consumers (sŭmat’ŭ sobija), 125–129, 130, 132, 202–203 Smith, Adam, 30 social actors: advertising and, 14, 16, 18, 20, 34, 39, 104; advertising as, 25–26; media as, 105–106; melodramatization of, 189 social democracy, 12–13, 46–47, 53–54, 75, 188 socialist realism, 20 social justice, 19–20, 72, 85–86, 94; in advertising, 98 Sogang University, 37, 47 Sŏnkyŏng Group, 54 South Korea: advertising in, 1–36, 207–209, 217n2, 223n4; arrival of consumerism in, 41–42; business culture of, 87–90, 92, 231n19, 231n20, 231n23; democratization of, 56–57; drinking culture of, 127–128; nationalism in, 31; neoliberalism in, 4–5, 51, 199; postcolonial logic in, 111 South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee, 224n14 sovereignty: consumer, 24, 53, 105, 125, 169, 174, 176–177, 178, 183, 243n18; corporate, 24, 174, 176, 181, 183, 189; corporate vs. consumer, 24, 61, 169, 176, 178, 189, 192–193; neoliberalism and, 169, 186–188; popular, 176, 181 Soviet Union, 20 Special Advisory Committee (KCSC), 101, 104, 112

281

SsangYong Group, 8–9, 9, 51 Stern, Barbara, 238n27 Stickler, John C., 73–74 Stole, Inger, 12 The Stranger (Camus), 81 structures of feeling, 104, 135 subjectivization, 13, 23, 24, 82, 118, 129– 131, 240n35; marketing and, 148–149; neoliberalism and, 119, 126, 148–149; non-subjects, 117, 138 sŭmat’ŭ sobija. See smart consumers “Summer Camp” (advertisement), 154–155, 156 suppression of truth (suppressio veri), 121 suspended sentences, 244n28 Taean oil spill (2007), 173 taejung. See masses Taekwang Mŏlt’i Aedŭ, 230n12 taepuŏp kwanggo. See nonbanking loan ads Taeyong Group, 56 Tan’gun, 29 taste, class determining, 93–94 TBWA Korea, 27, 80, 84, 90, 230n12 technology, media and, 197–206 television, Williams on, 198–199 terrorism, 191–192 Thinking about Samsung (Kim), 176 386 Generation, 74–76, 82–83, 98, 113, 185, 230n16 Tolstoy, Leo, 81 Tongyang Broadcasting Company, 41, 51 T.O.P. coffee (advertisement), 23, 214 “Toward People” (campaign), 1–2, 4, 10, 20, 22, 23, 29, 72, 80, 141, 161, 163, 217n1 Treaty of Kanghwa, 221n35 truth: in advertising, 120–124; factual vs. affective, 123–124 Tucson IX (campaign), 101–102, 115–116, 128 “Turn Off Your TV” (movement), 58 2 % (brand), 200, 212

282 Index

United Kingdom: advertising in, 11–12; identity politics in, 14 United States: advertising in, 41–42; market liberalization of, 51 universalism, 16–17 unlikely advertising (kwanggotapchiannŭnkwanggo), 29, 30, 32–33, 43, 54, 58, 99–100, 199–200 US Telecommunications Act (1996), 60 Vancouver Winter Olympics, 175 Warner, Michael, 21–22 “W” cell phone commercial, 150, 216 WikiLeaks, 130 Wilde, Oscar, 162 Wilk, Richard, 35, 235n4 Williams, Raymond, 12, 20, 122; on television, 198–199 wish image, 20 Wol soju (advertisement), 204 WomenLink (Yŏsŏng Minuhoe), 110–111, 152, 156–158, 159

Won, Myoung Jin, 133 Wonk’aesing (brand), 142 World Cup (2002), 153 world making, 22–23, 29, 135–136, 151 World War II, Korean Peninsula in, 40 WPP, 28 X-File scandal, 182–183 Yi Jeseok, 73, 78, 92–93, 96–99 Yi Tae-yong, 53 Yi Thae-baek (fictional character), 71 Yŏng-hŭi, 140–141, 142–144, 146, 147–148, 150–151 Yonhap News, 49 Yonsei University, 8–9, 46–47 Yŏsŏng Minuhoe. See WomenLink Yusin Constitution, 44, 51 Žižek, Slavoj, 166, 169–170, 240n35

A b ou t t he Au thor

Olga Fedorenko is associate professor of anthropology at the Seoul National University. She received her MA and PhD from the East Asian Studies Department at the University of Toronto, and her BA in Korean studies from the Institute of Asian and African Countries at Lomonosov Moscow State University. She has published a number of articles on advertising, popular culture, and the sharing economy in South Korea.

H AWAI‘I ST UDIES ON KOREA

Wayne Patter son

The Ilse: First-Generation Korean Immigrants, 1903–1973

L inda S . Le wis

Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising

Mic hael Finc h

Min Yŏng-gwan: A Political Biography

Mic hael J. Seth

Education Fever: Society, Politics, and the Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea

C han E. Park

Voices from the Straw Mat: Toward an Ethnography of Korean Story Singing

A ndrei N . L ankov

Crisis in North Korea: The Failure of De-Stalinization, 1956

H ahn Mo on-Suk

And So Flows History

Timoth y R . Tangherlini and Sallie Ye a , editor s

Sitings: Critical Approaches to Korean Geography

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Koreo-Japonica: A Re-evaluation of a Common Genetic Origin

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Questioning Minds: Short Stories of Modern Korean Women Writers

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Soldiers on the Cultural Front: Developments in the Early History of North Korean Literature and Literary Policy

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Non-Traditional Security Issues in North Korea

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Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in Korea: Critical Aspects of Death from Ancient to Contemporary Times

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Eastern Learning and the Heavenly Way: The Tonghak and Ch’ŏndogyo Movements and the Twilight of Korean Independence

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Catholics and Anti-Catholicism in Chosŏn Korea

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Imperatives of Care: Women and Medicine in Colonial Korea

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Divorce in South Korea: Doing Gender and the Dynamics of Relationship Breakdown

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Surviving Imperial Intrigues: Korea’s Struggle for Neutrality amid Empires, 1882–1907

A ndre w David Jack son, C odru Ț a Sîntione an, R e mc o Breuk er , and C edar B ough Saeji, editor s

Invented Traditions in North and South Korea

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Between the Streets and the Assembly: Social Movements, Political Parties, and Democracy in Korea

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Flower of Capitalism: South Korean Advertising at a Crossroads