Day 2, Seoul: Company visits and Cultural Learnings

Day 2 was a full day of company visits. We went to three companies, Cheil Communications, Grey Group, and Samsung.

Cheil Communications is a global agency based out of Korea and is actually an affiliate of Samsung. Only recently have they been working to obtain other global clients, apart from Samsung. They won an award at the Cannes Lion International Festival of Creativity for their work with Tesco Homeplus campaign, beating out 50,000 campaigns. So Tesco is a well known supermarket internationally and Homeplus is their online shopping network. The campaign Cheil put bascially created an virtual shopping center at a few subway stops here in Korea. They plastered the walls of the subway stop with grocery store shelves and products (basically a big piece of wall paper). The imagery, detail, and design was amazing. I'll try to get a picture of it up here later. On all of the products featured were QR codes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code). Koreans were able to capture the QR codes of the products they wanted, put them into a virutal shopping basket, and order them for delivery. They had to spend a minimun of $20 or something, but it basically helped these busy Koreans who only recently went down to a 5 day work week (used to be 6 day) accomplish a necessary task, grocery shopping, in a less stressful way. Rather than going out of their way to get to a grocery store, the store was brought to them. Truely innovative, creative, and an inspiring use of new technology.

(added pics of the Cheil Tesco Homeplus campaign)

Grey Group was more of a consumer insights agency. We learned a ton of interesting things about the Korean culture. For example:

• The young Korean male (~20 yrs old) is becoming more sensative and adopting certain female characterisitcs or habits 
• The Korean male might spend 2 hours getting ready
• The Korean male freely cries. In fact, during an hour long soap opera here, you might see a male character cry a number of times while the femal character will never shed a tear
• The Korean male may carry a purse
• The male makeup industry has been rising at a 12% rate, and is expected to rise even more this year.

As you can tell, the information on the Korean male was most interesting.

(adding some pics)

A couple guys and their designer purses

Promotion for male makeup

Samsung was what you would expect. The conversation revolved around the 3D TV. The show room they gave us a tour of had a ton of cool things that I would love to share with you, but probably shouldn't. Basically, technology is only going to get cooler!

We arrived back at the hotel by about 7pm. Melanie, Misia, Lauren and I went down the street to the Coex Mall, which was actually a typical mall. We grabbed dinner there and then walked back to the hotel. It was a long day. Tomorrow we'll be visiting Coca Cola and Publicis. I'll try to hop back online and post again tomorrow night.

<3 E