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Freeing Myself From Old Assumptions

I'm actually quite afraid that the things I'm saying about advertising might seem like the whole story. That's not the case at all. It's created with so many different purposes and meanings, and personally I've just chosen to focus on 'value' among them. And my past experiences as a current affairs and documentary PD are at the heart of this choice.

At the time, I was interviewing people in a variety of situations, and I frequently witnessed how their realities were vastly different from the keywords and news stories that the media compressed. A conspiracy and violence case between Buddhist monks who came from organized crime, the purchase of a Harley Davidson motorcycle by a government official in the southernmost village of Haenam, South Korea who embezzled the living expenses of those receiving basic living benefits, and the 5-year history of a Korean elementary school English teacher who was an Interpol-wanted child sex offender.

The examples above may seem like sensational topics, but I've mentioned a few because they are also objects that we experience and interact with normally in our daily lives.

People's realities are diverse, contradictory, and above all, different from how they appear from the outside.

These individual appearances, which cannot be easily summarized and expressed, come together to create a social phenomenon, which the media conveys in a fragmented way, even if it is with simple terminology and expressions. And people gain an understanding of the world through these articles, which in turn become the basis for their evaluations and arguments.

Looking back, I perceived the customer's world based on this fragmented information when I was producing ads. On top of this, I faithfully created outputs for years based on ideas that I thought would be interesting to customers based on my obsession with clever ideas. But I was able to identify the point where I was standing, which was subtly out of sync, that no one in the world of advertising questioned, and I made a different decision.

After that, I decided to once again make the focus of my investigation interest in and observation of people's everyday lives and conversations with them. To find out how the value of the products and services that client companies believe in is experienced in reality, I decided to create my own process of going into the moments of potential customers' lives, understanding the 'context' that exists within them, and obtaining data that can make 'value judgments'.

With that strange name, Reason of creativity, I spent the whole year of 2017 going around to CEOs and executives at foreign and domestic advertising companies. While experiencing rejections from most and laughter from some, I also seemed to want to believe it. "The overseas market will be different. Foreign advertising companies will be able to understand this, won't they?"

And that day, talking to other creative directors at the advertising festival, I was able to reconfirm that my earlier decision to start on my ownwas the right decision. A friend from Thailand said, "If you're going to pay so much attention to people's everyday lives, you should become a politician. You'll be a big success."

That's how I experienced another, my own, step.

P.S. Finally, here's a brief overview of an interview with a brand manager at one of my previous clients who spent hundreds of billions of won on marketing annually. At the time, this brand was running a major advertising campaign (TV advertising, digital content production and execution) with a major comprehensive advertising agency.

"The ads themselves are okay. But we have a core customer base of those aged 20 to 30, but for some reason only teenagers are raving about our ads... The CEO of the advertising agency is a Facebook friend, and when I see his post about our brand's advertising video that says, 'Successful campaign thanks to the good client,' I get angry, honestly. We're the ones who spent the money, but the sales aren't affected, and they're the ones who get the credit for the accomplishment..."