Video Content Trends in Korea
Have you ever thought about what are popular Korean videos? Mobile video content is the fastest growing form of social media content in South Korea. In a country where mobile usage penetration reaches 87% of the population, coupled with high-speed 5G wireless networks and widely accessible unlimited data plans, mobile users can stream mobile video content with much more ease and in higher quality. The country’s mobile infrastructure, high-definition video content and large form factors of mobile devices all contributed to the change in video consumption patterns amongst mobile users. Let’s drill down on how users consume video to understand the video content trends in Korea, and also introduce some popular Korean video.
Video Consumption pattern of South Koreans
The pattern of video content consumption is turning more mobile-friendly. Content is getting shorter and simpler, engaging on-the-go mobile users with short-form videos. Also, it’s based on customized storytelling from one to five minutes long.
Mobile users’ video consumption pattern is becoming spontaneous, watching contents fed by their social media platform of choice at any point in time, whether at home, during their commutes, or at work. According to the 2020 Short-form contents trend report published in 2019), consumption patterns can be divided into three different categories:
- Digital Immigrants – view contents at a dedicated point in time (i.e. content from cable television at home)
- Mobile First – view on-demand contents on a smartphone, tablet or personal computer
- Digital Native – view contents during downtime (i.e. commute, before bedtime)
Examples of popular Korean videos
With the above consumption patterns in mind, brands and marketers are producing short video content to target the Digital Native group. Approximately, 73% of all advertising and promotional videos are in the form of short videos under two minutes long.
Two recent video campaigns in South Korea highlighted the success of the short video format. Firstly, Korean pop singer Zico posted a video of himself and two K-pop female artists, Hwasa and Chungha, dancing to his new song titled “Any Song” on TikTok. The video became an instant hit. Fans and K-pop stars alike took up the challenge to replicate the dance video. Over 100,000 video posts are generated from users, both domestic and abroad, with the hashtag #AnySongChallenge. Zico’s video has drawn nearly 800 million views in the first ten days of the release. This video is 47 seconds long.
@kozico0914 ##AnysongChallenge##ZICO ##지코 ##청하 ##아무노래 ##Anysong#아#무노래나틀어주세요#KO#Z⠀
♬ 아무노래(Any song) – kozico0914
Secondly, another success case was the commercial video from the food producer Dongwon, to promote their canned tuna. The ‘Taste’s Great Tuna Campaign’ video generated over 15 million views via online channels alone in one month. The video is 41 seconds long.
In both cases, the producers made use of either a catch-phrase or easy to follow dance moves while incorporating an advertising hook in the music to associate viewers with the promotional content. Both videos involved many celebrities recreating the dance and the song which ultimately encouraged many fans to follow suit. This replicability magnified the promotional effect of the short video format.
Key takeaways
As a result of the 2 successful video campaigns, we believe that short video format will become the mainstream in the foreseeable future in South Korea. More viewers might become active players in the promotional videos themselves, either by mimicking the original video and recreating their own versions; or resharing the original video to challenge others to recreate. We expect an increase in video content’s “shareablity” due to the short video format trend.
- South Korea Insight 1/4 – Social media landscape overview
- South Korea Insight 2/4 – How brands can leverage KakaoTalk?
- South Korea Insight 3/4 – User behavior on Western social media in Korea
