Currently, in South Korea, K-Pop stars hold the entire marketing world in their hand. From car to ramen commercials, K-pop celebrities have become of huge relevancy in advertisements, mainly due to the aftermath of the 1997 IMF, also known as the I’M Fired crisis. At the time, in an attempt to distract and placate their audience, many of which were frustrated by their financial struggles, many companies turned to a more “consumer-centered” marketing, using celebrities in an attempt to help relate to the public. Fortunately for the companies, their efforts were successful, and even now, just by turning on the television today, one can see that the strategy of utilizing celebrities for marketing purposes still lives on today.
As Dae Ryun Chang, a professor of marketing at Yonsei, points out in the article, “K-Pop Sells: Why Korean Pop Stars are the World’s Best Advertisers, by Rachelle D, “The use of celebrities in Korea appears to be quite effective whether it is a K-Pop or K-drama star […]. Koreans still tend to be communal in their viewing and listening habits. They’re sensitive to what’s popular and track popular search words and names and no doubt many of the celebrity choices are based on such metrics.” Or as Olga Federenkos’s puts it in her article, “South Korean Advertising as Popular Culture”, “advertis[ements] in postdemocratization South Korea revea[l] how advertising mutates as a social institution in late capitalism”. Companies understand well enough that many people watch their commercials, not for the product, but for the celebrity starring in it, and do their best to highlight them beyond anything else. The more famous the celebrity, the more famous the advertisement, and the more relevancy it holds in Korean society. For that reason, sometimes it is hard to discern whether or not a commercial is really an advertisement, as it does not push the actual product until the end. There are commercials, such as the BTS Puma commercial, where the members simply danced to their single, RUN, with a few words changed to promote the product:
Then there are others where the commercial is directed like a music video, with the idols singing a song about the product, dancing a dance alongside it:
Lastly, there are the commercials that are like mini-dramas, with a plotline and characters, only exposing the reason of the advertisement at the very end:
Unlike other countries, where advertisements are often skipped over and forgotten, commercials in Korea have become so greatly intertwined with pop culture, that there are even awards like “Best Female/Male CF Star” and “CF Model of the Year”. Commercials have become less about advertising the product, and more about spotlighting the people starring in it, in hopes that the audience feels enough of a connection to the celebrity that they buy the product. Whether or not this is a bad thing is up to viewers, advertisements are just another show of the uniqueness of Korea’s pop culture.
The Politics of K-Pop 
CFs have solidified themselves in Korean pop culture so much so that a fanbase will petition online for their bias group to star in one. As the author stated, marketers are aware that the more popular the idol(s) is, the more the commercial product sells. Likewise, the fans are aware that for an idol group to star in a CF is a huge indicator of their success in the industry. The fans’ emotional desire for their bias group to be successful and their recognition of the value system at play in economic and cultural industries which will either enable or disallow the said idol group to reach certain levels of success, furthermore proves their dual role as consumer and creator in Hallyu and within pop culture industries at large.
Fans’ collective investment in supporting idols both being booked for a CF and the profitable success of the commercial itself proves, as Federenko states, “Ads are among shared cultural references that reproduce the imagined community of the nation,” and “Advertising content resonates with lived realities, making them communicable and thus empowering those experiencing them (342).” If we are to assume that fans are just as willing to submit their consciousness to the ideological fantasy of the imagined community created by, or for, the said idol as they are consciously aware of the socioeconomic stakes at play in the industry, it is thus a sound conclusion that these CFs, which typically imagine the idols in glamorised situations work subconsciously through fans to “explain the lack in a subject, and in society in general, by the lack of consumption and asserts consuming, and by extension participating in the capitalist economy, as a way to recover the impossible enjoyment (Federenko 344)”.
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