K-pop, Toyota’s platform for marketing in the US

LOS ANGELES -- Toyota Motor Corp., the top global automaker, showcased its sports cars – the GR86 and the GR Supra – at the Los Angeles Convention Center where South Korea’s entertainment powerhouse CJ ENM Co. held its annual K-pop festival.

The Japanese carmaker has been an official sponsor for KCON, an annual convention for global fans of South Korean culture and music, for eight years.

“Toyota has long set a goal of communicating with consumers through a creative platform,” said Toyota Motor North America’s Jacob Zuk, who is in charge of sponsorship. “KCON perfectly fits this concept.”

Other global companies such as McDonald’s Corp., the world’s top fast-food restaurant operator, joined Toyota’s move to take advantage of K-pop’s growing popularity worldwide.

KCON, held Aug. 19-21, attracted about 90,000 visitors to Los Angeles. Only the first 30,000 fans were allowed entry to the two-day K-pop music event, its first offline event in three years, at the Crypto.com Arena. Many of those who couldn't get in participated in additional events provided around the venue.

The entrances of the Crypto.com Arena were jammed on Aug. 20 with 15,000 K-pop enthusiasts queuing in six 150-meter rows for performances by K-pop stars such as Itzy, a girl group of JYP Entertainment Inc., and NCT Dream, a boy band of SM Entertainment Co. Thousands of fans who failed to get tickets hung around the concert halls waving light sticks.

Ateez, an eight-member boy group, kicked off the show with KCON’s theme song Poppia. Global fans from the US, Europe and South America sang along with Itzy in Korean when the five women sang Dalla Dalla.

'WHO’S GONNA PAY FOR K-POP CONCERTS?'

CJ ENM launched KCON in Irvine in Orange County, California, in 2012 when few could foresee the extent of K-pop's global success. The festival did not attract huge audiences at that time, making it extremely hard to find corporate sponsorships.

The entertainment giant, however, pushed ahead with the event, betting that the world would eventually embrace Korean culture. The dream came true as superstars such as BTS and Blackpink began to draw massive fanbases globally. The success of Korean movies and dramas including the Oscar-winning "Parasite" and Netflix Inc.’s mega-hit series "Squid Game" has also had a major impact.

The audience at KCON’s flagship LA festival soared to some 100,000 in attendance in 2019 before the outbreak of COVID-19, ten times the some 10,000 audience members in 2012. Tickets for the latest concert, which cost up to $220 per person, sold out early. About 7 million global fans who could not come to the arena watched the K-pop stars’ performance through YouTube and CJ ENM’s own streaming platform TVing.

Apart from the concert, CJ ENM held other events such as a global audition and dance contest for Generation Zers, or those born between 1996 and 2010, at the LA Convention Center. The winners danced with Kep1er, a nine-member multinational project girl group, on the same stage.

INCREASING MIDDLE-AGED MALE FAN BASE

The audiences of the concert and participants of those events indicated K-pop is not only for teenagers, Asians and women.

“More than half of KCON audiences are non-Asian,” said a CJ ENM official. “And the proportion of male fans and audience members in their 30s and older is quickly growing.”

Angela Killoren, CJ ENM America Inc.’s CEO, said many parents became K-pop fans and visited the festival every year after taking their kids to KCON.

“K-pop is emerging as part of mainstream culture,” Killoren said.

Some smaller South Korean companies saw KCON as an opportunity to showcase their goods in the US, and succeeded in drawing huge crowds to their customer booths for Korean beauty products and food.

Spigen Beauty Inc., a South Korean cosmetics company, sold out its products in a day, a company executive said. It took three days to sell all of the goods at the 2019 KCON, according to the executive.

Write to Sun A Lee at suna@hankyung.com
Jongwoo Cheon edited this article.