Naver Webtoon promotes K-ramen in Bangkok via pop-up store

South Korea's Naver Webtoon, along with major domestic players in the food industry, on Tuesday said it joined in Bangkok, Thailand, Boggle Boggle K-Ramen Pop-up Store from its launch on June 24 at the mega-shopping mall Siam Discovery.

The company said it used the intellectual property rights of original webtoons to decorate the store with their characters as well as produce its own webtoon introducing Korean-style ramen and pop-up stores with five leading Thai webtoon writers.

The five Thai works featured in the webtoon are "Wanthong Rai Jai", "Fa", "Take My Money", "Budsaba" and "Gimme Your Love", which were used to promote the instant noodles and their recipes, event schedules for each brand and benefits for visitors to the event.

Since November 2014, Naver Webtoon has run the Thai-language service Line Webtoon. The San Francisco-based data.ai, a platform that analyzes data from the mobile app market, said the service is No. 1 in Thailand for webtoons based on sales and the number of monthly active users.

The variety of events for Thai webtoon fans included Webtoon Brand Day, which offered a "toon filter" experience of real-time transformation into webtoon characters, creation of a photo zone using life-size characters centered on a flea market with 17 Thai webtoon writers, free gift event and coin card sales to view fee-based webtoons.

Naver Webtoon showed three filter experiences for "Operation: True Love" and "The Boy of Death", two South Korean works popular among Thai webtoon fans, and the Thai webtoon "I'm the Most Beautiful Count." A printing service for the results was also available.

"Because this pop-up store promotes South Korean ramen, collaboration with Naver (Line) Webtoon was essential for attracting young customers, who lead Thai dining trends," said Kim Jung-a, vice president of the global marketing and communications agency Innocean who planned the event, on the reason for the company's participation in the event.

Write to Ji-Eun Jeong at jeong@hankyung.com