Brief Explanation

The employment rate is getting worse, especially for the youth, and the generation gap is getting wider. The new way of communication is needed in Korea, but only the voices of successful people are heard through the media. There's no chance for the young people who doesn’t really have great success story or haven’t achieved a profound enlightenment to speak out. One day in 2014, these so called amateurs were given microphones and chances to speak up their minds by an advertising agency, TBWA KOREA. From the 10 years of time with college students, we got to believe that creativity was not outside of but within each individuals, and that it was our task to develop and let out that inner creativity by breaking down the mould.

The Brief

Share Junior Board’s philosophy which is “Every human is a creative bomb” with the outer world by showing how ordinary students could develop extraordinary messages. Also redefine TBWA KOREA’s role as a creative-seeking agency, not a mere advertising agency through the process of polishing and refining the voices of the rookies and sharing them with the society. It was TBWA KOREA’s role to make a small idea become a big and meaningful message. This is where we shifted the viewpoint from ‘teaching and educating’ students to ‘listening and paying attention to’ the students.

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

Mangchi was a big success. It was held 3 times, bi-anually, with 15 students as speakers for each session, and more than 1200 people as audiences as a whole. It was featured in major mass media – national TV, newspapers, magazines, and the total PR value converted into real currency would be around USD 0.3 million. The name of the ad agency, TBWA KOREA, has been on everyone's lips and the media at a relatively low investment cost. Also, Mangchi stories were published as a book. It was worthwhile that we gave young people a chance to inspire this society filled with typical success stories with fresh new thoughts. And TBWA KOREA really proved to the society what new things an advertising agency could do, other than making ads, and help to make our society be filled with more creativity.

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

We focused on the idea that TBWA KOREA started to pay attention to the voice of the youth who no one really ever took notice of before. TBWA KOREA paid attention to what students had deep in mind, what they had to show out to the world that people would be interested to hear, and spent 6 months developing each of the idea into a real speech. Current TBWA KOREA professional staff mentored, poured their time and effort into (donated their talents to) 15 Junior Board students brainstorm, elaborate and refine their ideas. It was a totally new initiative never attempted from any advertising agencies.