HITE-JINRO Group’s Chamisul started ‘Psysul Show’ campaign, a compound word of ‘Psy’ + ‘Chamisul’, targeting Korean men and women of legal drinking age with online and offline channels. It is a viral marketing campaign with interesting videos showing how to enjoy drinking Soju.

Soju is one of the most popular Korean liquor with about 20% of alcohol by volume. In Korea, the National Health Promotion Act has strong influence on advertisements of the brands of Soju. The Act strictly regulates advertisements of alcohol beverages. Soju has quite high alcohol contents, and, as such, the advertisement is limited to air on TV and prohibited in all public transportation, and billboard ads are also prohibited. The messages in advertisements are also prevented from beautifying the act of drinking alcohol and from representing that drinking alcohol is good for health. The regulations are equally strict on online advertisement by banning image of liquor bottle, act of drinking alcohol, or beautifying such an act. There is less and less space to deploy liquor advertisement.

The ‘Psysul Show’ campaign has been conducted through organically linked two channels.

The first is YouTube brand channel whereby users can watch 11 Psysul Show videos, and post comments or click ‘like’ button. Videos of Psy, who is a model for Chamisul and has gained huge popularity with the hit song Gangnam Style, will continue to be updated.

The second is the Psysul Show campaign site. HITE-JINRO Group planned three events to encourage people to engage in the viral marketing campaign. The three events are Voting & Sharing Event on Facebook, UCC Event to upload participant’s own version of Psysul Show video on the web and mobile, and SNS Event to send Psysul Show videos to friends of Kakao Talk, a mobile messenger service with 8.3 million users globally. The events were designed to be most effective for each channel.

YouTube brand channel opened on February 1, 2013, and the number of views soared to an unprecedented level in the history of Korea’s YouTube contents. In about two weeks, the number of hits exceeded 1 million, and, now, after one month and a half, it reached nearly 2 million. Such sensational response is hard to find elsewhere, not only among liquor brands, but among channels of other brands. The viewing is still rising.

As for the events on the campaign site, Facebook event to select the best Psysul Show video attracted average 1,000 votes a day. For one month, 26,900 votes were cast, and the number of sharing on Facebook recorded 17,736. Assuming that one Facebook user has 130 friends on average (Source: http://thesocialskinny.com/100-social-media-statistics-for-2012/), the video could have reached as many as 2,305,680 people. Some 150 videos were uploaded for UCC Event to produce people’s own version of Psysul Show. Kakao Talk Event led to an average 170 cases of Psysul Show video sharing on mobile a day. Besides sharing video, participants have talked about the campaign, creating a viral promotion.

The success of Psysul Show campaign through video and a viral marketing of consumers can be a good reference for liquor advertisements in Korea where the restrictions on liquor advertisement are fairly strict.