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      Subway Product Placement Makes It a Star of Korean TV

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyKorean TV’s Unlikely Star: Subway SandwichesThe sandwich chain’s aggressive use of product placement has made it a ubiquitous presence on the country’s television shows.Subway has appeared in at least 17 Korean shows, according to an informal tally by The New York Times.March 14, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETIn an episode of the Korean television show “The K2,” which takes place in a world of fugitives and bodyguards, a man is being treated with a defibrillator when he enters into a dream state. On the fringe of death, he recalls taking a past love to a Subway restaurant and to a park for a picnic, where he gently feeds her a sandwich and soft drink with the Subway logo facing the camera.The detail is not a narrative quirk. It is a result of South Korea’s broadcasting regulations and the aggressive use of product placement in the country’s shows by Subway, the American sandwich chain famous for its $5 foot-longs.“People joke, ‘If I had a drink every time Subway popped up, I’d be drunk before the first half is over,’” said Jae-Ha Kim, a journalist in Chicago who reviews Korean dramas. “Everyone here’s like, ‘I never got a Subway sandwich that looked that good, with that much meat.’”Product placement in TV shows is a reality the world over. But South Korea’s terrestrial stations are prevented from inserting commercial breaks during programming, meaning many Korean companies must be creative about getting their wares in front of viewers. As Korean dramas have become more popular with international audiences, global brands have pushed to be part of the action.And no company has pushed harder than Subway, which has grown into the world’s largest fast-food chain by store count since its founding in 1965 in Bridgeport, Conn.Colin Clark, the country director for Subway in South Korea, said product placements in popular dramas like “Descendants of the Sun” had a positive impact on global sales, specifically citing markets in China, Taiwan and Singapore.“I swear to you, it was a difference between night and day — before the product placement and after the product placement — the effect it had on the customers,” said Mr. Clark, who declined to provide specific sales figures.Subway’s country director in South Korea credits product placement in Korean dramas with a positive impact on global sales.Credit…Jean Chung for The New York TimesSubway did not provide a total of how many Korean dramas its products had appeared in, but an informal tally by The New York Times counted appearances on 17 shows. That can add up to a lot of people seeing the company’s cold cuts. Netflix, with over 203 million worldwide members, has become a leading portal for Korean dramas. When the highly anticipated Korean drama “Sweet Home” was released on Netflix in December, 22 million viewers watched the show in its first month.By sleekly presenting its products on Korean dramas as a harbinger of cool, Subway is also presenting a fresh image to American viewers who are increasingly watching the shows.Recently, the company has faced scrutiny of its bread, which an Irish court ruled is not bread, and its tuna, which a lawsuit claimed is “anything but tuna.”But on TV, pristinely clean Subway shops pop with bright colors serve as the setting for business meetings, social gossip and dates for beautiful couples. Instead of cookies and tea, elderly Korean TV characters keep freshly wrapped Subway sandwiches at the ready — you never can know when an unexpected guest will drop by and crave an Italian sub.On the popular Korean drama “Crash Landing on You,” North Korean soldiers and a South Korean businesswoman find common ground through Subway sandwiches.Product placement in Korean shows began in earnest in 2010, when South Korea’s stringent broadcasting laws eased restrictions on the practice in an effort to increase network revenues and promote Korean goods. In 2018, South Korea’s networks sold $114 million worth of product placement, up 15 percent from the previous year, according to Soobum Lee, a mass communication professor at Incheon National University.Shows collect an average of about $900,000 from product placements, although 2016’s “Descendants of the Sun” sold triple that amount, Mr. Lee said. It was also criticized by some viewers for excessive product placement.Other American companies, like Papa John’s Pizza, have used product placements in Korean dramas, but none are as ubiquitous as Subway.Ms. Kim said these kinds of shoehorned ads had become popular topics of discussion online, with some fans claiming they disrupt plots and threatening to stop watching altogether.She pointed to criticism of the show “Guardian: The Lonely and Great God” (also known as “Goblin”) and a scene where it’s inferred that the protagonist prevents a man from committing suicide; in an effort to cheer him up, the suicidal man is handed a Subway sandwich. Subway is also celebrated in death; in another episode, the Grim Reaper is shown enjoying a meal from the chain.“I know in the U.S. people are sick of it,” Ms. Kim said of the product placement. “We’ve had Subway, we know it’s not good. Stop trying to make it seem good.”While American viewers may roll their eyes at Subway’s being portrayed as haute cuisine, Seung-Chul Yoo, a communications professor at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, said product placement had been proved to work.Subway “tastes way better in South Korea,” said Seung-Chul Yoo, a communications professor at Ewha Womans University in Seoul.Credit…Jean Chung for The New York TimesWhen the actress Jun Ji-hyun wore red lipstick on the 2013 series “My Love From the Star,” similar products sold out in stores throughout Asia. Books featured on Korean dramas have become best sellers.Marja Vitti, who covers Korean television for the website Dramabeans, said some fans had watched dramas to spot new products from companies before they were released to the public.“I seem to notice a new Samsung feature in every drama,” Ms. Vitti said. “It’s like, ‘Oh, I guess we’re getting folding phones soon.’”Keeping up with trends, Subway has begun teasing new sandwiches on shows. In October, the company released its own mini-drama on YouTube, “Someway,” about a young woman who develops a crush on a Subway employee and regularly eats at his location to win his affection.Each episode begins with a character expressing fondness for a new sandwich variety, like one made with Altermeat, a meat substitute. The first episode of “Someway” has more than 1.3 million views.“There’s humor in the advertising we’re doing,” Subway’s Mr. Clark said. “As a brand, if you take yourself too seriously, you’re going to end up always getting into trouble.”Subway opened its first South Korea location in 1992. Now there are more than 430 Subways in the country, its second-largest footprint in Asia behind China.To continually appeal to its target demographic of 15- to 25-year-olds, Subway is also becoming more inventive with how it is presented. On the drama “Memories of the Alhambra,” gamers competing in an augmented reality game collected valuable swords and coins by going to Subway.In real life, newer restaurants with digital menu boards display the chain’s appearances on shows.Product placement “was a relatively cheap way to get us brand awareness,” said Mr. Clark, who has also overseen collaborations with the K-pop star Kang Daniel and a limited-edition Subway streetwear release with Fila. “It was something the other brands were doing, but weren’t really kind of owning that space the way Subway started doing.”Mr. Yoo said that in South Korea, Subway was generally viewed as a healthier option than burger chains, which added to its appeal. During the decade he lived in the United States he rarely ate at Subway, he said, but now he regularly enjoys its sandwiches in Seoul.“To be honest, it tastes way better in South Korea,” Mr. Yoo said.Brands like Subway will soon be able to do more traditional advertising on South Korean television. In January, the Korea Communications Commission announced plans to allow commercial breaks on terrestrial stations.Product placement is not likely to disappear, though.Mr. Clark said that terrestrial advertising was too expensive and that those stations didn’t reach Subway’s desired young customer base, who frequently stream episodes on their phones.Besides, the practice of product placement has already become a plot point.On the show “Because This Is My First Life,” the lead character dreams of becoming a television writer. When she lands a job in the industry, her assignment is to jam product placements into the scripts of popular Korean dramas.In Subway’s YouTube mini-drama, a young woman develops a crush on a Subway employee and regularly eats at his location to win his affection.Credit…Jean Chung for The New York TimesAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Ad With Realistic Take on Breastfeeding Airing at Golden Globes

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Awards SeasonliveWhat to ExpectliveLatest UpdatesHow to Watch the GlobesOur Movie PredictionsGolden Globe NomineesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn TV, a Rare Realistic Look at BreastfeedingA commercial from the parent products company Frida, to be broadcast during the Golden Globes, is part of a wider effort to show the struggles of the “fourth trimester.”CreditCredit…Frida MomFeb. 28, 2021Updated 5:10 p.m. ET More

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      What Frustrated Workers Heard in That Dolly Parton Ad

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyScreenlandWhat Frustrated Workers Heard in That Dolly Parton AdA protest song about degrading work becomes a rousing call to do even more work after that.Credit…Photo illustration by Najeebah Al-GhadbanFeb. 18, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETWe open to shades of gray and beige and what must be the world’s dullest office. In case you didn’t notice the overwhelming tedium, though, there’s help: One actor’s heavy eyelids are dragging his whole body downward, and another, slumped onto one elbow, seems to be collapsing so thoroughly into his desk that he might merge with it. By the time we see papers thudding into the inbox of a young woman — the camera loses focus as she contemplates the files, as if it shares her despair — we’ve gotten the message: Work is where joy goes to die.Then a flicker of hope crosses the woman’s face. She has looked up at the clock, which is moments away from striking 5. She opens her laptop, where we see our first glimpse of real color, in the website for a dance-fitness business she’s starting. After one last edit, she hits publish, then closes the laptop to an office transformed. Her gray sweater is now a red tank top, and she dances past her officemates, all now in bright outfits, converting their cubicles into creative small businesses: an art studio, a bakery, a woodworking shop, a landscaping business that seems to specialize in topiary sculptures, something involving scuba. Their life force is restored, because their jobs and their dreams are now one.The message is familiar, and classically American: bootstraps and businesses, Horatio Alger for the Instagram generation. If this ad — aired by Squarespace, a service for building and hosting websites, during this year’s Super Bowl — had only had a different soundtrack, it might well have been forgotten by Monday.But all this was set to Dolly Parton singing a reimagined version of her famous “9 to 5,” originally written for the hit 1980 comedy of the same name. In that movie, Parton, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin play office workers who semiaccidentally kidnap their sexist boss and, in his absence, transform their office, offering flexible hours, on-site child care and equal pay for men and women. The movie, in turn, was inspired by real women: a group of Boston secretaries who banded together in 1973 to fight against degrading and unfair working conditions. They are the ones who named their cause after the eight daily hours of their lives they wanted to make better.The updated song moves work into the remaining hours: It’s called “5 to 9,” and it is, according to Squarespace, “a modern rallying cry for all the dreamers working to turn an after-hours passion or project into a career.” The two songs are bizarro images of each other: both feisty and plucky, the same tune with very different messages. In the original lyrics: “They let you dream just to watch them shatter,” and “It’s a rich man’s game no matter what they call it/And you spend your life putting money in his wallet.” Now Parton offers that you could “Change your life, do something that gives it meaning/With a website that is worthy of your dreaming.” By the end, she’s belting: “5 to 9, you keep working, working, working, working.” Where once was righteous outrage at a broken system, there is now self-help. And grinding.After the ad aired, as Squarespace tried to promote the hashtag #5to9, a counterversion appeared: #9to5ShouldBeEnough. The ad clearly felt, to many of its viewers, like yet another glorification of an economy in which people must work more jobs, for ever longer hours, just to survive to the next paycheck — often for gig-economy companies that classify them as “independent” contract laborers, instead of offering the sorts of protected, benefited, living-wage jobs for which the women of the original 9to5 group continue to fight. It didn’t help that the gig-economy mainstays DoorDash and UberEats aired their own Super Bowl ads branding themselves as genial supporters of small businesses. DoorDash used the “Sesame Street” song “People in Your Neighborhood”; UberEats resurrected the tongue-in-cheek anti-corporate message of “Wayne’s World.” Both companies have taken in billions during the pandemic, skimming hefty fees off the struggling local restaurants whose food they deliver.Squarespace’s ad was a little different: Starting your own business is not the same as working in the gig economy, no matter how much gig-economy companies like to frame working for them as “being your own boss.” Still, it’s striking that the jobs in the ad — the sorts of creatively fulfilling jobs that characters have in romantic comedies — are also the sorts that are ever rarer and more untenable in our increasingly corporatized economy. Rather than reflecting the work most people actually do in their second shifts, they offer a dream that papers over reality.‘5 to 9, you keep working, working, working, working.’This was a poor message, AdWeek chided, at a time when “hustle culture feels downright toxic.” Inevitably, though, debate about the ad landed not on Squarespace, but on the shoulders of Parton herself. Was she profiting off the fetishization of an exploitative economy, or was she just another hard-working American with her own side hustle? (There’s an ad within the ad, for Parton’s new fragrance line, which uses a Squarespace site). A Washington Post headline referred to the ad as “Dolly Parton’s betrayal,” while one in Newsweek argued that the ad “Shows We Live in a Dystopia” — but only after cautiously averring that “Dolly Parton Is Awesome.”Parton is beloved for her music, her savvy, her generosity — but also for being the rare celebrity who has managed to rise above the polarization of a country that seems to agree on little except its admiration of her. She is careful not to appear to choose sides in our culture wars, and that circumspection creates a space for us to project, ardently, our own politics onto her choices. Perhaps she was surprised to learn how many people found an ad about hustling after your dream job — the real story of her own hardscrabble-to-superstardom life — to be political. But viewers of the ad saw it in the context of their own experiences: endlessly working, working, working, working.What’s interesting about the two versions of the song isn’t what they tell us about Parton. It’s what they show us about how, four decades later, our economy is still broadly failing the people who toil inside it. The original lyrics offer frustration and disbelief — “What a way to make a living!” — and a clear diagnosis of the problem: companies that aren’t required to respect or take care of their workers. In Squarespace’s hands, the words become “a whole new way to make a living” — a dream of escape, of going out on your own because you’ve given up on an economy that refuses to look out for you.But listeners reacting online kept mishearing that new line. They detected something a lot closer to how they actually experience our economy. Endless hustling, they heard, now offers neither solution nor escape; it is, simply, “the only way to make a living.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Quibi is selling content to Roku

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyQuibi Is Dead, but Roku TV May Resurrect Its ContentThe failed streaming company led by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman is in talks with Roku about a deal.Christoph Waltz in Quibi’s “Most Dangerous Game.” The streaming service’s programming has attracted interest from Roku. Credit…Quibi, via Associated PressJan. 4, 2021Updated 4:19 p.m. ETQuibi was the biggest bust of the streaming boom. But it has something Roku wants — more than 100 original programs.Quibi, which announced that it was closing six months after a much-hyped introduction, is in talks to sell its content to Roku, the streaming device maker with a streaming app of its own.The deal is close to completion, said one person with knowledge of the discussions, who was not authorized to speak publicly. Quibi and Roku declined to comment.Started by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, who raised more than $1.75 billion from major Hollywood studios and other investors, Quibi was a quixotic attempt to capitalize on the streaming boom. Its shows, chopped into installments no longer than 10 minutes, were meant to be watched on smartphones.The approach assumed that people wanted this kind of viewing experience to help them through their daily commutes or while they were in line for coffee, but the coronavirus pandemic meant that potential customers were out of their on-the-go workday routines when the platform went live in April.Mr. Katzenberg blamed the pandemic for Quibi’s quick downfall, while others cited its unusual format and some of its creative choices, including a show starring the Emmy-winning actress Rachel Brosnahan as a character obsessed with her own golden arm.Business & EconomyLatest UpdatesUpdated Jan. 4, 2021, 3:39 p.m. ETMore than 170 business executives urge Congress to certify Biden’s win.Haven, the health care venture of Amazon, Berkshire and JPMorgan, is shutting down.A trickle of trucks continues to ease Britain into life outside the E.U.Still, Quibi won two Emmy Awards in the short-form category, for the actors Laurence Fishburne and Jasmine Cephas Jones in the series “#FreeRayshawn.” Two of its other shows scored nominations: “Most Dangerous Game,” which starred Christoph Waltz and Liam Hemsworth, and a reboot of the comedy “Reno 911!”That’s where Roku comes in. The company needs material for its Roku TV app. And Quibi, which has not yet gone dark, will soon have plenty of material that could go unseen.Complicating the talks, which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal, is Quibi’s unusual business strategy. Mr. Katzenberg and Ms. Whitman didn’t pursue ownership of the platform’s content, instead buying exclusive rights from creators to stream their shows for seven years. The arrangement was attractive to producers, who retained the right to later resell the shows to another service, such as Netflix. It is unclear how a sale would affect the rights of content producers.Roku, known primarily for its easy-to-use streaming devices, generates almost two-thirds of its revenue from its media division. Roku TV, a free, ad-supported streaming channel, offers movies and shows made by other companies, without a significant lineup of its own original content.Despite the relatively low cost of digital platforms, streaming bills are starting to add up as the digital media industry matures and expands. The average household pays for only three services at a time, and exclusive content on a free app is likely to attract an audience.The latest entrant, Discovery+, a platform built on 55,000 hours of unscripted shows, went live on Monday, arriving in a crowded field that includes, in addition to Netflix, Peacock from NBCUniversal, HBO Max, Disney+, AppleTV+, CBS All Access (soon to be renamed Paramount+) and Hulu.Roku has become a streaming force by exercising its distribution power — it claims 46 million accounts — to lift its media business. After a long disagreement, Roku recently forged a deal with AT&T to carry its HBO Max service. Roku wanted more access to advertising inventory on AT&T’s forthcoming ad-based streaming platform as well as rights to Warner Bros. content.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More