眞露 | 恋スル！チャミスル シーズン1／恋するチャミスル シーズン2 | 2022
Six and a Half Minutes of Nonstop "So Relatable!" Moments / Jinro "Falling for Chamisul"
A forbidden romance across class lines, amnesia, a rich young heir, the fiancée of a company president's daughter—this ad packs in every K-drama plot twist you've ever seen, and I couldn't stop watching all six and a half minutes of it.
The problem
Thanks to the Korean wave, Chamisul's sales doubled year-over-year in 2020 and grew 8 times in 2021. But awareness of the brand had stalled at "that liquor in the green bottle"—people weren't actually falling for it or buying it. As the next move, this campaign was built to target Korean drama fans in their 20s and 30s.
The insight
K-drama fans can't resist a good "so relatable" moment. Familiar tropes make people laugh and nod along without even thinking. Betting on that, the team released the first installment, a 3-minute-54-second video starring Yui Sakuma and Yuta Koseki, which racked up 2 million views in five days. Nearly 3% of the views even came from Korea itself—when your "relatable" content gets reverse-imported back to the source, that's nothing but love.
The idea
An ordinary office worker and a rich young heir are just about to fall for each other when the fiancée of a company president's daughter shows up—and then the heir loses his memory. The video crams in 21 classic K-drama tropes. The second installment ran a full six and a half minutes, yet achieved a 20% full-view completion rate and hit 9 million views on Twitter. For a length that would normally get skipped in seconds, that's an incredible result.
What happened
Across all the videos, total views topped 10 million, and viewer actions surpassed 50,000. The campaign went on an award-winning streak: a category award at YouTube Works Awards Japan 2022, the Grand Prix at ACC TOKYO CREATIVITY AWARDS two years running, the Grand Prize in the TV commercial category at the Galaxy Awards, and the top prize in its category at BRANDED SHORTS.
Afterthought
"So relatable" moments often get written off as cheap, but I think they're actually a powerful tool—they give people a shared language, which makes them laugh and want to share. This campaign hit home because it took the tropes K-drama fans genuinely love and respected them, seriously. Now I kind of want to watch a K-drama with a glass of Chamisul in hand.
