K-POP ON! - brand identity

OPPORTUNITY - WHY K-POP?

• K-Culture infiltrates many facets of the cultural zeitgeist, including entertainment/film, fashion, gaming & social media, giving consumers infinite touchpoints to showcase their fandom & connect with other fans.

• K-pop is an extremely fan-driven genre, where fans are willing to go all-in to get as close as possible to the creators they love as well as the global community of fellow stans.

AUDIENCE AND CULTURAL INSIGHTS

K-Pop is a global success and the music industry darling. With this growth, we have ambitious goals to reach to make Spotify the destination for K-Pop fans. In order to reach our goals, we will reposition and rebrand the K-pop Flagship playlist to feel authentic and relevant to the globe. K-Pop’s success is not overnight but 10,000 hours and years of hard work. This collectiveness  and consistency in their energy, drama and movement is something worth celebrating in K-Pop culture.

design & thought PROCESS

I was inspired by the playfulness of movement and what branded K-Pop as the worldwide phenomenal. I know a colorful, fun, energetic approach is one to make K-POP ON! stands out from the playlists on Spotify. Below shows a peek into the digital workplace for initial branding exploration.

BRAND POSITIONING

Become the most relevant DSP brand with Gen Z K-pop fans by providing a path to deeper interaction with content, creators, and other fans. 

The Playlist Brand will lead in moments where we are:

• showing proof of our offering to the broader new and casual K-Pop audience.

• trying to explicitly grow our audience of the playlist

• K-Pop ON! will act as a gateway to the K-Universe

This playlist name means 'always ON the 100(온) scored K-Pop music and spread out K-pop to whole(온) world'. ON(온) is a pure Korean word and has two meanings. The first one is '100' when used as a root word. The other one is 'every' or 'whole' as a prepix. (i.e. 온누리 = whole world).

There is a duality in the play of words, both having a meaning which resonates in english (it's ON, always ON, come ON) & in korean (100 / every, when 온 is added with other words, it is often positive).

With these strategic points and design thought processes, I create an identity that constantly re-jiggle in movement, playful in expressing diverse genres through motion and constantly evolving across platforms, just like K-Pop culture itself. This visual direction relies on a bold and vibrant color palette. I also create 3 different logo lockups for this evolving direction with hangul 온 as a standalone that makes this visual direction stand out from the rest.

FINAL LOGO LOCKUP

While hangul is our focus, we want to bring it alive following through our Design Direction of turning on the movement.

Building the Design System

We do stress testing on multiple artists & background colors to make sure this design system runs smoothly in markets of english and international language audiences.

Motion language

SOCIAL

In K-Pop, stans crave new content every day and are always wanting more. Whenever new music is released, they are teased with rounds of concept photos. New merch and collectibles are released often, and K-Pop album box sets even include exclusive photo books and exclusive photo cards. For artists who are interested in a lower-lift participation than the video trailer, we’ll create Dreamland-themed photo cards. Each card would feature a Spotify code driving to the K-Pop ON! (온) playlist. To double down on our “Turn On The Movement” platform, the cards can be double-sided. One side will feature a close-up portrait of the artist, and on the back, we’ll show a wide shot with each artist in their “turned on” dreamland.

Styleframes by Rainy fu, Animation by Scholar

FANS GIVEAWAYS

We create custom glow-in-the-dark K-Pop ON! posters for markets to distribute as giveaway  items (influencers, PR/Press, etc). When the lights are turned off, the glow-in-the-dark effect activates, showing that K-Pop is always on. Revealed in neon will be special “handwritten” messages from the respective artists to their fans.

For participation, artists would write one personalized message to their fans. We’d then digitize the message and then add the messages on top of artists’ existing posters either through printing or silk screening glow in the dark ink.

OUT-OF-HOME billboards

Times Square, Penn Station (New York) and LA

K-POP ON! CAMPAIGN SHOOTS (FEAT. SEVENTEEN, B.I & ITZY)

In three 0:15 hero videos, we’ll visualize our K-POP ON! (온) PLAYLIST as a surreal destination. In each spot, we’ll showcase artists building their unique worlds that magically “TURN ON” with elements that are respective to each K-Pop artist.
Showing that when you listen to K-Pop ON! (온) on Spotify, you don’t just turn on music, you TURN ON THE MOVEMENT.

RESULTS

K-Pop ON! (온) Playlist Traffic & Engagement:

K-Pop ON! (온) saw DAUs peak at 442.08K a 75% increase from the previous week’s peak DAUs, averaging at 364K DAUs a week.

• Streams peaked at 3.3M, a 112% increase from the previous week’s peak DAUs, with an average of 3M streams a week.

• Time spent on K-Pop ON! (온) also saw a 28.6% increase WoW, averaging at 133,415 hours a day over the past week.

K-Pop ON! (온) Organic Social:

• Overall: #KPopON has over 16.6M views on TikTok

• Over 40k posts on TW, IG, and Tumblr since 8/19

• Hero Videos:

• Over 5.9M Impressions across all platforms, >460k Engagements

• 377k Impressions on TikTok with >110k Engagements (nearly 33% ER) , >2M Impressions on Twitter with >260k Engagements (nearly 15% ER) , >1.7M Impressions on Instagram with >88k Engagements (over 5% ER)

• >1.7M Views on Youtube with 9k Engagements

SPECIAL THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO HAD MADE THIS PROJECT SUCCESS. Global Music Marketing Alex Dubov, Madison Pietrowski Global Brand & Creative Mel Eisen, Jem Michael (Brand) Meagan Dexter, Midori McSwain (Strategy) Edward Yeung, Dominique Wynne, Jay Norman (Creative), Rebecca Lim (Design) Global Social Alexa Villareal Global Media Kaitlin Longworth, Danielle DePiano, Shannen Boynton Global Comms Shira Knishkowy Global Content Promo Richelle Cyrus, Kara Goldsmith SEA Marketing Rish Tamilrajan, Siti Meera, Jan-Paul Jeffrey SEA Music Wootae Kim, Chesca Tan, Eve Tan, Kossy Ng Global Music Programs Eunu Song, Boon Ken Wong, Andy Sloan-Vincent Global Product Marketing Gabriela Lancellotti