The Grand Narrative

( Cha Su-yeon (차수연) and Jung Il-woo (정일우). Source )

Probably the only Korean commercial ever to feature a woman repeatedly moving up and down on top of her boyfriend(!), in hindsight it’s kind of bizarre that I barely noticed it when it came out two years ago:

Much more interesting though, is what is said and written in it. Not only does the background text read “You need Vitamin C for love too!” (사랑에도 비타민C가 필요하다!) for instance, but like Chris explains here, who also thought the commercial was perfectly innocent at first:

Boyfriend is trying to airplane girlfriend but he’s having trouble maintaining, if you know what I mean, and so he downs a bottle of 비타500. Immediately invigorated, dude now has no problem keeping her up, and at the end he asks her, “Where shall we go?” She replies, “Hong Kong!”, which I now know is a pretty popular euphemism here in Korea for an orgasm, its origins being the affluent image of Hong Kong that was held in the collective consciousness of Korea until not too long ago. So ladies, next time your man asks where you wanna go, demand he take you to Hong Kong, and don’t let him stop till you get there.

Noble sentiments indeed.

I confess, that was also the first time I’d ever heard that of that slang, although I’d add that when I first arrived in 2000, for this particular usage of the English “coming” the equivalent was “going” in Korean, so “going to Hong Kong”  makes sense. Unfortunately for the sake of linguistic variety however, by now the Korean (and Japanese) seems to have been completely Anglicized.

Regardless, can you imagine such explicit sexual slang being used in a daytime commercial in most English-speaking countries? Wondering if it represented a trend, I looked at Vita500′s commercials going back to 2004 here, but unlike for alcohol commercials there’s definitely no shift towards more risqué ones over time. Actually, the only other remotely sexual one was this one with Rain (비) and Shin Joo-ah (신주아) from 2005:

But just because Vita500 has only spiced up one of their commercials in recent years doesn’t mean that other food and drink companies haven’t. If you thought that that oh-so-subtle sexual symbolism above was lame for instance, then clearly you haven’t seen this commercial for Seoksu (석수) mineral water from last year (which I discuss here):

But it was particularly these ones for the ironically named Poker Chips (포카칩) that I was reminded of while writing this post. While this may sound a little strange given the screen capture below, personally I find the first one quite endearing:

I couldn’t tell you who appeared in those or when exactly they came out sorry, but clearly they’re all pretty old.

Given that context, then it just goes to show how strange it was that this commercial for Hong Kong clothing company Giordano with Jun ji-Hyun (전지현) and Jung Woo-sung (정우성) was banned when it came out in 2004, and how completely arbitrary Korean censorship can be sometimes:

On the plus side, its banning gave it some notoriety, and rapidly spawned so many clones that the censors just seemed to give up with those sorts of commercials thereafter. This much raunchier one for the tea drink “17차,” also with Jun Ji-hyun, came out just one year later for instance:

These days, aside from the government’s push for a  “real name” internet system of course, one other notable censorship issue is the Youth Protection Committee’s (of the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs; see #4 here) recent banning of music group TVXQ’s latest songs from being played on TV and the radio because of “lewd content” (see here also). But one might ask what exactly the point was considering the album has already been out for six months though!

(For all posts in the “Creative Korean Advertising” series, see here)