SOUTH KOREA. The 30th Lotte Duty Free Family Concert held last night – because of the COVID-19 crisis, the first ever to be pre-recorded and conducted online – proved a resounding success, drawing 2.2 million views and 550,000 individual users.
The 90-minute concert was themed ‘Duty Free Life Again’ and featured some of Korea’s biggest pop stars, including BTS, Tomorrow X Together, Hwang Chi-yeul, GFriend, and Lee Hyun.
The Lotte Duty Free Family Concert, launched in 2006, has grown over the years to become a major Korean Wave (hallyu) cultural event.
A high-quality performance was ensured through the deployment of a stage using four large LEDs and featuring 12 cameras. The concert was translated into six languages, including simplified and traditional Chinese, English and Vietnamese.
Besides attracting a vast global audience on the night, Lotte Duty Free achieved a big surge in membership during the run-up to the event. From 31 August to 25 September, Lotte Internet Duty Free attracted around 900,000 new subscribers – around 35,000 per day, a surge of around +590% year-on-year.
New members from Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, accounted for 44% of the total. Customers from other nationalities such as the Americas and Europe, previously a small base, represented 38%, while Korean consumers accounted for a 12% share.
By age group, teens and those in their 20s, who tend to be interested in Hallyu culture and duty free shopping, accounted for 37% and 43%, respectively, of the audience.
Superstar band BTS unveiled a preview of their new campaign video at the concert. The film was themed ‘We Want a Duty Free Life’. It expresses the daily worries of millennials and the BTS ‘Duty Free’ method of resolving them. The campaign video will be released sequentially in October through LDF TV, the official YouTube channel of Lotte Duty Free.
Lotte Duty Free CEO Lee Gap said: “I hope this Family Concert will help the world to overcome COVID-19. Lotte Duty Free will continue to provide differentiated services to customers by highlighting cultural marketing, in an effort to attract more foreign tourists to Korea in the future.”
[This preview video helped build interest in the blockbuster Family Concert]
