the.WATERMELON

“We believe that creativity on the basis of a solid strategy yields impressive results” is the philosophy of the.WATERMELON, a Seoul-based agency specialising in brand communications and consulting. Creative director Hyungkyun Oh, who has been distinguished by various awards, provides brand strategy guidance to the agency’s 37 creative staff – and their fresh ideas deliver measurable impact in both the analogue and digital worlds. “Money Dream” combines sustainability with customer retention.

Interview with the.WATERMELON

Red Dot: What gave you the idea for the Money Dream pillow?
the.WATERMELON: South Korea disposes of 608.5 million discarded or unfit banknotes every year. If we were to place them on top of each other, the stack would be more than 60 km high, which is seven times higher than Mount Everest! Not a single one of them was being recycled. We thought about how we could reduce the banknote waste and came up with the idea of recycling the notes into the Money Dream pillow. We developed a new type of pillow filling by combining ground banknote waste with an eco-friendly material, using roughly five million won (around 3,500 euros) in banknotes per pillow. The aim was for people to perceive the pillows as being valuable, driving demand for them and automatically increasing the banknote recycling rate.

The pillows contain banknotes that have been taken out of circulation. Are people fascinated by money for reasons other than its value?
We developed the pillow because many Koreans believe that sleeping on money brings happiness and riches. We also took advantage of the fact that the Korean word for dream sounds like the word for “giving/bringing”, suggesting that the pillow may bring luck and wealth. At a time when the banking paradigm is shifting from analogue to digital, our client believed it was crucial to gain more subscribers for its digital banking app. So the Money Dream campaign targeted people who downloaded the app, rewarding them with a Money Dream pillow.

What kind of a response did the campaign receive?
The campaign with the new, eco-friendly pillows generated 303 million hits and attracted a lot of attention. In the first month alone, the video notched up 17 million views and was reported on 469 times – even generating coverage from The New York Times, Bloomberg and Fox News. In that same period, the app download rate increased by 284 per cent, and the number of active users by 118 per cent. What’s more, the recycling rate for unfit banknotes in South Korea increased from zero to seven per cent.