Why NC Soft and Baemin Are Building Media Companies
Red Bull proved that companies can out-media the media. What NC Soft and Baemin's moves into content say about the future of brand communication.
Red Bull's dirty secret: the drink tastes bad. They know it.
Red Bull executives have reportedly joked that they "accidentally got into the energy drink business." Their real business is content. In 2012, they paid $740M to put an Austrian skydiver in a space suit above the stratosphere. The advertising value returned: $47B.
Their subsidiary Red Bull Media House produces thousands of videos, images, and music licenses. For sports content, no company rivals them except ESPN. The brand value: $7.9B.
The lesson isn't the money. It's the sequence. Red Bull didn't make content to sell drinks. They made content that was worth consuming, and people who consumed it were more likely to buy the drink. The content was not advertising. It was the product.
What Changed
GE, LEGO, IBM, P&G, Coca-Cola — companies outside Korea have been producing better content than most media companies for years. The press release as the primary unit of corporate communication is a historical accident, not a law of nature.
Nike built NTC and NRC with 30 million users. They don't sell running shoes through those apps. They sell the identity of being someone who runs. The shoe comes later.
What NC Soft and Baemin Are Doing
NC Soft invested $220M in a visual effects company behind Okja and The Handmaiden, partnered with Yonhap on AI media research, and started pushing their baseball analytics service PAIGE.
Baemin launched Magazine F with designer JOH — not a Baemin magazine, but a food documentary magazine. Issue one: Salt. Issue two: Cheese. It has nothing to do with food delivery and everything to do with building a community of people who care about food.
The approaches differ. The goal is the same: original content that forms fans, not just customers. Not content that sells at you, but content you seek out.
The Question This Raises
If companies are becoming media, what does media become?
The advantage of the traditional media company — distribution, credibility, reach — is disappearing. What remains is the ability to build a loyal vertical audience and deliver them genuinely useful experiences.
The craft part of journalism doesn't go away. But the institutional protection does. Content that earns its audience through quality will win over content that inherited it through distribution.