An interesting insight into the commercialising of celebrity in Korea, from the International Herald Tribune.
A leaked dossier on celebrities’ private lives commissioned by the top South Korean advertising agency has revealed a gulf of distrust between stars and those who hire them for lucrative advertising contracts.
The 113-page confidential report commissioned by Cheil Communications, a Samsung Group affiliate and the country’s leading agency in terms of revenue, was posted online anonymously last week. Dubbed the “X-File,” it was drawn up by a research firm, which outsourced much of the work to tabloid journalists.
The confidential report was designed to warn clients about the risks of hiring certain celebrities and to assess their career potential. In South Korea, stars are critical components of marketing.
“The importance of celebrities is greater here than in other markets,” said Jay Paik, president of Ogilvy & Mather Korea. “Most TV ads are 15 seconds, which curtails creativity; to make an impact, we need celebrities.”
The report covers 99 entertainers, many of whom, like Bae Yong Jun, known in Japan as Yonsama, have gained star status around the region because of the so-called Korean Wave of pop-culture exports.
The report included items that ranged from the innocuous - like who is dating whom and who has had plastic surgery - to the lurid, like accusations of illegitimate births, homosexuality, drug abuse, violence and group sex.
Whereas celebrity misdemeanors barely raise eyebrows among Western tabloid readers, in strictly neo-Confucian South Korea, bad reputations kill careers. The TV host Hong Seok Chun was removed from broadcasting after he disclosed that he was a homosexual in 2000, and in the same year, the singer Baek Ji Young’s career plummeted after a video of her having sex surfaced online.
A squeaky-clean image is essential for stars to get the all-important TV exposure on South Korea’s cheery chat and game shows.
But even though the risks to advertisers have long been present, Cheil’s dossier is unprecedented. “I have been in the ad business for 18 years and have never heard of a report like this,” Paik said.
Cheil took out ads in major newspapers on Saturday apologizing to all those whose reputations were affected by the report. Two days earlier, the journalists who contributed to the research had released a statement saying that the X-file included rumors they had not reported. “We are victims, too,” they said.
For the named celebrities, the damage has been done. South Korea leads the world in broadband usage, and the file has exploded across the Internet.
But even though a celebrity management agency on Thursday threatened legal action against Cheil, media commentators said that lawsuits were unlikely: court cases could bring further sordid details to light. On Friday afternoon, two actors from a broadcast performers’ union called a teary news conference in which they begged the public not to judge them by the “rumors” in the report.
From the 
