MAM
The birth of Korean cool: how Seoul hacked the world’s taste buds
MUMBAI: This is a book the Indian prime minister’s office ought to read between policy briefs—and then read again with a highlighter. Ditto Ashwini Vaishnaw and the mandarins at the ministry of information and broadcasting. Narendra Modi has spoken often about exporting India’s soft power; he has even launched Waves to push Indian content abroad. Euny Hong’s The Birth of Korean Cool shows, briskly and unsentimentally, how another Asian countries actually did it.
First published in 2014 and expanded for 2025, the book is part reportage, part cultural history and part field manual. Hong, a Paris-based journalist, dissects how a war-battered, culturally insecure South Korea retooled itself into a global style factory. The lesson is bracing: Korean cool did not “go viral”. It was planned.
Hong’s central argument is gloriously unfashionable. Hallyu—the Korean wave—was not an accident of youthful exuberance but a state project, designed with bureaucratic zeal. Around 2000, president Kim Dae-jung looked at America’s film revenues and Britain’s stage musicals and drew a blunt conclusion: culture pays. He set up a Cultural Content Office with a $50 million annual budget. That pot swelled to $500 million. Today it is closer to $5 billion, still fuelling Korea’s pop exports.
A financial crisis provided the shove. When heavy industry sputtered, policymakers pivoted to pop. Culture, they decided, was not fluff but infrastructure. Long before K-pop hijacked playlists and K-dramas colonised Netflix queues, Seoul chose to subsidise desire—with spreadsheets, grants and a steely long game.
The book is at its sharpest when Hong punctures the myth of effortless cool. She tours idol boot camps that would make investment bankers blanch, a society obsessed with polish, and an ecosystem where failure is not romanticised but fixed. Cool, she argues, can be trained—sometimes brutally.
She is no evangelist. With dry wit, Hong exposes the darker underside: pressure-cooker perfectionism, the commodification of youth, the relentless optimisation of faces, bodies and emotions. Korean cool, she reminds readers, is as much factory as fantasy.Stylistically, the book moves at K-pop tempo—snappy, self-aware, lightly irreverent. Hongwrites like an insider with a sceptic’s eyebrow permanently raised. The prose is sharp without being academic. This is economics in eyeliner.
If there is a flaw, it is deliberate. Readers seeking obsessive deep dives into specific bands or shows may find Hong more interested in systems than stars. But that, too, is the point. This is not fandom. It is a study of how nations brand themselves—and win.
The Birth of Korean Cool is ultimately a warning to every country chasing relevance. Soft power is not vibes; it is policy. Cool is not magic; it is management. Seoul did not wait to be discovered. It engineered desire—and exported it. The rest of the world is still humming along, trying to catch the tune.
(Thanks to Sameer Nair for the gift. Paperback available on Amazon at Rs 1,612. Publisher: Picador; pp 331.)
AD Agencies
Prakash Nair reportedly quits Ogilvy after 23 years
One of the agency’s longest-serving leaders has moved on, with his next destination still unknown
MUMBAI: After more than two decades at one address, Prakash Nair has left the building. The president and head of office, north at Ogilvy has moved on from the agency, according to highly placed industry sources. His next move remains unknown. Ogilvy did not respond to requests for comment.
Nair spent over 23 years at the agency, making him one of its longest-serving senior figures. He was elevated to lead the Gurugram office in April 2022, a role that put him at the helm of Ogilvy’s northern operations at a time of considerable churn across the advertising industry.
Before taking charge in the capital, Nair served as associate president at Ogilvy Mumbai, where he worked on some of the agency’s most prized accounts, including Mondelez, Tata Motors, and BP Castrol. Over the years, he built a reputation for driving modern, integrated, and award-winning work, the kind that wins metals at Cannes and keeps clients from straying.
His departure was marked in style. A farewell gathering was held in Delhi, attended by senior figures from across the advertising fraternity, a signal of the regard in which Nair is held in an industry that does not always pause to say goodbye properly.
Where he goes next is the question the industry is now asking. After 23 years at one of the world’s most storied agencies, the answer, when it comes, will be worth watching.
