K-Drama PPL: One Quarter of the Screen, by Law

The Broadcasting Act caps placement at 5% of run time, 30 seconds a brand, a quarter of the screen. From October 2026 it becomes a third. A slot: 1bn won.

🇰🇷 Korea·August 8, 2026·9 min read

You have probably paused a Korean drama to look at a lip product, a drink or a car. The next question is always the same: was that placed there by accident, or paid for?

It was almost certainly paid for. What is less obvious is that the size of the product on screen and the seconds it may appear are set by law.

And that law is changing right now. The widely quoted "one quarter of the screen" becomes one third from October 2026. Products in future dramas will be visibly bigger.

At a glance

Rule	Current	Effective October 2026
Product size on screen	Up to one quarter	Up to one third
Total exposure	5% of total running time	Unchanged
Per brand	30 seconds	Unchanged
Mid-roll ads allowed from	Programmes of 45 minutes+	30 minutes+
Mid-roll count (45–60 min)	1	2
Mid-roll count (60–90 min)	2	3
Excluded genres	Children's, news, current affairs, debate	Unchanged
Timeline	Public comment closed 27 July 2026	Promulgation September, effect October

Only three rows actually change, and all three point the same way: more room, more often, in shorter programmes. What the table does not say is why a regulator would loosen advertising rules at the exact moment advertisers are leaving. That answer is not in broadcasting at all.

When and why placement became legal

Product placement (PPL) means showing a commercial product inside the programme itself. In Korea it became formally legal with a 2010 amendment to the Broadcasting Act enforcement decree. Before that it was prohibited in principle, which is why older Korean dramas are full of logos covered with tape or blurred in post.

Legalisation came with limits: 5% of running time, 30 seconds per brand, one quarter of the frame. Children's programming and news, current affairs and debate shows are excluded outright.

Once you know those three lines, dramas look different. A character holding a drink with the label turned toward camera while delivering dialogue, a shot that pans across a car grille before anyone gets in — the length and size of those shots are calculated values, not a director's whim.

The 30-second-per-brand cap in particular shapes the visual grammar. You cannot show one brand at length, so you split it into short repeated appearances. When the same café reappears across many episodes, or the same drink keeps turning up, that is the cap being spread out.

Why the rules are being loosened — the broadcasters' numbers

The deregulation has a financial cause.

Metric	Value
Broadcast ad revenue last year	2.0134 trillion won (-12.3% year on year)
Terrestrial broadcasters' operating loss	117.4 billion won, a third consecutive loss-making year
Terrestrial ad revenue trend	About 1.9 trillion won in 2015 → about 800 billion won in 2024 (-56%)
For comparison: total Korean ad industry billings	19.7885 trillion won in 2024 (+1.9%)

The last row is the point. The advertising market as a whole grew while broadcast advertising halved. The money did not disappear; it moved to another screen. Which screen is visible in the Korean app usage table — YouTube at 113.6 billion minutes a month against Netflix at 5.61 billion.

So the government chose to enlarge the area and frequency that advertising may occupy on the screens broadcasters still have. For a viewer, that means products inside dramas are about to get bigger and more frequent.

It genuinely sells — including across borders

The effect shows up in numbers. Placement in a hit drama costs over 1 billion won for a single brand, and that price holds because it works.

tvN's Queen of Tears (2024) featured nine luxury vehicles including a Mercedes-Benz Maybach. Mercedes-Benz Korea reported a double-digit percentage rise in online showroom visitors versus the previous quarter.

But the example that matters most to Southeast Asian readers is older. In KBS2's Descendants of the Sun (2016), the Laneige Two Tone Lip Bar used by Song Hye-kyo recorded double-digit sales growth at Singapore counters. A scene shot in Korea turned into till receipts in another country.

This is why placement in Korean drama is not a domestic advertising decision. Dramas travel, and the products inside them travel with the show. When a Korean cosmetics brand spends this kind of money on a drama, the target is often shelf space abroad, not domestic sales.

'Wanpan' — the Korean word for it

There is a Korean word for the outcome.

Wanpan (완판, 完販) means sold out — literally "completely sold". Attach a person to it and you get wanpan-nyeo (완판녀, a woman) or wanpan-nam (완판남, a man): the person whose worn or used item sold out. Korean entertainment media use this constantly.

What makes the word interesting is that it is also used when there was no advertising at all. If a sponsored product sells out, that is an advertising success. If a bag an actor carried privately through an airport sells out, that is a different kind of event. Korean uses the same word for both. Which means the term is less a measure of ad performance than a measure of that person's pull.

Viewers are not being fooled

Survey results are worth reading carefully here.

Say placement breaks their immersion: 58.9% (15.8% strongly, 43.1% somewhat)
Feel resistance toward placement: 55%
Believe placement exceeding the legal limit exists on air: 68.5%

More than half are uncomfortable, yet the market grows and the rules are being relaxed. That gap is the current state of Korean placement.

The reading is that viewers are not deceived by placement; they watch knowing it is there. Which is why recent years have brought a directing style that treats it as an open joke — a character says a brand name with unnatural precision and another character mocks them for it. It is less an attempt to hide the rule than turning the rule into a joke shared with the audience.

What this means where you are

Situation	Why it happens	What to do
You want to find that product	Placement is timed to new product launches	During the run or just after is the easiest window. A product from a drama several years old is often discontinued
You know the brand but not the shade	Shade codes are never visible on screen	Korean fan communities and beauty accounts publish "[show] ep.[n] lip colour" breakdowns, usually faster than official announcements
It is not sold in your country	Many are Korea-only domestic lines	Check your local official store first, then Korean proxy buying, then a trip. Some are easiest to find in person at Olive Young or Daiso
The car or appliance model does not exist locally	Korean and export specifications carry different model names	Search by year plus trim level on your local official site rather than the Korean model name
What changes next	The size cap widens to one third in October 2026	Products will be captured larger, so pausing the frame will make labels easier to read — shade names included, in many cases

For readers in Vietnam and Thailand, the third row matters most. Brands with established Southeast Asian distribution, like Laneige, can be bought at home. But a large share of what appears in Korean dramas sits in domestic retail channels only — convenience stores, Olive Young, Daiso. If a Korea trip is on your calendar, keep that list separately.

Sources

#Korean drama #Terms explained #Shopping #Industry structure