Family Month: I Love You campaign

Ticketmonster (T-mon for short) is one of South Korea’s leading social commerce sites. Since May is celebrated as the “Family Month” in Korea, T-mon came up with the “엄마 사랑해” or “I love you, Mom” campaign.
First, they asked their employees to call their moms and say

“사랑해”…

The reaction of the moms (or dads) in the video is pretty funny. In the first few seconds of the video, the employees are shown dialing the phone numbers. A man said it’s quite difficult to dial the number, while a woman said she already feel like crying. Without saying “Hello~” the employees immediately say “I love you”… the parents’ reactions are hilarious!
– I love you, too… what’s the matter?
– I love you, too… thank you. What are you doing?
– When did you not love me?
– Thank you… I love you, too.
– Why? Why? Why? What’s the matter?
– Why? Did you do something terrible?
– Who are you? Who are you?
– Who is the person beside you asking you to kid?
– Hahahahahahaha!
Obviously, older kids don’t say the word often enough. My husband asked what if he does the same ~ call his mom and tell her “I love you”? Then I remembered when he bought his mom a bouquet of flowers. She didn’t know how she would accept it. Those kind of showing affection is not quite common to his family ~ or perhaps in Korea in general. What I have seen in the eleven years that I’ve been living here is that people show their affection to their parents by treating them to a good meal, taking them on trips or giving expensive gifts during the holidays.
My Korean parents-in-law enjoy the same kind of affection ~ phone calls, a good meal and road trips.
In another video, T-mon set up a booth in a public area. They invited people inside their booth to call their moms and tell them “I love you”.
The video starts with the question: “How often do you call your parents?”
Then people get inside the booth and ring their parents to say “I love you”…
Some of the responses are…
– I love you, too.
– I’ll send you money.
– Where are you hurt?
– Did you eat something?
– Did you get drunk?
– Do you need money?
– You didn’t anything bad, right?
– You are my son, right?
– Why? Are you going to the army?
Then they asked the parents what they need… and most of them said “nothing”.
Oh, one mom said “No, no, no… I love you more”

In the end, it only takes ten seconds to make someone happy and T-mon dares the viewers to call.
When I first saw the video (through Zel Kim’s FB post), I thought T-mon thought of this campaign because of that Kakaotalk message of a student in the Sewol ferry tragedy. A search on Daum showed that they came up with it a few days before the sea accident, so it doesn’t have anything to do with this campaign.