SOUTH KOREA. Lotte Duty Free has clinched two top prizes at the Social i-Awards 2023 held yesterday at Lotte World Tower in Songpa-gu, Seoul. The retailer received the Instagram Marketing Innovation Grand Prize and the YouTube Channel Grand Prize for the General Shopping category.
Hosted by the Korea Internet Professionals Association, the Social i-Awards is the country’s largest social media content awards programme. It honours companies that best exemplify innovation and excellence in social media platforms in terms of branding, digital service, marketing and content.
Finalists were selected by a panel of 4,000 internet experts.
Lotte Duty Free has been lauded for its innovative way of providing duty free shopping content through Instagram formats. It was also recognised for delivering engaging marketing content on its YouTube channel. All its social media platforms were singled out for their digital marketing capabilities.
According to the retailer, its Instagram and YouTube accounts are the most followed in the travel retail industry, with 480,000 and 770,000 subscribers, respectively.
By producing multilingual content in English, Chinese and Japanese as well as Korean, the inflow of global customers to its social media channels has been maximised, adding to Lotte Duty Free’s brand value, the company said.
Its most popular self-produced content is the ‘LDF Original’ series, which starred Lotte Duty Free models and some of the hottest names in K-pop including Lee Jun-ho, Stray Kids and Aespa. Its dramas, musical films and music videos have accumulated 55 million views.
‘LDF Magazine,’ which features Korean lifestyle areas such as K-beauty and K-fashion, represents Korean culture and products to customers around the world.
Lotte Duty Free Marketing Division Head Roh Jae-seung said: “SNS is an indispensable and important marketing channel for customer communication and corporate image enhancement.” ✈
