ABOUT

We began in January 2001. Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Johnson & Johnson, Hyundai Card, Samsung Fire & Marine. From the first digital marketing for global brands to integrated on/offline campaigns, from branding to performance, from consulting and planning to design and production — we did nearly everything an ad agency could do. The moment we threw open the first-generation digital marketing market, we grew fast, carried by the speed of the digital industry itself. Hundreds of brands and campaigns. From the very start, we sat at the front of the industry.

Revenue, profit, and investment. Awards across digital marketing. The industry's first idea, first project, first solution, and so on. Within ten years of starting, the business results were more than enough. And yet the most meaningful fruit 9fruits left behind was something else entirely.

Through an internship called 'Sinin-yechan' (In Praise of Newcomers), more than 100 advertising newcomers learned their first work in brand and advertising here. 'The Second Button', 'Counting the Stars at Night', 'New Advertising Conference'. Seminars that dreamed of sustainable brands, cause marketing, and a new turn for advertising. Workshops that ran from Tokyo to Shanghai, all the way to Heaven Lake on Mount Baekdu. As much as making campaigns, we cared about raising the people who would make them, sharing knowledge, and building the culture of the industry.

The greatest thing 9fruits left behind was not a list of campaigns, but people who always thought of a different value even within a tedious advertising industry. Even now, we see work at several agencies carried on by those inspired by the culture of 9fruits.

We believed the craft of marketing was the ability to look closely at a customer's value, and we were wary of the industry's marketing myopia. But the marketing that succeeded in the market was, in the end, the work of stimulating lack and desire. Creativity was the craft of exaggeration and packaging, and brands were built on concept rather than identity.

Around the time Alex Bogusky left advertising to find his soul. Around the time DDB's old warning — Do this or die, the single line that advertising untrue will, in the end, kill everyone — began to read like my own story. A documentary about the architect Jeong Guyon, and the first 'Sustainable Brand' conference held in San Diego, led 9FRUITS away from the work it knew so well, toward somewhere else.

The turn required a time of some chaos. Passing through that time, in 2019, we declared that we would no longer work the old way in the old market.

During the time of transition, we met many social ventures. Their brands — their 'own story' — were rich. Yet they were like a lamp set under a bowl; their light was still too faint to brighten the market.

Social ventures speak of purpose; large corporations speak of profit. But what divides the two is not reality — only the limit of imagination. A path where purpose becomes profit. A third way that refuses to choose one over the other. That is the alternative we set out to find.

In the end, we believe every brand is the work of persuading a single sentence.

'Another World is Possible' (또 다른 세상은 가능하다)

A brand is something like a web of meaning handed to those who want change, and we help that alternative brand give off its light. To carry the beauty of the alternative and the power of the alternative into the world — so they no longer stay under the bowl, but rise onto the lampstand and shine. To make a brand a lighthouse, not a neon sign. This is the alternative work that 9fruits, now in its 26th year, is doing today.