KakaoTalk Ads: Channel Friend Base and Friend Talk

A Friend Talk message to somebody who has already added your Kakao Channel costs in the region of 15 won to send. An LMS to the same person's handset costs double or more and requires you to hold their phone number. That arithmetic, not reach, is the reason to advertise on KakaoTalk at all, and it decides what I report from the first week: cost per Channel friend added, and the share of those friends still receiving messages ninety days later. Before an account exists: Kakao Moment will not issue an advertiser account without a Korean business registration number. If you hold a Korean entity, the account is opened under it and I am added as an operator. If you do not, you contract a Korean agency of record yourself and I work inside their account. What I will not do is open the account under a registration I control and rent it back to you. On the day the engagement ends you would lose the friend base, and the friend base is the only durable thing this work produces. The acquisition half: Biz Board is the banner sitting above the chat list, and no other inventory in Korea occupies that position. I buy it on the add-friend objective rather than the site-visit objective. Pushing Biz Board traffic to a European domain is the standard way a Korean budget disappears: the click is expensive, the page reads as foreign, and nothing about the person is kept. Around it I run Kakao display and video across Daum for secondary volume at a lower cost per friend, and Kakao Sync so that anyone signing into your site with a Kakao login becomes a Channel friend in the same action rather than a second one. The retention half: Friend Talk is where the money comes back. Sends are cheap, but a Korean user blocks a Channel without hesitation and a blocked user is gone for good, since there is no re-permission path. Frequency is therefore set against measured block rate rather than a content calendar. I generally open at two sends a month, watch block and read rates for six weeks, and only then judge whether the audience tolerates weekly. Alim Talk, the template-approved notification channel, stays transactional. What I refuse: Biz Board bought as pure awareness with no Channel behind it. A Channel for a brand with no Korean-language reply path, because an unanswered inbound message in Korean does more damage than no presence at all. Sticker campaigns as an opening move; the format is real but it buys friends who never engage again. And I do not translate Italian or English creative into Korean and call that localisation. Korean copy is written by a Korean copywriter I brief and pay, and the invoice names them. Not included: Media spend, which you settle with Kakao or with your agency of record directly. Agency-of-record fees where one is needed. Your Korean site, checkout or payment gateway integration. Customer service staffing. Naver, which is a separate discipline and belongs to a separate vendor. Who this is not for: Brands testing Korea on a five-figure annual budget. Companies that want a Korean presence without answering Korean customers. Anyone whose measure of success is CPM parity with Meta, because Kakao is dearer per impression and the comparison leads nowhere useful. What you receive: A Channel with a growth curve you can read, a documented block rate and the cadence derived from it, and a monthly file stating what was spent, what came back through Friend Talk, and what I would switch off.