KakaoTalk Ads Run as a Channel Programme, Not a Banner Buy

In Korea the cheapest media you will ever buy is a message to a Kakao Channel friend you already paid to acquire. A send bills at roughly KRW 15 to 20. A Bizboard slot at the top of the chat list is bought at auction and then it is gone. So we plan the Kakao budget backwards: what does a friend cost, what does that friend return over two quarters, and how much display spend is therefore justified to add one. Everything below follows from that arithmetic. What happens before any spend: Nothing runs until the Korean side is real. A business registration number on the Kakao Business account, a verified Kakao Channel carrying a name a Korean speaker would actually search, and the consent copy written properly, which means marketing consent and the separate night-time consent Korean law requires for advertising messages sent between 21:00 and 08:00. Skip the second and you build a friend base you cannot legally message in the evening, which is when automotive and legal audiences read. Fixing it later means re-asking every friend you have. The buying: Kakao Moment, run as two connected motions. Friend-add campaigns judged on cost per friend and on the seven-day opt-out rate, because a cheap friend who mutes you is a loss booked as a win. Bizboard, video and sponsored display bought only where the friend maths supports it, or where a launch genuinely needs a week of chat-list presence. Kakao Pixel and the SDK go on the site before the first won auction, with Kakao Sync where you have login, because Kakao's reported conversions and your own server counts will disagree and we would rather know the size of the gap in week one than argue about it in month six. The message programme: Wide image, basic text and carousel sends, written in Korean by a Korean writer, scheduled against the legal send window and the reading behaviour of the segment rather than a European calendar. For a dealer group that is test-drive booking by region. For a law firm it is a consultation slot, which in Korea means writing inside the attorney advertising restrictions on outcome claims. We write to them and expect Kakao's review team to enforce them. Not included: We do not build the Korean site or the booking flow. We do not sell Kakao keyword ads on Daum search as a standalone line. We do not operate the channel's inbound replies. Someone has to answer in Korean during Korean office hours, and if nobody will, the message programme is the wrong idea and we will say so before you sign rather than after. We take no media commission and no platform rebate; Kakao bills your entity directly. Who this is not for: Brands with no Korean legal entity and no intention of forming one. Anyone who wants Kakao because a slide said 45 million Koreans use it, which is also true of the postal service. Teams whose success metric is impressions delivered. How the engagement runs: A fortnightly working session with your channel lead rather than a monthly deck. You hold the ad account and the Channel, we are named as an operator and removed with one click. Reporting pulls from the Kakao Moment API into your warehouse in raw form, so the numbers we discuss are numbers you can query without us. Spend shifts and creative decisions are logged with their reasoning, because in eighteen months somebody will ask why the Bizboard budget was cut and the honest answer should still be retrievable.