JTBC's K-drama poster doubles as a drug-test kit — Gangnam crime drops 57.4%

In late 2023, South Korea was gripped by a visible rise in drug crimes, and the specific fear was drink-spiking: colourless, odourless, tasteless drugs such as GHB slipped into drinks, most often to enable sexual assault. More than 8,000 such assaults had been reported over the previous three years. Meanwhile JTBC was about to premiere 'Strong Girl Nam-soon', a superhero K-drama about a mother-daughter trio born with superhuman strength who take on a drug cartel in Gangnam.

Cheil Worldwide's art director Kim Kang-min connected the two: why not make the drama's promotional poster itself a drug test? Each poster was printed on real reagent paper, carrying 27 detachable round test kits. Users peel one off, place a drop of a suspicious drink on the strip, and within a minute the reagent turns green if the drink is drugged.

The production was the hard part. Two months of searching were needed to find a printer willing to risk it, because the heat of printing could destroy the reagent. The fix was to shrink the poster, print it in an apricot tone close to the reagent's colour, and leave the reagent area free of ink. Posters then went up around Gangnam — subway stations, bus shelters, cinemas, cram schools, cafes, plastic-surgery clinics and pharmacies — and 800 were distributed, including to 20 Seoul universities.

The public response was explosive. People stripped the test kits off the posters, all 800 copies ran out, and cinemas and clinics asked for more. JoongAng Ilbo ran the story under a headline calling the posters a sensation. The LIA award entry reports that Seoul's drug-crime rate fell 57.4% after the campaign, and the work swept ADFEST 2024 — Gold in Direct plus Silvers in Media and Outdoor — and took Bronze at LIA 2024.