Rakuten Viki launched its first K-Drama Day advertising campaign in September 2025, starring Will Poulter, Victoria Justice, and Alicia Hannah-Kim across CTV
ARCHIVERakuten Viki Brings K-Drama Day to Life With Will Poulter and Victoria Justice
Rakuten Viki launched its first-ever advertising campaign for K-Drama Day in September 2025, starring Will Poulter, Victoria Justice, and Alicia Hannah-Kim across connected TV and digital platforms in the United States and South Korea. Created by Unfold Agency, the spot positions Viki as the definitive streaming home for Korean entertainment by casting recognisable Western talent as guides into the world of K-dramas, with the five-day celebration running from September 26 through September 30, 2025.
The campaign narrative centres on Will Poulter and Alicia Hannah-Kim introducing Victoria Justice to Viki's K-drama catalogue, weaving in fan-favourite titles including Lovely Runner, Study Group, Train to Busan, The First Night with the Duke, and Reborn Rich. The creative device is deliberate: Justice functions as a proxy for the uninitiated viewer, lowering the barrier to entry for English-speaking audiences in the United States who may be curious about Korean entertainment but have yet to commit to a first series. Poulter, known to US audiences through The Bear and Guardians of the Galaxy, and Hannah-Kim, recognised from Cobra Kai, lend the spot mainstream credibility without diluting the cultural specificity of the content being promoted.
Beyond the hero spot, each celebrity curated a personal K-drama watchlist on the Viki platform, incorporating acclaimed titles such as Taxi Driver, True Beauty, Guardian: The Lonely and Great God, and Reply 1988. This extension transforms a traditional advertising activation into an ongoing content experience, binding the campaign's reach to habitual platform behaviour. As reported by PR Newswire, K-Drama Day 2025 marked Viki's third annual celebration of the event and the first time the company deployed a formal advertising campaign around it, signalling a strategic shift toward paid media investment in the United States market.
ARCHIVERakuten Viki occupies a specialist niche in the global streaming landscape, competing not at the scale of Netflix, Prime Video, or Disney+ but as the leading destination for Asian entertainment among dedicated fans. The K-Drama Day 2025 campaign addresses a specific strategic tension: how to broaden the platform's user base in the United States without alienating the core Korean entertainment community that defines its identity. Unfold Agency resolved that tension by casting talent with dual-audience credibility — performers already embedded in American popular culture who are also genuine fans of the content they are promoting.
The global OTT streaming market provides meaningful context for this move. According to Mordor Intelligence, the global OTT streaming market is estimated at $221.0 billion in 2025, growing at a compound annual rate of 20.1 percent through 2030. In the United States, subscription video accounts for a dominant share of that revenue base, according to Dataintelo, with advertising-based models representing a growing secondary revenue stream. Rakuten Viki's decision to deploy a connected-TV campaign in the United States reflects a calculated effort to capture audience attention within the same premium video environments occupied by its larger competitors.
As reported by Variety on September 26, 2025, the campaign represents Rakuten Viki's explicit push to expand its presence among English-speaking audiences and US Asian-drama fans. That framing matters strategically: the platform is not simply retaining an existing community but actively recruiting adjacent viewers. According to rakuteninternational.com, Viki first announced an international K-Drama Day in November 2023, and the 2025 edition marks a significant escalation in promotional ambition. In South Korea, where Korean entertainment holds obvious cultural primacy, the campaign reinforces Viki's standing as a platform that takes the global reach of K-dramas seriously — a credibility signal directed as much at content partners and talent agencies as at end consumers.
The K-Drama Day 2025 spot employs a narrative device native to Korean drama itself: the reluctant initiate drawn into an unfamiliar world by trusted companions. Victoria Justice plays that initiate with conviction, allowing the creative to mirror the actual viewer journey that Rakuten Viki wants to catalyse among English-speaking audiences in the United States. The structure is economical — a scenario that communicates genre appeal, platform breadth, and community belonging within the compressed timeframe of a CTV pre-roll or digital placement.
Will Poulter and Alicia Hannah-Kim function as knowing insiders rather than conventional spokespersons. Their enthusiasm is positioned as personal rather than promotional, a distinction that carries weight in a media environment where audiences are acutely sensitive to the difference between authentic advocacy and scripted endorsement. Poulter stated publicly, as quoted by clapboard.com on September 29, 2025, that the work of K-dramas is defined by incredible creative and technical craft, a framing that elevates the content above genre entertainment and aligns with how committed fans actually discuss the medium. Justice, quoted by clapboard.com, described falling in love with the magic of K-dramas, reinforcing the campaign's emotional register.
The watchlist extension is a meaningful creative decision. By assigning each talent a curated list of titles — including Guardian: The Lonely and Great God, Reply 1988, and True Beauty — the campaign generates persistent on-platform content that outlives the paid media window. Production credits for the K-Drama Day 2025 campaign beyond the three featured talents and Unfold Agency's creative role are not publicly documented. The campaign was classified by Clapboard's ad archive under the creative category of Ongoing Characters or Celebrities, a designation that reflects the deliberate construction of talent as recurring ambassadors rather than one-off endorsers. Clapboard assigned the campaign a score of 63 out of 100.
Rakuten Viki's K-Drama Day 2025 campaign generated nearly 1 billion impressions across connected TV, digital, and social platforms, according to shortyawards.com. That figure positions the campaign as a substantial media event by the standards of a specialist streaming platform rather than a mass-market broadcaster, and it reflects the reach potential of a well-coordinated CTV and digital buy in the United States market when anchored by recognisable talent.
No verified wins at Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards are publicly documented for this campaign. The absence of formal industry recognition does not diminish the campaign's structural effectiveness. The mechanics — celebrity advocacy, platform-native watchlist content, and a five-day window of activations including prizes and talent exclusives — are designed to convert awareness generated by paid media into habitual on-platform behaviour. Each element of the campaign architecture serves a distinct function in that conversion journey.
The campaign's primary effectiveness signal is structural rather than metric-based. As reported by rakuteninternational.com, this was Viki's first formal advertising campaign for K-Drama Day after two years of running the celebration without paid media support. That escalation reflects internal confidence in the return on investment for celebrity-led CTV advertising in the United States, and it signals that K-Drama Day is now treated as a marquee moment in Viki's annual marketing calendar rather than a community-facing content programme alone. For a platform competing against Netflix and Prime Video for discretionary viewing time, the decision to invest in premium media channels is itself a performance indicator worth noting.
Rakuten Viki's K-Drama Day 2025 campaign is the platform's first advertising campaign for its annual K-Drama Day celebration. Created by Unfold Agency, the spot stars Will Poulter, Victoria Justice, and Alicia Hannah-Kim and ran across connected TV and digital platforms in the United States and South Korea from September 26 to September 30, 2025.
The campaign stars Will Poulter, Victoria Justice, and Alicia Hannah-Kim. Poulter and Hannah-Kim play experienced K-drama fans who introduce Justice to the world of Korean entertainment on Viki. Each talent also curated a personal K-drama watchlist on the platform featuring titles including True Beauty, Reply 1988, and Guardian: The Lonely and Great God.
Unfold Agency created the K-Drama Day 2025 campaign for Rakuten Viki. The campaign launched in September 2025 across the United States and South Korea, marking the first time Rakuten Viki deployed a formal advertising campaign around its annual K-Drama Day celebration, now in its third year as a platform event.
The K-Drama Day 2025 campaign generated nearly 1 billion impressions across connected TV, digital, and social platforms, according to shortyawards.com. The campaign ran for five days from September 26 through September 30, 2025, in the United States and South Korea, anchored by a hero ad spot and talent-curated watchlists on the Viki platform.
The campaign featured fan-favourite titles including Lovely Runner, Study Group, Train to Busan, The First Night with the Duke, and Reborn Rich within the hero spot. Celebrity watchlists extended the campaign to include Taxi Driver, True Beauty, Guardian: The Lonely and Great God, and Reply 1988, reinforcing Viki's depth of Korean entertainment content.
Clapboard's ad archive assigned the Rakuten Viki K-Drama Day 2025 campaign a score of 63 out of 100 and classified it under the creative category of Ongoing Characters or Celebrities. No verified wins at major industry awards including Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, or the Clio Awards are publicly documented for this campaign.
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