Shinsegae Department Store’s main branch in Jung-gu, Seoul, premiered a new Christmas film on its Shinsegae Square LED facade at 5 pm on November 6, turning one of the Korean capital’s most photographed buildings into a 3D anamorphic stage for the final stretch of the year. The video will screen daily from 5 pm to midnight until January 31.
Shinsegae Square, installed two years ago on the department store’s exterior wall, has become a seasonal landmark in its own right, with each year-end programme drawing crowds who film and photograph the facade. This year’s production runs three minutes and 40 seconds and is titled “A Fantastical Journey of Delivering Christmas Wishes.” It follows a bear who guards a post office, loads letters filled with wishes onto a balloon boat, arrives at an ice castle and completes a Christmas tree that warms the village, closing with the line “Send your Holiday Wishes.”
The technical centrepiece is 3D anamorphic animation — a rendering technique that uses forced perspective and optical illusion to make a flat surface appear to have depth. In this case the bear appears to leap out of the screen, and waves appear to crash inside a transparent glass wall. The effect depends on the geometry of the facade and on a viewing position that most pedestrians naturally occupy, which is why anamorphic content works best on buildings that face a wide plaza or a broad crossing rather than a narrow street.
The soundtrack is equally deliberate. The score combines the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, the “Choral”, with Christmas carol melodies, and was enhanced with a live recording by a 60-member orchestra from Vienna. Pairing the most recognisable choral work in the Western canon with seasonal songs gives the film a scale that a purely jolly holiday track could not, and the Vienna recording adds a layer of cultural authority that Korean audiences will read as premium.
Kim Sun-jin, Vice President and head of Shinsegae Department Store’s sales division, said the company hopes many people will warmly close the year at Shinsegae Square while enjoying a video that encapsulates wishes. The framing is commercial but the function is civic: in a district where retail, tourism and transit overlap, a large-scale seasonal facade gives the street a reason to gather after dark during the coldest, darkest months.
For the out-of-home industry, the Shinsegae case illustrates a model that is spreading across East Asian capitals. Rather than selling the facade purely as advertising inventory, the retailer operates it as a media property with an editorial calendar — a summer programme, a Christmas programme, cultural collaborations — and monetises the resulting attention indirectly through footfall, brand equity and social distribution. The screen is not a billboard that happens to be on a building; it is the building’s public face.
That model has costs. A three-minute-forty film with orchestral scoring, anamorphic production and a two-and-a-half-month run is a significant investment, and it only works where a landmark facade can command sustained public attention. But it produces something that standard DOOH inventory struggles to generate: an audience that arrives deliberately, stays for the duration, and films the result for other people.
Why it matters: Shinsegae Square’s 3D anamorphic Christmas film — Beethoven’s Ninth with a Vienna orchestra, a bear and a balloon boat, nightly from 5 pm to midnight until January 31 — shows a retailer running a landmark facade as a curated media property rather than as advertising inventory.
Source: The Chosun Ilbo
