Advertising Information Transmission Rules · Marketing Consent
Marketing Consent & Commercial Message Regulation
What are advertising message rules?
- Promotional messages require prior consent, an ad label, and an opt-out
- Don’t mix transactional notices with promotions
- Keep records of consent and opt-out handling
What consent rules actually change is not the wording of your messages but the record keeping that happens before sending. However carefully you write the content, you can’t send without evidence that you may email that address. Conversely, even a clumsy notice is fine if consent records and an opt-out mechanism are in place. That is why organizations that apply these rules properly usually redefine their mailing list as not a “collected list” but an “asset backed by proof”.
In Korea, the basics are an (Ad) label at the very start of the subject line, plus the sender’s contact details and instructions for opting out or withdrawing consent in the body. To send between 9 p.m. and 8 a.m., you must get separate consent for nighttime messages. When someone opts out, you must report the result to them within 14 days, and every two years from the date of initial consent you must reconfirm each recipient’s consent status. A point that is often missed: consent to collect and use personal information and consent to receive promotional messages are two separate things. Detailed requirements and fine amounts may change, so check the latest laws and regulations before finalizing your sending policy.
Channel boundaries also need separate attention. Kakao Alimtalk is meant for informational messages such as orders and reservations, but Friend Talk, sent from the same channel, is promotional and requires consent. The argument that 'it’s a corporate email, so it’s exempt' does not hold. Because the recipient reads it in a personal account, it is safer in practice to treat it the same way. For a list that includes overseas customers, the rules depend on where the message is sent from, so complying with Korean rules is not the end of it.
The most common mistake is assuming that receiving a business card means you have consent. The moment you bulk-upload 500 trade show sign-in sheets and send a first email, complaints come in. When a verification request follows, the person in charge can’t produce a single consent screen, and the send ends up classified as sent without consent. The same goes when the unsubscribe link requires a login, or when someone who opted out stays in the sales team’s CRM and gets added to the next campaign. The opt-out list must be enforced in both the sending tool and the CRM at the same time, and consent records should live in a system, not in a personal PC folder, so they survive a change of owner.
John KimInstructor John Kim, author of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum Consulting
Euijung KimBrand strategist with 30 years in advertising, formerly a division head at Daehong CommunicationsAs spam became a social problem, countries wrote the prior-consent principle (opt-in) into law. In Korea, the Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection governs commercial advertising messages. Requirements differ by country, such as the EU’s GDPR and the US CAN-SPAM Act, so sending abroad calls for separate checks.
The marketing team at Company A, an industrial parts manufacturer with 320 employees and annual revenue of around KRW 90 (≈ US$1) billion, launched a monthly newsletter to 12,400 leads collected over three years from trade shows and web inquiries. Within two days of the first send, 14 spam complaints and angry calls came in. The team halted sending and spent six weeks rebuilding the process. (Hypothetical example)
- When Ms. Kim of the marketing team opened the list, only 3,100 records had both the consent wording and the consent date and time, and the legal officer put it plainly: “A business card from a trade show can’t be treated as consent.”
- We went through all 12 types of outgoing messages with the sales director and sorted them: 7 quote and delivery-date notices as transactional, and 5 seminar invitations and new-product announcements as promotional. We then separated the templates and sending accounts.
- For the 9,300 records without proof of consent, four sales reps spent three weeks re-obtaining consent by phone, logging the call date and time and the script used in the CRM. As a result, 1,180 records became sendable contacts again.
- We asked the development team to build the following into the sending tool: an automatic (Ad) prefix on subject lines, a block on sends after 9 p.m., one-click unsubscribe, and a notice of the processing result within 14 days.
- They synced the opt-out list to the sending tool and the sales CRM in real time, preventing complaints like “I clearly unsubscribed, and it came again.”
- Six weeks later the send list had shrunk to 4,280 records, but the open rate rose from 11% to 27% with zero spam complaints, and seminar sign-ups grew from 8 to 23 per session.