u/Famous-Relative-4340

Hey everyone, I just really need to vent because I feel like I’m going crazy at my job and I wonder if anyone else has experienced this kind of culture clash.

I work at a K-beauty marketing agency here in Seoul. Honestly, my actual job sounds fun on paper: I'm supposed to find foreign creators living in Korea and give them free skincare or clinic treatments. That's it.

But the Korean corporate way of doing this is driving me insane. My boss literally wants me to just mass-send cold DMs to hundreds of expats on Instagram every single day. I keep telling my team, "Guys, this looks exactly like a scam! If I got this DM, I'd ignore it or block the account!" And of course, the response rate is terrible because our messages just go straight to the hidden/spam requests folder anyway.

I genuinely want to build real connections with expat creators, but the company culture here is just "numbers, numbers, send more DMs." It feels so creepy and disconnected from how social media culture actually works. I feel so bad for the creators receiving our copy-pasted corporate DMs.

Has anyone else working in Korean companies dealt with this kind of frustrating, old-school marketing mindset? Or if you make content here, how do you even tell the difference between a real opportunity and a spam bot?

Just feeling really defeated today trying to bridge this cultural gap. Thanks for reading my rant.

Hey everyone, I’m a marketer working at a K-beauty agency here in Seoul. I could really use some advice from the expat creator community.

My team’s goal is to find foreign creators living in Korea and offer genuine partnerships (like free skincare products or clinic treatments). Currently, our standard approach is sending cold DMs on Instagram.

However, we are running into a frustrating wall: Instagram often filters these messages straight into the "hidden requests" or spam folder. On top of that, I worry that receiving a cold corporate DM just looks like a scam bot, which is the exact opposite of what we want. We genuinely want to build real, long-term partnerships with creators here.

I want to suggest a better approach to my team, but I'm trying to navigate the cultural differences. For creators here, how do you actually prefer to be contacted by brands? What makes a message look like a genuine opportunity rather than just another spam request?

Any honest advice or insights on how to better connect with the community would be highly appreciated! Thanks for your time.