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HS Seoul, KTO agree to boost overseas tourism marketing

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By Kim Rahn
  • Published Mar 30, 2011 5:54 pm KST
  • Updated Mar 30, 2011 5:54 pm KST

By Kim Rahn

Seoul City and the Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) have agreed to cooperate on overseas promotions and marketing efforts.

Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon and KTO CEO Lee Charm signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to this end at Oh’s office in Seoul, Wednesday.

They will jointly make television ads for overseas TV stations and promotional video clips for online marketing hoping to attract 10 million foreign visitors to the country, especially to the capital.

“KTO makes TV and Internet ads promoting all parts of Korea, and we plan to have Seoul play a greater role in creating the ads than the other cities through the MOU,” a city official said.

“We’ll also seek aid from the organization’s 25 overseas branches, which have a broad network in foreign countries and marketing know-how. We’ll provide promotional items about Seoul to the branches and make use of travel fairs held abroad,” he said.

The MOU comes after the city council cut the city government’s overseas promotion budget. “We used to cooperate with related organizations, but plan to increase collaborative work this year following the budget cut. There are several overlapping tourism projects promoted respectively by the KTO and the Seoul Tourism Organization, and we’ll rationalize some of them to attain more efficiency,” he said.