How The Best Brand Characters Are Getting Their Own Shows

Some brand characters live on packaging. Others live in the culture. See how a shift in screen time turns a simple mascot into someone people truly know, and why vertical video finally makes that transition accessible to every brand team.

Screen time for brand IPs

Bellygom started as a pink bear that CU convenience stores created as a promotional mascot in 2018. By 2023 it had generated more than 20 billion won in character goods revenue, opened a flagship pop-up in Times Square, and built a social following in the millions. Consistent animated content across digital platforms gave audiences enough repeated contact with the character that they stopped processing it as a brand asset and started thinking of it as a character they genuinely cared about.

GS25 and CU demonstrate what that affection is worth commercially. When GS25 launched Blue Archive ramen in collaboration with a gaming IP, 130,000 units moved in 10 days. When CU released Teenieping ramen, 250,000 units sold and the line expanded into 21 products. Characters that had been animated, serialized, and distributed long enough to build real audience relationships drove those results. Fans were not just buying ramen. They were buying a chance to interact with characters they already loved.

Japan built the foundational playbook long before Korea scaled it. The Japanese character goods market sits at roughly $20 billion annually, built on characters that started as simple mascots and grew into cultural institutions. Kumamon, a regional bear created to promote Kumamoto Prefecture, has generated over 160 billion yen in licensed product revenue. Hello Kitty grew from a coin purse graphic into an $8 billion annual licensing empire because Sanrio treated the character as an ongoing creative entity with an evolving life rather than a static promotional asset. Give a character enough content that people develop genuine attachment, and the merchandise follows.

Why vertical video makes this model accessible to every brand

The traditional path from mascot to beloved character required either a feature film budget or the patience of a decade-long licensing strategy. Even the Bellygom model, consistent digital animation across platforms, required a dedicated content operation that sits beyond what most marketing teams can realistically sustain.

Animated vertical series change that cost structure significantly. A brand character that used to need a full animation studio and a multi-year commitment can now build episodic presence on a schedule that fits inside a marketing budget. The character gets the screen time it needs to move from simple recognition to the kind of audience affection that drives merchandise demand and makes product collaborations feel like events.

The format also reaches the right audience where they already are. The consumers driving licensing revenue in Korea and Japan are mobile-first and platform-native, spending their attention in vertical video feeds.

A character that appears in a vertical series shows up in the same environment where that audience decides what to follow, what to share, and what to spend money on.

The path every collectible character has taken

Every character that grew from a concept into a cultural fixture followed a similar arc. A character needs a personality before it needs a product line, and it needs an audience that chose to follow it before that audience can be invited to buy something.

Vertical animation makes this arc achievable for brand characters that do not have Nintendo's development budget or Sanrio's 50-year head start: a food brand mascot with a strong visual personality, a gaming character with deep lore that never made it to screen, a sports team mascot with decades of fan recognition but no animated series of its own, a toy brand character from the 1990s still carrying genuine nostalgia equity among adults who are now parents. The production infrastructure that makes running this arc affordable now exists in a way it simply did not before.

Brands across Asia already building this

Pengsoo is one of the clearest recent examples. EBS, South Korea's public broadcaster, created a giant genderless penguin character in 2019 and gave it a YouTube channel and a continuous content schedule rather than treating it as a campaign mascot. Within ten months Pengsoo had 2 million subscribers and generated approximately $7.6 million in revenue. It was named South Korea's Person of the Year in 2019, which is a remarkable outcome for what started as a children's broadcaster character.

Hyundai Mobis and AhnLab both used branded animated series to reach Korean millennials and Gen Z with content that extended well beyond a standard campaign. Hyundai Mobis released a racing animation featuring its in-vehicle technology through a character called Moby, earning over 250,000 views in 3 days. AhnLab serialized a webtoon on Naver around an AI robot character learning about digital security, which ran to a third season with a 9.83 platform rating. Both brands found that a character with an ongoing story built audience engagement that traditional advertising formats could not match.

Southeast Asia is moving into this space actively. Sunway Group in Malaysia partnered with AdAsia to turn their existing brand mascots into an animated series called Gogo and Bebe Wonderland, launching in 2026 with original music, a virtual recreation of Sunway City as the story world, and merchandise and live events running alongside the series from season one. Bibigo has been running its mascot as a multi-market content operation on WEBTOON and YouTube simultaneously, reaching audiences across Korea, the US, and Southeast Asia through episodes. The gaming and anime characters that Korean convenience stores compete to collaborate with built that cultural position the same way: through animated series that ran long enough for real audiences to form around them.

The opportunity sitting in every market

Every market that has brand characters and a mobile-first audience has the same opportunity, which at this point is essentially every market. A cereal box mascot that three generations of kids have grown up with. An esports team character that fans draw art of but has never appeared in original animated content. A regional brand mascot that an entire country recognizes but nobody thinks of as a character worth following week to week. All of these have real audiences already there. The format that builds those audiences into something commercially meaningful is what animated vertical series provide.

StoryCo is the largest producer of vertical animated content in the world. We have produced more than 200 hours of animated vertical content across 400+ titles, with 800+ voice actors delivering performances across languages.