ILLIT's "It's Me" Sparks K-POP's Next Marketing Playbook

ILLIT may have just delivered K-POP's first real marketing shift since 2020, when Zico turned short-form dance challenges into an industry standard. The group's recent in-house promo videos for "It's Me" have pulled the kind of attention agencies usually spend months trying to engineer.

"It's Me," the title track of ILLIT's fourth mini album "MAMIHLAPINATAPAI," sat at No. 3 on Melon's Top 100 main chart on May. 18th. The placement is striking given how the song was first received.

Early reactions were mixed. Some listeners felt the track moved away from the dreamy, princess-leaning visual world fans had come to associate with ILLIT. "Taken on its own, this promo cycle is fine," one fan wrote, "but it doesn't feel like the ILLIT I knew."

That sentiment shifted once the group leaned into a "taekwondo girl" concept. The music video, released on April. 30, briefly showed the members in taekwondo uniforms with a frilled mini skirt. Carrying that styling onto live music shows is what set the conversation off across YouTube and other platforms. Viewers praised the fit between the song's bright tempo and the sharp, extended limb movements borrowed from taekwondo. ILLIT later filmed a choreography video with members of Little K-Tigers, a youth taekwondo demonstration team.

The bigger shift, though, has come from what ILLIT is calling 'easily digestible content', extremely short videos designed for quick, casual viewing on Instagram and TikTok. Starting on the 12th with a 15-second clip titled "It's 米," a parody of a Korean rice commercial, the group rolled out seven short videos in total.

The hook is wordplay on the song's title. In the rice ad parody, a woman tastes something and asks what's in it. ILLIT members then pop out of a sack of rice shouting "It's 米", using the Chinese character for rice, also pronounced "mi" in Korean.

Each clip is short, built around a single punchline, and engineered to pull viewers straight into the next one. The first video, "It's 米," reached 1.49 million views within six days of release. The other six are averaging around 600,000 views each.

It has been roughly six years since Zico's "Any Song" turned the dance challenge into K-POP's default promo tool in 2020. Before that, artists relied heavily on legacy media buys across radio and TV. After it, short, easy choreography clips designed for fan participation became the industry baseline. ILLIT is pushing past that template by producing offbeat short videos meant to be passed around and remixed as memes.

Some in the industry see this as a turning point. "After 'It's Me,' the old, simple promo approach won't survive in K-POP," one industry source said. "We're moving past fans just copying choreography. The next wave is fans turning scenes from an artist's own videos into memes. Creative, unexpected ideas are going to matter more than ever."