Kia is amping up the promotion of its facelifted Sportage SUV by collaborating with the hit Netflix series Squid Game – but in doing so it appears to have forgotten a key scene of the show involving a different South Korean carmaker.
A series of videos is being released to promote the second season of the TV show, in which contestants take part in challenges which determine a final winner who scores an eye-watering amount of money.
The videos, uploaded to YouTube, promote the Sportage by showing the TV series’ ‘Masked Men’ using a number of its features and, in future installments, “embarks on a journey […] breaking the restrictions and venturing into a new world”.
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While this sounds like a relatively normal way to promote your product by using one of the most popular pieces of media produced in recent years, Kia has seemingly forgot why the show’s protagonist, Seong Gi-hun, is in serious debt.
The show paints a grim picture of working at a Korean carmaker, with a flashback in episode five showing Gi-hun had been laid off by fictional carmaker Dragon Motors, where mass layoffs led to violent confrontations with law enforcement.
Gi-hun subsequently emerges from the flashback after watching someone seemingly being killed in front of his eyes.
Though Dragon Motors isn’t real, the riot the scene is based on was, occurring in 2009 at a SsangYong (now KGM) factory – the brand’s former name meant ‘double dragons’ – after the South Korean carmaker announced it would lay off thousands of workers.
Members of the workforce took over the factory in May 2009 and weren’t effectively overthrown for 77 days, with the strike reaching its end in August of the same year.
No deaths occurred during the strike, however.
