| Episode 38. Competitor Analysis
Parte’s teaser began with a polished group logo.
Soon after, pretty boys in intense makeup began appearing one by one.
What stood out was that all of them were dressed in matching black outfits, and thick smoke blanketed the floor.
The short teaser ended with them standing in formation beneath a blood-red CG moon.
For a rookie group, it was well made, aside from the fact that everyone’s expressions were a little awkward.
“……They’re strong.”
Choi Jeho said. It was an impression as concise as he was.
“What kind of concept do you think it is? Since there’s a moon, maybe werewolves?”
“I think it’s probably the underworld. Their group name comes from the Parthenon, after all. Maybe they’re going with a Greek mythology concept from the start?”
I dragged the playback bar back to the beginning as I spoke.
I’d been too busy stanning Spark on someone else’s behalf to pay attention to other idols, but when the concept was this clear, there was no way not to know.
“We won’t know for sure until the next teaser comes out, though. Did they release the schedule for the next one too?”
“……They said it’s coming out next week.”
Next week was when Jang Junhu’s music video would be released.
On our side, there was no teaser to speak of. It was going straight to release.
I couldn’t tell whether that was because there wasn’t any proper promotional plan, or because they were trying to gather even the firepower that would’ve been split off to a teaser into the music video instead.
‘Even considering the difference between an idol group and a ballad singer, there’s definitely a comparison to be made.’
Maybe because I’d seen a filming site in person, even if only once, I could roughly gauge the scale of the set just from watching the teaser.
Maybe this was why people said that if you were going to be a servant, you should do it at a lord’s house.
I scrolled down and checked the comments.
They hadn’t even debuted yet, but maybe they’d already gained overseas fans, because half the comments were in English.
Just from the Korean comments that appeared here and there, the mood wasn’t bad.
≫ This is why I stan big companies
≫ The taste of capital is sweet
≫ Minil, congrats on your debut ♥ Let’s only walk the flower path!
≫ How does MYTH manage to bring in faces like that every time…… Every single day, there are newly handsome kids coming out
I could confidently say that our team’s visuals didn’t lose out anywhere either.
Starting with Lee Cheonghyeon, who was like white jade, Spark’s strength was also that not a single member had lacking looks.
There might be suspicions that my vision had grown clouded after making over twenty Spark cup holders, but this one thing, I could take pride in.
Because Spark had never received blatantly malicious comments saying there was a visual hole in the group.
It was just a shame that, with me joining as the very embodiment of an ordinary person, that honor would probably never be granted to this group.
Then the problem, naturally, had to be “capital.”
As trends became more important in the entertainment business, and as the scale of investment in the idol business changed, the public’s standards of evaluation rose relatively higher every year.
It was good that Spark’s debut schedule had been moved up and the gap with front-runners like Parte had been narrowed, but comparisons between groups were unavoidable.
≫ Honestly, Spark’s MV…… is really lame. It seems like UA is trying to spend money too, but it looks so cheap
≫ I can understand them saving money on stage outfits, but I wish they wouldn’t cheap out on the MVㅠㅠ They can only coast on the kids’ faces for so long
≫ The company just doesn’t want to spend money on anything unnecessary,ㅇㅇ Even if they shoot it like complete sh*t and put it out, the fans suck it up and love it, so why would they spend moneyㅋㅋㅋㅋ This is all something the fandom brought on itself
└ Wow, you’re blaming the fans for this?ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ └ㅇ┐
Even just the comments I’d seen while making Spark comment compilation videos were like this.
And if we got directly compared to a rookie group from a major agency?
It was obvious that people would already be excitedly slapping four or five consecutive screenshots of the music video backgrounds together, titling it “The Reality of Small and Mid-Sized Agencies,” and spreading it all over communities.
The image of being from a small or mid-sized agency itself wasn’t bad. What were we supposed to do if the company was actually small?
Besides, it wasn’t as if there were no cases of groups debuting from small and mid-sized agencies and succeeding.
But continuously planting the image that “the company doesn’t invest in the group” was dangerous. Because that alone made fans feel exhausted.
I might be someone who would be leaving before long, but Spark was a group that would last seven years. At times like this, we had to think from a long-term perspective.
To do that, it was important to somehow get a budget out of the company.
If necessary, I was planning to plead with them to let Lee Cheonghyeon write songs and Choi Jeho and Kang Giyeon make choreography, then calculate every bit of production cost we saved and pour it into the music video.
That way, forget seven years, we’d at least survive seven weeks.
‘Sh*t…… The fact that they disbanded on their seventh anniversary still pisses me off no matter how much I think about it.’
Damn. I’d been thinking too hard about the group’s future and ended up remembering something unpleasant.
It was a moment that called for deep breathing to find peace.
For the sake of my mental and physical stability, I handed over my phone, and Kang Giyeon and Jeong Seongbin started continuing through the comment section I’d been looking at.
With Lee Cheonghyeon joining in right away, a total of three people began reading the comments seriously, their faces gradually hardening.
“They get malicious comments even when they look this cool……. And it’s only a teaser.”
“Even this is divisive? Was I the only one who thought the sound was good?”
At the same time, the guys were vigorously grinding down their own mental strength.
If I left them alone like this, they looked ready to spend the whole night writing positive comments for Parte, only to get interrogated about whether they were doing viral marketing.
Kang Giyeon’s face in particular had turned utterly ashen.
“If people who haven’t even debuted yet get this many hateful comments…… then after debut……”
“Hey, hand over the phone.”
“Ah, yes.”
“And from debut day onward, you guys are banned from monitoring comments and searching your own names. Got it?”
“Huh?”
That was close. While monitoring someone else’s team, I’d almost dragged every single one of our guys into the mire.
I decided to clearly remember the three people who required special caution when it came to monitoring.
Even if reading comments gave me dry eye syndrome, I vowed that I would do the monitoring myself.
* * *
“Lastly, please say a few words about your resolution before this stage.”
“I’ll work hard. Please give us lots of support……!”
“Cut!”
When I called cut, Kang Giyeon, dressed in training clothes, let out a sigh as he stroked his chest.
The two of us were once again enthusiastically conducting the “Kang Giyeon-exclusive mock interview” tonight as well, without fail.
And after a whopping four weeks and three days, Kang Giyeon had produced remarkable results. It was a miracle like a midsummer night’s dream.
“You know this is the first time you finished an interview without your hands shaking even once today, right?”
“Really?”
Kang Giyeon looked surprised. I told him to check for himself and played the video I’d recorded.
Pronunciation good, volume good, comments good. This much was a huge improvement.
His gaze was a little unstable, and his answers were mechanical, but those were things we could practice gradually.
+
[SYSTEM] “Hidden Task” has been completed.
▷ Details: Help a member grow
▷ Reward: Experience Points (10)
▷ Accumulated Experience: 95
▷ Accumulated Points: 0
+
See? Even the system counted it as a success.
This was clear proof that Kang Giyeon’s ability score had gone up.
Kang Giyeon himself must have seen the change clearly too, because he couldn’t take his eyes off the camera screen.
“There are still a lot of things you need to fix going forward. You know that, right?”
“Yes. Especially my gaze…… It’s practically on the floor.”
“You can practice. Starting tomorrow, let’s try paying attention to other things too.”
After pointing out the next task, I cleaned up the tripod I’d set up on the floor.
‘Next time, instead of a phone camera, should I try to get my hands on some broken camera from somewhere and set it up?’
Even at Jang Junhu’s music video shoot, there had been several cameras. The pressure given off by lenses like those couldn’t be compared to the tiny nail-sized camera on a smartphone.
Just as I was starting to desperately long for even the camera Manager Nam had bought because he wanted to take commemorative photos in front of summit stones, Kang Giyeon, who was moving chairs behind me, spoke.
“Um, hyung.”
“What?”
“Where did you learn stuff like this?”
“Cough, huh?”
When I turned around, Kang Giyeon had an innocent face with not the slightest trace of malice.
He had no idea that he’d just stabbed a regressor’s weak point with a blade sharpened about a hundred times.
As if I’d been pierced by an awl, my heart pounded like it was about to burst.
“Learn? I didn’t. I just thought a little about how ‘practicing in a way that’s similar to the real thing might help.’ That’s all.”
I had learned. By using my superior as a negative example.
But Kang Giyeon didn’t let it pass that easily.
“It just seems like you point things out really thoroughly, hyung. The points you criticize are different every time too.”
“Maybe it’s because I have good eyes? Everyone always says I seem to have a good eye for things.”
“Hmm.”
You try taking in dozens of new employees at a time and running orientations. Your pupils will split too.
Still, I couldn’t very well tell him honestly, so instead, I went out confidently, as if daring him to do something about it.
“Why, you don’t trust my educational policy? Starting tomorrow, should I just play speech training videos from MeTube for you?”
“I’m sorry.”
Fortunately, Kang Giyeon backed down immediately.
Although my humanity might have rotted a little, there was nothing I could do about it.
What if they found out I knew what would happen in the future, squeezed all the information out of me, and then kicked me out?
That couldn’t happen. I was going to cling to the soles of your shoes like a leech.
“Do you think you can handle simple photoshoots, aside from interviews or stages? We have profile photos coming up soon.”
That was right.
The profile shoot for the photos that would be posted on portal sites after debut was soon.
If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t have kept Kang Giyeon, who needed to sleep a lot and grow quickly, here until this hour.
“If it’s just taking photos, I think I can do it to some extent. I was okay when we took ID photos at school too.”
Ah.
That photo where you couldn’t find even a trace of a smile, even if you took your eyes out, washed them, and looked again?
I recalled Kang Giyeon’s high school ID photo, which would later become famous as “the one and only Duke of the North shot in arts high school ID photo history.”
If he himself liked that upright impression, then it didn’t really matter how the photo came out.
Fans liked any photo as long as the features were clear too.
‘But he didn’t like photos like that very much…….’
I didn’t know whether it had been that way from the start, but Kang Giyeon tended not to like his own impression very much.
All the guys in this group were like that, but if they kept their mouths shut, they had faces that were perfect for being misunderstood.
‘Am I sick? No, Sparkler. I’m in a good mood today. ……Does my expression look that stiff?’
‘No, Gang-gyeon! Don’t lose heart! It’s because the camera quality is bad today! Right, everyone?!’
Kang Giyeon, who grew dejected whenever the topic of his impression came up, and Lee Cheonghyeon, who tried desperately to comfort him, appeared vividly before my eyes.
Of course, I had no intention of letting him off just because the shape of his face was something he was born with.
As long as he wanted correction himself, I’d turn him into a smiling machine even if I had to hook rubber bands to the corners of his mouth. I’d carve the sorrows of working life into his face.
Just as I was about to make him do something like “greet the members with a smile every morning,” Kang Giyeon spoke.
“I’ll practice taking photos more on my own.”
“Do you think you can do it?”
“Yes. Hyung, you should head in early today too.”
For a moment, I wondered if he was being considerate and telling me to go in early, but this guy was “that” Kang Giyeon.
There was no way the guy who had made me roll around on the practice room floor until 11 p.m. would suddenly show that kind of goodwill.
‘Well…… Whether I go early or late, there’s work to do wherever I am.’
If I stayed in the practice room longer, I would practice more, and if I returned to the dorm, I would work, so in reality, there was no change to my rest time.
“Yeah. Let’s call it a day.”
Still, I couldn’t send the kid off alone, so I wrapped up practice around then and packed my things.
Without even imagining that, a few days later, Kang Giyeon would return equipped with a bright, sunny smile.