▷ Separate Spark and Yu Hansu

▷ Reward: EXP (???)

+

My fists clenched on their own.

Because it basically confirmed that even without driving out Yu Hansu, a smooth debut was possible just by keeping him at arm’s length.

Forcing one person off is never an easy job.

Once he belonged to UA, the chance of firing him just for being in the way was slim. Legally, a company can’t dismiss a worker on a whim.

Besides, Yu Hansu hadn’t caused any fatal incident yet.

He just gave off a bad vibe, ran his mouth too much, and didn’t look like he’d do good work going forward.

But that wasn’t enough as a just cause to push him out.

It didn’t help that, outside the Planning Team, no department held a particularly negative impression of him.

If someone talks like that, he must have caused trouble somewhere.

Even the manager, when reporting the dispute between Yu Hansu and the Planning Team, seemed to understand well enough which side carried the liability.

And yet there’s still no noise inside the company?

In a place where, if you have an exit interview in the morning, the rumor’s everywhere by lunch?

Then there was only one thing to suspect.

Yu Hansu has latched onto a connection inside UA.

That happened often at Hanpyeong Industries too.

A manager’s nephew someone brought in, a director’s younger brother, and so on.

It’s hard to argue loudly about someone with strings or ties to power.

When you can’t throw someone out, picking a big fight with him does no one any good, so however dirty it feels, you end up matching the mood to some degree.

I didn’t know whether the power of connections had been in play before he joined or only afterward.

Either way, it was a headache.

Kim Iwol, career legend. Turns out office life leads you to sniff out parachute hires and cut them loose.

Until now, with no choice but to obey the boss, all I could manage was petty, needling acts of resistance.

Being an ordinary guy who can’t stage a mutiny didn’t help either.

But now the situation had changed.

Someone was clearly going to cause trouble, and there were people inside the company shielding him; that gave me grounds to cut out Yu Hansu.

“Should I make him leave on his own? I can’t play politics though...” All the fretting that had filled my recent days became meaningless in an instant.

That actually made the solution simpler.

"PD, Team Lead. I’m really sorry to cut into your work talk."

"Kim Iwol, didn’t I tell you not to butt in when the adults are talking?"

"Why are you so aggressive today, PD Yu? Iwol, go on. Say it."

So all I have to do is show results and get chosen?

Then there’s only one answer.

"It’s not much, but I also have an item in mind for the album."

"Hm?"

"If the company is still discussing it... I’d like to organize it and submit a proposal as well."

Take off the badges and compete on skill—that’s the idea.

Idol albums are as varied as group identities.

Dozens of idol groups debut in this country every year.

Even so, if you broadly grouped albums by disposition, you’d probably split them into photobook-type and concept-type.

First, photobook-type: it includes a photobook packed with many artist photos.

Next, concept-type: it still includes photos, but with a smaller share; in exchange it adds a small amount of merch or event elements.

Every fan has a preferred style, but Spark’s fans particularly disliked the former. The reason was simple.

≫ The otakus keep saying a million identical photos are all pretty, so they literally put in a million identical photos

≫ What’s the point of “100 unreleased photos included” if the background is all the same

└ I haven’t received my album yet... is it really identical...?

└ Yes, all shot in the same studio

└ Gasp... it’s too late to get a refund, right ㅠㅠㅠ

Because cash-strapped UA went for cost-efficient shoots, the quality hit rock bottom.

In an age when some new-school agencies share photos on a USB kit, UA alone did something that makes you say, “Sorry, Earth.”

Who wants to buy multiples of an album that gives you no satisfaction for the money? Especially a rookie album whose fansign slot odds won’t be high.

So in any case, we’d have to win on quality.

High-quality content comes from capital.

But an agency that even scrimped on outfits and studio rental—UA—obviously didn’t have that kind of capital.

A sigh escaped me on its own. Looked like I had to restart the research from hell.

“Assistant Kim, collect some welcome-kit references.”

At X-small companies—no, SMEs—CEOs regularly ◈ Nоvеlіgһт ◈ (Continue reading) catch innovation fever.

When it hits, they suddenly want to do something grand as if possessed.

Like redesigning the website, or reorganizing the company.

Or doing something they’ve never done to feel like their firm is keeping up with the times.

Around this time two years ago, the president at Hanpyeong Industries went through the same phase.

Maybe he hated the stodgy impression the company name gave off, or maybe he hated that a string of young employees had quit and the average age had shot up; either way, he wanted a young, stylish corporate culture.

His half-baked remark traveled to an executive team with no brains at all.

Then, via Manager Nam—head empty, echoing like a drum—it arrived at me, whose brain had rusted over.

Thus the mission assigned to me was a welcome kit as part of the grand operation “Recruit Young Employees.”

My “client” had about twenty mouths, including Manager Nam’s yap, so the requirements were many.

“It can’t cost too much, but it mustn’t look cheap.”

“Put in stuff young folks like. Don’t kids like that? Characters?”

“Assistant Kim, the director is asking whether that VR thing is just a matter of renting the device?”

It was all f***ing drivel, word for word. I still get dizzy thinking about it.

As they said, I worked hard to find something moderately inexpensive yet not screaming “value,” sleek yet with a retro touch.

What was it again? I’m sure...

[gasp]

I jolted awake, panting.

In front of me were a laptop with the screen gone dark and a crumpled notebook.

I remembered searching for album components. I must have dozed off face-down; my lower back ached.

It was pure luck none of the others came out to the living room at night.

If they’d seen an unidentified male silhouette collapsed on the dining table, there would’ve been shouting at midnight.

I nudged the mouse and the laptop lit back up. The file I’d been working on before I fell asleep was still open.

“Welcome kit,” huh.

I don’t remember what items I chose back then.

By the time I organized the ideas and reported them, the president had already gotten hooked on “management with substance.”

I don’t know how related that was to “management with substance,” but I clearly remember getting chewed out for not printing the welcome-kit report on scrap paper.

But this time is different.

To get rid of Yu Hansu entirely, I have to bring an item UA can’t help but adopt and carry it through to commercialization.

I butted into the meeting with zero prepared opinions; I’d better bring something worthy of that.

I blinked my gritty eyes a few times and checked the time on the laptop.

There was still about an hour before the student crew would be up.

I pressed my elbows, stretched once, and fixed my eyes back on the screen.

Before long, the PT day nobody wanted dawned.

There’s no rule saying you have to sit on your hands and take it; the planning work was wrapped up cleanly after some simple labor.

At the same time, the area under my eyes—briefly cleared during the MV shoot—went dark again.

I must have looked rough, because last night Kang Giyeon even spoke to me.

"Are you staying up again tonight?"

"Stay up? I’m sleeping a solid two hours, on the dot."

"You said you had something in mind. Does it still take that long?"

It takes that long because “having something in mind” was a lie.

With Yu Hansu and the Planning Team two seconds from grabbing each other by the hair, saying “I’ll start preparing now!” obviously wouldn’t fly, so I lied. This is why people shouldn’t lie.

Still, thanks to the grind, I came up with a fairly decent composition plan.

If the junior who taught me the Big Three Don’ts saw it, I could’ve gotten an objective evaluation. Too bad.

I brought my USB and entered the conference room, and the mood was nothing like when I first joined UA.

With one villain spouting nonsense, how could anyone look pleased.

The Planning Team Lead’s brow, which had grown chiseled wrinkles over the past months, looked pitiable. It could be a photo example under “Why companies must hire well.”

I swept my gaze in order: the CEO, whose mood had soured at the lack of progress despite adding manpower; the Planning Team, wanting to wrap up something—anything—soon; and Yu Hansu, arms crossed, glaring at me.

Normally, I’d start by thanking them for giving someone as lacking as me a chance, but there was no time for that now.

I cut to the chase.

Along with a PPT slide of a dusty box hidden in a corner of a school storage room, waiting to be discovered by Sparklers.

How do you approach this so you capture both “purchase desire” and “fandom heart”?

The answer for the former is pretty crisp.

Either make it broadly appealing, or make it extremely rare. Pick one.

Meaning, you either sell delicious fish-shaped pastries everyone likes, or you make a giant koi candy that nobody goes out of their way for but everyone wants to try once.

The fandom heart is different.

To me, fandom heart was, in one sense, obvious, yet the more you dig, the less you know.

Look at Manager Nam’s daughter.

She said everything Choi Jeho did was good, but when she attached a candid where he was wearing a neon-orange vest as his own clothes, she never failed to add, “Please erase that shitty vest!”

It wasn’t just the daughter. At least among the Spark fans I saw, they were contradictory.

There were plenty of fans who, in a positive way, were contradictory—saying they wanted to see the boys win first place and bawl, but the moment the kids’ eyes even glistened, they cried harder than the boys, saying, “Guys, don’t cry!”

And there were quite a few who said they’d saved up money, just please come back, but when the comeback happened, said, “Ah... honestly this time it’s kind of meh.”

From my days of proxy stanning as a deputy, this is how I roughly translated fans’ hearts:

“As long as you hit baseline, we’ll embrace it all, so please think before you come out!”

So I prepared this.

A concept that mixes something everyone has experienced at least once—school days—with something no one has ever seen.

Its name: the “Small and Precious Secret Box of a Certain Club, Found One Day by a Sparkler in the Corner of a Storage Room” album.