Elephant Company to host '2027 Marketing Seminar' on AI search strategies

Elephant Company announced Friday it will host the "2027 Marketing Seminar: Brand Content That Survives the AI Era" on Wednesday at Space Share Samsung Regency Hall in Gangnam-gu, Seoul.

The seminar will feature companies that have put generative engine optimization — known as GEO — into practice in AI-powered search environments, including lifestyle services platform Ajeongdang, SK Broadband and startup Littly, each sharing their strategies directly.

Among the most anticipated speakers is Ajeongdang, a lifestyle solutions platform that grew its sales 57-fold over four years. Chief Marketing Officer Lee Ha-seok said content that genuinely answers customer questions keeps working long after it is published, unlike paid advertising that stops the moment spending does. "We treat content as an asset and advertising as a tool to amplify its efficiency," he said.

Ajeongdang offers internet, home appliance and moving services under a single brand and has built a library of more than 9,000 pieces of search engine optimization (SEO)-based content. Rather than organizing its website around product listings, the company structured it around life events — moving, marriage, contract renewals — that prompt customers to seek out its services. It analyzes consultation records using speech-to-text technology to identify the exact language customers use, then incorporates those expressions into its content. Performance is tracked by content type: informational pieces are measured by impressions, clicks and time on page, while comparison and conversion content is evaluated by consultation requests, contracts signed and revenue contribution.

"AI only delivers information — whether that information is trustworthy ultimately comes down to the service the customer actually experiences," Lee said.

Park Sang-hyeong, head of the SEO strategy team and the person behind 5,000 pieces of content produced in-house, will also join the session.

SEO and GEO are strategies for improving the visibility of digital content in search and driving user traffic. SEO optimizes keywords, content structure and technical website elements so that specific pages rank higher in results on conventional search engines such as Naver and Google. GEO, by contrast, is designed to make content more likely to be referenced or cited as a source when generative AI tools — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and others — generate answers to user queries. Where SEO focuses on getting users to click through to a website from search results, GEO centers on building the credibility and citability of content within AI-generated responses.

SK Broadband will share how a major telecommunications company adapted to the AI search landscape. Manager Jeong Bok-hee of the AT/DT marketing team will present on how telecom service brands are discovered and compared in the age of AI search.

SK Broadband, which had long run its marketing around paid advertising, carried out a GEO project on its main website B World and expanded into organic channels. The company began by restructuring its most important pages first, then redesigned its promotional campaigns — previously organized around services — to reflect the questions and intent of customers. It also ran GEO training sessions for both internal teams and external operators.

"Understanding what questions customers are asking matters far more than deciding what you want to say," Jeong said.

Representing the startup world, Littly — a profile link and website-builder service — will take the stage. Im Ju-il, chief executive of Modooub, will present on Littly's SEO and GEO marketing journey as a small team. Littly runs a service with 400,000 members with a staff of five. After partnering with Elephant Company on a GEO project, it saw traffic from AI channels such as ChatGPT surge 358 percent within eight months. Users arriving via AI search clicked the sign-up button at roughly twice the rate of the overall average.

Strategy sessions addressing how to navigate the shifting marketing landscape heading into 2027 will also be on the agenda.

Elephant Company Chief Executive Kim Ye-ji will present on "The New Era of Paid AI and Organic Marketing," drawing on her firsthand experience running paid advertising on ChatGPT. Seonwoo Eui-seong, chief executive of Euclab Marketing, will cover YouTube strategies for brands in the AI era, while Kang Seul-gi, chief executive of Connect AX, will address how the role of content marketers is evolving and how marketing organizations can develop their own AI transformation strategies.

"There is strong interest in GEO, but technical optimization alone is unlikely to produce lasting results," Kim said. "Ultimately, a brand has to solve customers' problems and become the answer to their questions — and that is a challenge brands and their marketing teams must tackle together." She added that the seminar aims to bring together companies of different sizes and industries to share what changed when they started from the customer's question, and to collectively define the strategic benchmarks for 2027.