In the winter of 2025, something peculiar happened on the Korean internet. A real-estate advertisement accumulated fifty million views. Not a viral moment, not a celebrity scandal, not a social media trend engineered by algorithms—but a two-minute film about going home that moved through the country like a collective sigh of recognition.
The advertisement was for Switzen, a housing brand owned by KCC Construction. The campaign's central line—"집에 가자" ("Let's go home")—is, on its surface, unremarkable. In Korean, it is a phrase as common as breath. But in the context of a nation that works more hours than the OECD average, that measures success by proximity to exhaustion, that has built an entire culture around the assumption that rest is something you earn rather than something you deserve, those two words became something else entirely: a permission slip. A small act of rebellion. A diagnosis of a country's unspoken hunger.
This is the story of how a housing brand accidentally wrote the sentence that Korea had been waiting to hear.
The Architecture of Sentiment
The Switzen campaign—directed with a deliberate restraint that mirrors the aesthetic we saw in Culinary Class Wars—follows a simple visual grammar. Office workers on trains. Students in uniforms. Soldiers in transit. Travelers with luggage. Each frame captures a moment of movement, of bodies in transit between obligation and refuge. The film doesn't argue. It observes. And in observing, it suggests that the act of going home is not a luxury but a necessity—not a destination but a reprieve.
The campaign's closing line arrives with the gentleness of someone who understands exhaustion from the inside: "오늘도 집까지 오시느라 고생 많으셨습니다." The English translation—"You worked hard making it all the way home today"—flattens the original. In Korean, the phrase carries a tone reserved for acknowledging someone who has endured. It is not congratulatory. It is compassionate. It says: I see how tired you are. I see that you made it. That matters.
The numbers that followed were staggering. Ten million views in ten days. Fifty million by late September 2025. Awards at Korea's top advertising festivals. Recognition at the Seoul Video Advertising Festival. But the true measure of the campaign's success was not in the metrics. It was in the comment sections—thousands of Koreans describing the advertisement as "painfully accurate," as if the brand had simply held up a mirror to a feeling they had been carrying alone.
Why "Home" Means Something Different in Korea
To understand why this campaign resonated so deeply, you must first understand what "home" means in the Korean context—and what it has been forced to mean by the architecture of Korean working life.
Korea has made progress on working hours. The country has reduced its annual work hours over the past decade. And yet the gap persists: Koreans still work significantly more than the OECD average, a gap that transforms the act of "going home" from a neutral transition into something weighted with meaning. It becomes the moment when the performance ends. When the résumé can be set aside. When, theoretically, you can stop.
In that context, "집에 가자" is not merely logistics. It is permission. It is acknowledgment. It is the recognition that exhaustion is real, that it is widespread, and that the journey home—whether by subway, by car, by foot—is itself a form of labor that deserves to be named.
The Untranslatable Word: Jeong
There is a Korean concept that foreigners feel before they can define it: 정 (jeong, 情)—a word that scholars describe as the sticky, accumulated bond of care, obligation, warmth, and familiarity that forms through repeated everyday contact. It is relational glue. It is a psychology of "we." It shapes how people interpret belonging, how they understand their place within a network of obligation and affection.
Switzen's campaign is, in essence, a jeong narrative masquerading as a brand advertisement. It does not argue that the home is luxurious. It does not promise architectural innovation or investment returns. Instead, it suggests something more fundamental: that the home is where you are held—sometimes by family, sometimes by routine, sometimes by nothing more than the knowledge that someone (or something) is waiting.
This is why the closing line lands with such force. It speaks in a tone that Koreans reserve for the genuinely exhausted: gentle acknowledgment, no lecture, no productivity sermon, no attempt to reframe suffering as opportunity. Just recognition. Just the simple statement that you made it through another day, and that matters.
The Shadow Side: Jibae and the Anxiety of Belonging
But Korea's "home story" has a second register—one that Switzen's campaign mostly leaves offscreen, and for strategic reasons.
지배 (jibae) means domination or control. If 정 is the emotional warmth that gathers inside a home, 지배 is the way "home" can also organize hierarchy: who owns, who rents, who waits longer, who feels behind. A Korean home is often where care is practiced—and where social ranking becomes visible. It is where generational anxiety crystallizes. It is where the gap between aspiration and reality becomes impossible to ignore.
In a country where housing prices have become a proxy for life success, where owning a home in Seoul is increasingly a marker of class privilege, where younger generations speak of the "hell Joseon" phenomenon—the sense that Korea has become an impossible place to build a life—the act of "going home" carries an undertone of class anxiety that the advertisement largely elides.
This is the campaign's strategic gamble. By treating home as a universal refuge, it risks smoothing over the reality that in Korea, home is also an index of inequality, generational strain, and the widening gap between those who own and those who rent. The advertisement offers comfort, not confrontation. It provides emotional balm without addressing structural wound.
And yet—and this is crucial—that may be precisely why it works. In a moment when institutional solutions feel distant and political discourse feels fractured, a brand that simply acknowledges exhaustion and offers gentleness becomes, paradoxically, radical. The advertisement doesn't solve the problem. But it names it. And in naming it, it creates a space where millions of people can recognize themselves.
The Global Resonance: Korea as a Case Study in Exhaustion
For international audiences, the Switzen campaign functions as cultural translation. It presents a Korea that is not the Korea of K-pop gloss or technological futurism, but a society where exhaustion is endemic, where tenderness must be deliberately spoken, where the boundary between work and rest remains contested terrain.
The film frames "going home" as the moment when the worker becomes a person again—an idea legible anywhere, but particularly sharp in a country still negotiating its relationship with speed, competition, and endurance. It suggests that Korea is not only a nation of innovation and ambition, but also a nation of people who are tired, who need permission to rest, who deserve to be held.
This resonance extends to the campaign's musical choice: Kim Chang-wan's "집에 가는 길" ("On the Way Home"), a song from decades past that the campaign helped revive. The choice is deliberate. The song carries nostalgia—the sense of a simpler time, a slower pace, a different relationship to home and belonging. By pairing the contemporary advertisement with a vintage song, Switzen created a temporal bridge: the past offering comfort to the present, suggesting that the hunger for home is not new, but enduring.
The Critic's Question: What Is Switzen Selling?
A serious critique remains, and it deserves to be named: does this campaign sell Switzen, or does it sell the idea of home in general?
Some advertising critics argue that the slogan is emotionally powerful but strategically hazy—warm enough to belong to any builder, any landlord, any brand that wants to borrow human meaning without specifying a distinct promise. In other words: Switzen has written a beautiful sentence. The question is whether it has written a differentiated brand.
The counterargument is simpler: in a moment when most advertising speaks the language of aspiration, differentiation, and competitive advantage, the act of speaking the language of rest, recognition, and shared humanity becomes its own form of differentiation. Switzen succeeded not by making a better pitch, but by making a more honest one.
The Diagnosis: What the Campaign Reveals About Korea
Switzen's achievement is not that it discovered home. It is that it made "home" feel newly audible—like a familiar word heard, suddenly, at the exact right volume. The campaign did not create the hunger for rest. It simply named it, and in naming it, gave millions of people permission to acknowledge what they had been carrying alone.
But this success is also a diagnosis. When a real-estate advertisement becomes a nation's most widely shared comfort, when a brand's recognition of exhaustion moves more people than institutional promises of reform, you learn something about what the nation has been missing on the way back. You learn that Korea is tired. You learn that the country is hungry for gentleness. You learn that sometimes, the most radical act a brand can perform is simply to say: I see you. You made it. That matters.
The film ends where it began: with ordinary people in transit, moving through the city toward home. But by the end, the act of going home has been transformed. It is no longer just a return to a physical space. It is a return to the self. It is an acknowledgment of endurance. It is, in the most literal sense, a coming home to the recognition that you deserve to rest.
And if that sounds like praise for a housing advertisement, it is. But it is also a mirror. In Switzen's campaign, Korea sees itself—tired, tender, and finally, audibly asking to come home.
