Official accounts are the brand's home
On LINE, customers add a brand's official account as a friend, which is the opt-in, and then receive broadcasts, coupons and rich messages: image-based messages with tappable areas. The rich menu sits at the bottom of the chat, a permanent panel of shortcuts built on templates of 2500x1686 or 2500x843 pixels, and it deserves the care of a home page. LINE is run by LY Corporation, formed in October 2023 from the merger of LINE, Yahoo Japan and their parent company. On KakaoTalk, brands run a KakaoTalk Channel, and informational notifications use pre-approved templates that cannot carry advertising. Message volume costs money on both, so segment rather than broadcast.
Stickers and emoticons are a medium
Stickers are how people talk on LINE, and brands give away sponsored stickers free to users who add their account as a friend, a long-standing friend-acquisition tactic in Japan and Thailand. The specifications are exact: sticker images up to 370x320 px in PNG, sets of 8, 16, 24, 32 or 40, plus a 240x240 main image and a 96x74 chat tab icon. On KakaoTalk the equivalent is emoticons, and Korean character culture runs deep. Synthetic White saves a brand character as an Element, so forty stickers share one face, one line weight and one palette, and a set can be adapted for each market's jokes and seasons.
Local design expectations
Western brand guidelines often call for white space and one message per frame. Japanese promotional design tends to carry far more information: detailed product points, prices, campaign dates and characters in one layout, and readers expect it. Thai campaigns lean on colour, humour and personality; Korean design moves quickly with trends. Language brings a subtler trap. Japanese and Korean both have politeness registers, and a brand message in the wrong one reads as rude or oddly stiff, so generated copy must be briefed with the register and checked by a native speaker. Traditional Chinese for Taiwan is not a conversion of Simplified Chinese; vocabulary differs as well as script.
Rules on advertising messages
South Korea's Network Act requires advertising messages to begin with (광고), meaning advertisement, to identify the sender and to offer a free way to opt out, and sending ads between 9 pm and 8 am needs separate prior consent. Japan has regulated stealth marketing since 1 October 2023 under the Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations: advertising that hides its commercial nature counts as a misleading representation, so paid creator posts must be labelled as ads. Thailand's Personal Data Protection Act has been fully in force since June 2022. Build these requirements into templates, so every generated message carries them by default rather than by memory.
Updated 25 September 2026