‘Squid Game’ brand deals and commercials miss the show’s main point

(Helen Juwon Park / Illustrations Director)
By Martin Sevcik
Jan. 15, 2025 9:48 p.m.
This post was updated Jan. 16 at 9:04 p.m.
Warning: Spoilers ahead
As “Squid Game” rises to prominence once more, companies see a green light for brand deals and commercials – missing the point entirely.
The second season of the mega-hit Korean drama has launched its hot pink guards, green jumpsuits and whimsical death games into the forefront of public consciousness once more. Following its Dec. 26 release, the show is once again inescapable, inspiring countless pieces of fan content and derivative projects across the internet and having the most-viewed debut week in Netflix history.
With this new season comes a new wave of advertisements for the show, including official trailers boasting 20 million views and promotional billboards across the world. But unlike last season, where Netflix was testing the waters with a brand-new intellectual property, Netflix has been able to use the franchise’s immense popularity to secure lucrative brand deals this time around. Puma, Johnnie Walker, Samsung, Duolingo and even the “Call of Duty” franchise have adopted the show’s branding over the past few months, capitalizing on the latest trend like all these brands have before.
Normally these brand deals would be utterly inconsequential, disappearing from a viewer’s mind as quickly as they popped up. But there is something different – and perhaps even sickly ironic – about these “Squid Game” cross-promotions. By taking the iconography of the show and plastering it across their products without care, these brands are reinforcing the themes of the show: the destructive consequences of ruthless capitalism and the exploitation of people by elites they will never meet.
Consider Domino’s branded commercials highlighting the emergency pizzas offered via the company’s mobile app. In these brief skits, a contestant from “Squid Game” fails a challenge from the show – a fate that typically results in their immediate execution. Instead, the inventive contestant whips out their phone and procures the emergency pizza, somehow ensuring their survival until the end of the advertisement.
There is comedy in these skits, both from the absurd presence of Domino’s in this near-replica of the show, as well as from the choreography of the skits themselves. It is sincerely funny that the guard accepts a pizza as a bribe, juxtaposed against the ruthlessness they exhibit in the show. It turns a horrifying scenario into a fun ad spot – a piece of entertainment to be broadcast on televisions across the world.
But for all the ways these ads intentionally mimic the show – from its delightfully gaudy decor to its life-or-death stakes – they unintentionally replicate the exact criticisms at the heart of the first two seasons.
The end of season one introduced viewers to the VIPs, a group of wealthy benefactors who have been watching the show unfold over the course of the season. They have no care for the individuals in the games, instead casting bets and watching the last few players get whittled down for pure entertainment value. The deadly competition is a show, and the players are but mere numbers to these elites.
The same dynamic exists for these Domino’s ads. Nameless, random people are shown just barely escaping death’s door, all in service of an elite’s interests – in this case, selling mediocre pizza to increase shareholder value. Numbers 314 and 131 from the skits are manifestations of Domino’s big bet on the brand power of an expensive license, much like how the characters from the show are simply vehicles for VIP bets.
Any brand that commodifies the people from the show is guilty of the same ironic, tasteless advertising. Johnnie Walker’s “456” brand whiskey, named after the show’s main character, drops his name – Seong Gi-hun – in favor of his identification number, dehumanizing him in the same manner as the show’s game masters. The “Squid Game” slot machines debuted in 2024 are perhaps the most tasteless of all, enticing people to waste their money away with a familiar property – perhaps ignoring that a gambling addiction led Gi-hun to the deadly games in the first place.
This is far from the first time major brands have haphazardly adopted a show’s aesthetics without considering its implications for advertisements – Subway’s 2013 “Hunger Games” commercials comparing the bold act of revolution to the bold taste of its sriracha chicken melt come to mind. But the obvious parallels between the advertisements’ commercialization of tragedy and the dubious actions of the show’s fictional showrunners reveal the complete apathy toward the show’s essential themes by the brands and Netflix itself.
Amid these advertisements, the show becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. With its wild success, it becomes a brand that enables commercialization for an elite class – the same function as the fictional competition highlighted in “Squid Game.” It proves that there are no principles, so long as money is in play – just as the series has overtly insisted over its first two seasons.
In this way, “Squid Game” brand deals perfectly embody the criticisms at the heart of the show – becoming just like the show in ways the partner companies almost certainly did not intend.