Characters take top honors in industry sector's New Wave and Rising categories; company vows to keep expanding customer touchpoints

Nexen Tire's brand characters Ssaeny and Mobicrew [Nexen Tire]
Nexen Tire's brand characters Ssaeny and Mobicrew [Nexen Tire]

Nexen Tire announced Wednesday that its brand characters Ssaeny and Mobicrew won the grand prize in the New Wave and Rising category of the industry sector at the 2nd Korea Character Awards 2026.

The characters earned high marks for translating four key tire performance attributes — which consumers might otherwise find technical and difficult to grasp — into approachable character form. The leader, Ssaeny, represents durability; Wingardi embodies high performance; Miley stands for mileage; and Moani symbolizes low-noise performance.

Since the characters' debut in May, Nexen Tire has been rolling out content across its official social media channels, including YouTube and Instagram. The company also produced and distributed 16 animated KakaoTalk emoticons at launch to broaden its touchpoints with customers.

The characters' creative expression of tire performance is grounded in Nexen Tire's product competitiveness. The company has earned recognition for its technology and quality by supplying original-equipment tires to global premium automakers including Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi, and it is reinterpreting that technical excellence through characters and content to make it more accessible to everyday consumers.

"Tires are a product that consumers don't normally pay much attention to, so we started by thinking about how to make the brand feel approachable first," a Nexen Tire official said. "We will continue to expand how we use these characters and content so that the brand experiences we build can translate into lasting relationships with our customers over the long term."

Nexen Tire has been building its content portfolio in recent years. Its 2024 web drama series "Tycometry" racked up 7 million cumulative views on YouTube and took the grand prix at the Enn Awards 2024, the country's largest digital content awards. Following last year's web entertainment show "Tier Maker," the web drama series "Nexaeng," released in the first half of this year, has surpassed 11.66 million cumulative views.

The company recently opened Nexen Design Gallery, an exhibition space at its central research institute, The Nexen University, in Magok, Seoul, converting the first-floor lobby into a multipurpose exhibition space — part of a broader push to engage with the public across a range of fields.


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