Korea Company Atlas, the corporate data platform run by Seoul Economic Daily, has been named the online category winner of the 2026 Feature Reporting Award of the Year selected by advertisers, an honor conferred by the Korea Advertisers Association.
The association said on the 13th that it had selected two works for this year's award — Seoul Economic Daily's Atlas and SBS's "The Fourth Wave: AI in My Life" — and will present the prizes at the 2026 Korea Advertisers Conference, to be held on the 22nd at the Josun Hotel in Seoul's Jung-gu district.
Winners of the Feature Reporting Award of the Year were chosen through a preliminary screening, a second round of judging by the association's economic public relations committee and a final review by its steering committee. "This year's winning entries combined data journalism with advanced AI technology to shed precise light on Korean corporate governance and the industrial landscape, presenting new social value and alternatives," the association said in explaining its decision.
Korea's Big Business Groups at a Glance: Four-Language Global Service With Simulation Tools
Atlas (en.sedaily.com/atlas), which formally launched on the 28th of last month, is the country's first innovative corporate data platform to link the complex ownership structures of Korea's large business groups with government policy, legislation in the National Assembly and media coverage on a single multidimensional data map.
Atlas provides a detailed visualization of a vast data set covering the designated controlling shareholders of 102 business groups identified by the Fair Trade Commission, along with 4,167 affiliates and 345 listed companies. It renders tangled circular shareholding arrangements and cross-affiliate ownership stakes in multidimensional graphs, allowing users to trace at a glance the chain of control running from a listed company's largest shareholder to the group's ultimate controlling shareholder.
To help overseas investors better understand the Korean market, the platform operates in real time in four languages — Korean, English, Chinese and Japanese. It includes a step-by-step guide explaining Korea's distinctive "designated controlling shareholder" system, which is unfamiliar to foreign investors, and offers a customized simulation function that allows users to verify and predict in advance whether a particular corporate entity would be classified as a group affiliate. The features have drawn a strong response from global capital markets.
AI Big Data Analysis of 110 Million Pairings Shows Stock Volatility 1.17 Times Higher Before Policy Announcements
The AI-based data journalism content developed in-house by the newspaper was also cited as a decisive factor in the award. Seoul Economic Daily teamed up with the financial machine learning laboratory at Sogang University's industry-academic cooperation foundation to run an AI algorithm across the full body of data accumulated over 26 years from 1998 to 2024 — 50 government policies, 118,602 related news articles and share price data for 906 listed Korean companies.
By cross-checking and analyzing an extra-large data set totaling 110.49 million article-stock pairings, the project scientifically demonstrated a correlation showing that on days when a company's name appeared in articles ahead of a major government policy announcement, the stock's price swings widened to 1.17 times the usual level. The work is regarded as a journalistic achievement that goes beyond simply delivering news, raising the bar for data-driven market forecasting and information transparency.
2026 Korea Advertisers Conference Under Slogan 'New Possibilities Created by Freedom,' With Special Seminar
The 2026 Korea Advertisers Conference, set for the 22nd, is being organized as a forum for exchange on the rapid changes in the advertising and media environment, under the slogan "New Possibilities Created by Freedom."
Awards in other major categories will be presented alongside the feature reporting prize at the KAA Awards ceremony that day. Four entries were selected for the newspaper feature award: the Dong-A Ilbo ("AI Robots Reshaping K-Manufacturing"), the Maeil Business Newspaper ("Visiting Advanced Nations in Accident-Free 2.0"), the Chosun Ilbo ("Electricity Price Shock: Industry Grinds to a Halt") and the Korea Economic Daily ("The Battle for Electric-Power Supremacy"). Three programs will receive program awards: MBC's variety show "Omniscient Interfering View," KBS2's "Boss in the Mirror," and SBS's drama "Mr. Kim." Marketer awards went to Hyundai Motor Group, LG CNS, Samsung Electronics, Dongwon Group, LG Uplus, Kyungdong Navien and Dong-A Pharmaceutical, while the service award went to Kim Seung-il, a former vice president of Kolon and former chair of the Korea Advertisers Association's steering committee.
A special seminar starting at 2 p.m. ahead of the ceremony will feature a lineup of lectures on the latest media and marketing trends, beginning with a presentation on the "2026 Survey of Internet Media Influence" by Han Kyu-sup, a professor of communication at Seoul National University. Other sessions will cover Samsung Electronics' successful "AI Newlywed Appliances" integrated campaign, Dong-A Pharmaceutical's strategy for renewing its 63-year-old Bacchus brand, and Nielsen Korea's "Driving Global Success With Data: Analyzing the AI Advertising and Streaming Markets."
The awards will be presented at the Advertisers' Night event, which begins at 6 p.m. on the 22nd in the Orchid Room and Grand Ballroom of the Josun Hotel in Seoul's Jung-gu district.