Naver GFA & Kakao Moment Ad Specs — An English Guide

If your product sells in South Korea, Google and Meta alone will not reach the market. Naver is the country's dominant search-and-content portal, and KakaoTalk is installed on effectively every smartphone in the country. Both operate mature self-serve ad platforms — Naver GFA (Glad For Advertisers) and Kakao Moment — and between them they hold inventory that has no Western equivalent.

The obstacle for international teams is not the platforms themselves but the documentation: nearly all of it exists only in Korean, and the English-language material that does circulate is usually outdated agency blog posts. This guide is the practical spec sheet, written from the perspective of a team that already runs Meta and Google and needs to add Korea without rebuilding its creative process.

Naver GFA image specs

GFA delivers native-style ads across Naver's main app feed, the smart channel strip, Band and affiliated inventory. The workhorse formats:

Kakao Moment image specs

Kakao Moment places ads inside KakaoTalk — chat-tab banners and the #tab feed — and across Daum portal inventory. Core canvases:

The 1.91:1 vs 16:9 trap

This is the single most common error international teams make on Korean platforms, and it is worth stating plainly: Naver's landscape canvas is 1.91:1 and Kakao's is 16:9. They are not interchangeable.

Reusing a 1200 × 628 asset — the Meta and Naver landscape size — on Kakao letterboxes it inside the 16:9 slot, producing visible bars and a creative that reads as a repurposed afterthought next to natively sized competitors. Export a true 1280 × 720 for Kakao. The two ratios are close enough that the mistake is easy to make and far enough apart that the result is obvious.

Read across that table and the efficient production set becomes obvious: 1:1 and 4:5 serve all four platforms, 1.91:1 covers three, and 16:9 exists solely for Kakao. Five exports cover every placement discussed in this guide and the Meta and Google guides combined.

Korean creative conventions

Korean feed ads carry noticeably more in-image text than Western equivalents. Price, benefit and deadline routinely live inside the creative rather than the caption, and this density is not penalised in auction the way Meta penalises text-heavy images. Localising a Western creative by simply translating a single headline often produces an ad that reads as sparse and unserious to the local audience.

The counterpart to that permissiveness is that both platforms hard-reject blurry or upscaled text, which makes exact-size exports more important on Korean platforms, not less. A creative that survives Meta's compression at a slightly wrong size may fail Korean review outright.

Kakao Bizboard: the format with no Western equivalent

Beyond the native feed sizes above, Kakao sells Bizboard — the banner strip at the top of the KakaoTalk chat list. It is the single highest-reach placement in the Korean market, because the chat list is the screen essentially every Korean smartphone user opens multiple times a day.

Bizboard is a wide, short banner rather than any of the ratios discussed here, and it demands its own artwork: extreme horizontal proportions, very few words, and a composition that survives being read in under a second while scrolling to find a conversation. It is not a placement you can serve by resizing a feed creative, and international teams routinely underestimate this. If Bizboard is in your media plan, budget separate design time for it.

Account setup realities

Both platforms require a Korean business registration number to open an advertiser account, which is the practical barrier for most international teams. The usual routes are a local subsidiary, a Korean agency of record, or a reseller partner. This is worth resolving before creative production rather than after — an approved creative sitting in a folder while account setup runs for six weeks is a common and avoidable cost.

Payment and invoicing also work differently from Google and Meta, generally favouring prepaid balances over post-billed spend. Plan cash flow around that rather than assuming a credit-card model.

Review and approval notes

GFA's creative review is stricter than Western platforms about claim substantiation. Superlatives such as "best" or "No.1" require supporting evidence, and medical, financial and cosmetic claims are reviewed aggressively. Plan an extra review day for first-time creatives in a new account.

Reviews are also conducted by human reviewers during Korean business hours rather than by an instant automated pass. A creative submitted on Friday evening Korean time is unlikely to be live before Monday, which matters when campaigns are timed to a sale date. Submit at least two working days ahead of any hard launch.

Korean formats AutoAdfit exports