BTS collaborate with UNICEF to help create a safe and positive tomorrow for the youth of today
By Abbie Mole
The ‘LOVE MYSELF’ campaign was established on the 1st of November 2017, in South Korea, by BTS and UNICEF. The campaign, in the leader RM’s words, was started ‘with the intention of loving ourselves and making the world a better place for all with that love.’ However, the boys’ mission on spreading self-love didn’t just stop with South Korea.
On April the 15th, 2017 the Japan committee for UNICEF, BTS members and Big Hit Entertainment’s Japan Office attended a ceremony in Tokyo to officially launch the LOVE MYSELF campaign in Japan and take the ‘Love myself, then make the world a better place for all with that love.’ message global.
In addition to the LOVE MYSELF campaign collaboration, the Korean committee for UNICEF and BTS agreed to sponsor the Japan committee’s #ENDviolence campaign, which is intended to raise awareness and help prevent violence against children and teenagers.
The core meaning behind both the LOVE MYSELF and ENDviolence campaigns is very important for both the BTS members and the Korean public as Korea has a current serious problem with teenage suicide, with the World health organisation stating the country has the 10th highest suicide rate in the world. Along with this, for the members of BTS the message of loving and accepting oneself is very close to heart as between them they have suffered from OCD, depression, anxiety and extreme weight loss dieting since they were teenagers. It is also this passion and the sharing of a common experience which lead to the campaign’s success in branching out into Japan’s UNICEF sector and starting a social media frenzy. Both campaigns thrived on social media with #LOVEMYSELF gaining 6,777,662 tweets to date and #ENDviolence averaging at around 300 tweets a day. This also helped with spreading the message and in turn increasing official LOVE MYSELF merchandise sales, of which 100% of the income is channelled into funding the campaign. Along with merchandise sales, funding of the project is made up of; 3% of Love Yourself physical album sales (which is 1.15 billion in KRW or £1.03 million), donations from people by buying digital stickers from ‘Line’ and ‘Kakao talk’ and a KRW 500 million donation from the seven BTS members and Big Hit entertainment. The money collected goes towards a 2-year collection fund which is then donated to services that assist children who are victims of violence.
The Love Yourself album trilogy previously mentioned was one of the biggest things to come out of the LOVE MYSELF campaign on BTS’ behalf. The three albums in this trilogy are; Love Yourself: Her (released in 2017), Love Yourself: Tear and Love Yourself: Answer both released in 2018. The success of this trilogy, with 4,003,456 combined pre-orders and a minimum of 5,090,934 combined physical album sales, only allowed BTS to further their LOVE MYSELF message to their whole audience by creating a link between the campaign and their music. Alongside this trilogy a Japanese addition called Face Yourself was released 4th of April 2018 which kept with a similar theme to that of the Love Myself trilogy.
To this day BTS are finding new ways to be heavily involved in charity and raising awareness for youth problems. Recently on the 24th of September BTS’s leader Kim Namjoon (with the stage name RM) gave a powerful speech at the United Nations in New York “Youth 2030” event, which was to launch a UNICEF initiative, telling the youth of today that “No matter who you are, where you’re from, your skin colour or gender identity, speak yourself, find your name and find your voice by speaking yourself.”.
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