- BLACKPINK and YG Entertainment have brought back the pink Seoul "PINK AREA" map, which is being counted as a digital teaser for Deadline.
- BLACKPINK is collaborating with the National Museum of Korea, signifying K-pop's push into state-sponsored cultural institutions.
- Deadline, their first album since Born Pink, arrives at a time when YG's finances are improving along with the live-entertainment sector.
BLACKPINK has moved its promotional playbook well past conventional posters and countdown teasers. With Deadline, the group's upcoming five-track EP, set for release on Feb. 27, 2026, YG Entertainment has redeployed a pink-themed digital map of Seoul featuring notable landmarks and scattered visual clues. The result: a treasure-hunt dynamic that has fans parsing every pixel for connections to the EP's concept.
BLACKPINK's PINK AREA map returns from Deadline World Tour era
The current map closely resembles the interactive "PINK AREA" activation launched in late June 2025 to promote BLACKPINK's Deadline World Tour. That version used a geo-referenced network of Seoul sites, from Namsan Tower to Banpo Bridge, to hide clues and virtual easter eggs. Rather than a standard event guide, the campaign turned the city itself into a marketing surface, driving online engagement without requiring fans to physically visit each location. The Deadline World Tour ran from July 5, 2025, through Jan. 26, 2026, covering 33 concerts across Asia, Europe, and North America.
Its reappearance days before the EP's release has split fan speculation. Some read it as a nostalgic callback to the tour era; others expect new, album-specific content layered onto the map. For now, the activation appears to be an online-only teaser, with no confirmed physical events tied to it.
BLACKPINK PINK AREA SCREEN CAPTURED from BLACKPINK's Instagram story.
BLACKPINK partners with National Museum of Korea for Deadline EP rollout
Separately, BLACKPINK has struck a partnership with the National Museum of Korea, the first large-scale collaboration between a K-pop act and the state-run institution, with Spotify joining as an official partner. The collaboration includes nightly pink illumination of the museum's facade, a dedicated listening zone at the Gwanggaeto Stele along the "Path of History" corridor, and member-narrated audio tours for eight artifacts, with Jisoo and Jennie narrating in Korean, Rosé in English, and Lisa in Thai. The deal is the clearest example yet of K-pop being treated as an instrument of South Korean cultural diplomacy at the institutional level.
That Seoul-wide presence extends into retail. Pop-up stores open Feb. 28 through March 8 at Musinsa's Myeongdong and Seongsu locations, selling exclusive Deadline merchandise in two of the city's busiest shopping corridors.
YG Entertainment's revenue rebound and K-pop market growth behind Deadline's stakes
Deadline is the group's first release since the Born Pink studio album in 2022, and it arrives with considerable commercial pressure. The five-track EP follows YG Entertainment's 2025 financial rebound, a year in which annual profit nearly tripled and concert revenue spiked over 270%, driven largely by touring income from Treasure and Babymonster. Individual milestones have reinforced that momentum: Rosé and Bruno Mars' "APT." became the first song by an artist outside North America or Europe to top the IFPI Global Singles Chart in 2025.
K-pop acts on Billboard's midyear Top Tours chart brought in a collective $228 million from 78 shows between October 2024 and March 2025, a 79% increase over the same period a year earlier, according to Billboard data reported by CNBC. Against that backdrop, BLACKPINK's campaign for Deadline offers a case study in how major acts are layering digital activations, location-based marketing, and institutional partnerships onto a standard release rollout, turning an EP launch into something closer to a citywide event.
