Chinese New Year digital marketing campaign

The year of the ox. That I get, the year of the rat I didn't.

I've always like the Chinese New Year over January 1. It's based more on the positions of the earth, moon and sun. And isn't that what a new year is all about, the earth and its moon has made it one more time around the sun. And in doing so, the earth unwittingly has taken us with it.

My digital marketing campaign for Chinese New Year took two paths. Both used the fortune in the fortune cookie idea.

For consumers on the website the message was a simple "Happy Chinese New Year." For our retail, wholesale and foodservice customers, the message had a double meaning. You know how I love a double entendre. "Good fortune in tropical produce".

I took tons of fortune cookie photos last year and got too fed up trying to figure out how to animate the fortune cookie opening. I had the cookies in various stages of opening with the fortune showing just so. Again with animation, I was making it too difficult and when you make an animation difficult you just know the flash file way is going to be way too big.

I'm glad I saved the photos. For the web site, I wanted the viewer to question what was happening in the beginning and then for the animation to dawn on them.

For my online banner ad, I just couldn't make the animation work with the 120x240pixels (w x h) space. I tried putting the fortune diagonally - making it hard to read. And having the fortune pan horizontally made it hard to understand what you were looking at. So I did someting else for The Packer. A clean looking ad that really stands out. I've got to remember to use more white background banner ads, they really jump out at you. On the left is a screen shot of thepacker.com showing the banner on the right hand side. I'm not so good at timing 'print screen' but it does show how a white background amidst other colorful ads really makes it stand out. At first you think it's copy for the article.