© 2006 Coleman Partners.
All rights reserved.
Our annual holiday mailers are an opportunity to remind potential and existing clients of our ability to break through the clutter of the everyday.
Our annual holiday mailers are an opportunity to remind potential and existing clients that at any given moment someone might be going to elaborate lengths to mail them something silly. For Thanksgiving 2005, decided to venture where no agency had dared tread before: sending out several hundred potatoes.
The worst thing about ordinary holiday cards? They taste terrible. The Russet Burbank potatoes we sent out were delicious and nutritious.
This lovely card explained that in our "big idea pot," there is always an extra "potato" - one more strategy, one more concept waiting for when our clients need it most. On the reverse side, the card suggested other things to do with your potato besides mashing it.
To heighten the silliness of the project, we created incongruously nice packages for the little bundles of starch. These wooden boxes were custom branded with our logo and stuffed with the world's premier packaging material, "Excelsior."
The card attached to the potato directed recipients to a special web site (www.colemanpartners.com/potato) that included potato history, science experiments, recipes, potato-related doodles and a link to our master web site.
For the 2005 holiday season, we resolved to put together something unique. Inspired by the Chinese food feast at the end of "A Christmas Story" and ancient Jewish holiday rituals, we opted to send out fortune cookies.
We found a baker in Hollywood who produced custom chocolate-dipped fortune cookies for the stars. We tried several varieties, so believe us when we say his are the best.
We originally sourced plain carryout boxes from restaurant suppliers, but ultimately decided it was more memorable to design our own boxes.
The ceaseless march of the ages reduced to a mushu pork metaphor.
The FDA insisted on this. Lousy government.
Following the Zen spirit of the project we opted to keep the accompanying web site simple. It featured a complete list of the fortunes, a series of year-end haikus and other musings.