OLG’s 2025 PlaySmart Lunar New Year campaign draws on festive traditions to spotlight the importance of making smart, informed gaming choices.
As the world prepared to welcome the Year of the Snake, the Lunar New Year offered brands a unique opportunity to connect with large, influential Asian communities.
Lunar New Year sits between the first new moon of the lunar calendar and the first full moon. It’s the most significant holiday celebrated in most Asian cultures around the world, often with unique traditions and customs.
For Balmoral Multicultural Marketing, it’s a chance to help brands resonate authentically with Asian-Canadian audiences by honouring traditions and creating meaningful connections with consumers.
Authenticity and relevance matter more than ever
“Given the importance of Lunar New Year in the cultural calendar, showing up authentically is essential for brands,” says Sharifa Khan, Balmoral’s founder and CEO. “To be well received, companies must find relevant connections between their products and traditions associated with the holiday.”
To mark the arrival of the Year of the Snake, Balmoral worked with Canada Life, Clorox, and OLG to develop original campaigns that strongly convey the spirit of renewal, optimism, and hope central to Lunar New Year celebrations.
Honouring family traditions
Preparation is a central aspect of Lunar New Year festivities, particularly the tradition of thoroughly cleaning one’s home to welcome good fortune. Balmoral identified this alignment with its client Clorox, and built a social campaign in Cantonese and Mandarin to encourage people to “start clean with the power of Clorox.” The creative captures the joy and spontaneity of the season and shows the festive foods prepared by focusing on a family scene where a mother uses Clorox Clean-Up spray to address the messes that come with big gatherings. Highlighting everyday cleaning moments while connecting the product’s utility with the cultural practice of preparing for the year ahead, Balmoral shifted the perspective to position Clorox as an essential part of routine cleaning.
Clorox Canada connects the cultural significance of preparing the home for Lunar New Year to convey the brand message: “Start clean with the power of Clorox.”
Good luck and good fortune
One of Lunar New Year’s traditions is the exchange of gifts that bestow wishes of good fortune and prosperity. Here, Balmoral found powerful, relevant connections for OLG, which conducts and manages gaming in Ontario.
Addressing Asian audiences to promote responsible gambling, OLG’s Lunar New Year campaign for PlaySmart finds its inspiration in “over-indulgent festival behaviour” – visible in the food, shopping, feasting and spending during the celebration. The online video, social, and radio campaign centres on people optimistically and indulgently seeing positive signs or patterns they believe bring good fortune, signs such as perfectly aligned oranges in a festive fruit basket. While the campaign captures the fun aspect fully, it gently nudges the viewer about the importance of making smart, informed gaming choices.
The seasonal campaign for OLG Lottery and Instant Games elevates the practice of gifting a “lottery bouquet” to celebrate and give wishes of good fortune.
OLG’s multi-platform Lunar New Year campaign, which Balmoral developed for its Lottery and Instant Games, depicts family and friends celebrating in unexpected ways to the sound of OLG’s trademark “winning tune.” The ritual of gifting money in traditional red envelopes is given a creative twist when lottery tickets are used instead of cash. Balmoral also showcased another historic practice to great effect, portraying a young man gifting and wishing prosperity with a remarkable bouquet of lottery tickets.
Symbols of prosperity
For Canada Life, Balmoral developed a campaign that leverages the Chinese New Year tradition of gifting money to loved ones in red envelopes as a way of wishing good fortune and prosperity. Building on the insight that consumers want to protect themselves and their families by securing and growing family wealth, the narrative for this digital and social campaign shows how Canada Life enables you to invest in long-term protection and prosperity. Using red envelopes, the ads introduce a brand-centric segue, replacing currency with scenes showing that wishes for abundance, academic success, or having a prosperous business, can come true with Canada Life by your side.
Canada Life uses red envelopes, a cherished cultural tradition in China and other parts of Asia, to show how insurance can help families build a more prosperous future.
Cultural knowledge, experience and insights drive the results
Balmoral Multicultural Marketing specializes in powerful, culturally resonant work focused on cultural traditions and festive celebrations year-round, Khan notes.
“Leveraging real-time and predictive data as well as our own cultural knowledge, experience and insights, we identify new opportunities to deliver meaningful engagement and results,” adds Khan. “A multi-ethnic staff of seasoned marketers from around the world drive the relevance and impact of our clients’ campaigns, ensuring success.”
“Lunar New Year is an important festive occasion, but it’s also an important marketing opportunity for brands to show how they authentically engage with the Chinese community throughout the year.”
