Hasta La Creative!

Last year, China’s all-purpose chat app WeChat brilliantly reinvented a Lunar New Year tradition. It’s customary to share gifts of red envelopes filled with cash, called “hongbao.” WeChat took the tradition mobile by letting people gift small amounts of money to each other digitally.

To make it fun and social, the app created a game that divided money up randomly between friends, so they might wind up with a little cash or a lot. In just over a week, 40 million envelopes were shared. To give or receive money, people link their bank card to the app a clever move to get the app ready for e-commerce.

Almost all China’s big tech companies are doing digital red envelopes now. This year other Western and local brands joined in, by using tech platforms for giveaways. And on Feb. 18, the eve of the holiday, WeChat logged 1.01 billion hongbao exchanges in a single day, including gifts between friends and from brands, the app’s parent company Tencent said.

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