Ele.me's CNY ad celebrates the 10,000 small shops that close — life never does

For Chinese New Year 2025, food-delivery platforms had a predictable playbook: promise consumers they stay open so nobody goes hungry during the holiday. Ele.me noticed the human reality underneath — tens of thousands of small restaurant owners were closing their shutters to go home — and decided to advertise the closures instead.

The raw material was everywhere already: the handwritten, photocopied or spray-painted 'store closed' notices that shop owners tape to their doors before the holiday. Ele.me and agency RESEE collected these notices from more than 10,000 small shops in dozens of cities, made them into posters on Wenzhou's shutter doors, and filmed a short film across four cities from Guangzhou to Jiamusi — 3,000 kilometres and 40°C of temperature difference, shot in 20 days from brief to delivery.

The notices read like tiny human comedies: 'Going home to wrap wontons for my granddaughter', 'Going home to meet a matchmaker — married or not, I'll be back', 'Off to lie flat and travel for New Year'. In the film's warmest turn, closed shops advertise the ones still open: 'I'm going home — the hotpot across the road is great, go there.' The message was 'work pauses, life doesn't — and if you need anything, Ele.me and some shops are still on.'

The campaign reported over 100,000 participants in discussion, hundreds of unpaid media mentions, an 82% month-on-month rise in brand favorability during the campaign period, and 41% of users saying it made them think of or open Ele.me over the holiday. It took a silver in event marketing at the 2025 Digitaling Awards, and trade commentary framed it as the year's example of reverse marketing: a delivery platform that earns trust by telling people to order less.