Brown Bag Marketing is an Atlanta marketing agency run by a group of zany creative types who sent out a very creative, interactive holiday card this season. It created quite the buzz at work for those lucky enough to be found on their mail list. (Turns out intern Danny helped post the associated educational video.)

When I saw the card, the name “cootie catcher” came to mind because this is the folded paper toy my dad would create when we were kids. If you search the web for cootie catcher, what you will find is many elaborate variations of decorative “fortune tellers.” Many call them cootie catchers, but it is very hard to find out why. It goes back to the much more simple but much more magical toy my dad made.

My dad’s trick was to show you an empty cootie catcher in his hand, use it to pick all over your hair, shoulders, and arms, and then show you it was filled with cooties. They looked like little spiders to me. Now I realize this is all a joke about having lice or fleas and probably dates back to a time of the black plague. He would tell you to blow them away, quickly switching back to the empty catcher. (I’ve got to make a video of this….)

Brown Bag’s holiday card was in the vain of the much more colorful and decorate fortune tellers. (Can you tell this is a girl vs. boy thing.) In this case, you choose a word — Bag, Brown, Peace, Love — and sequence the fortune teller for the number of letters in the word. Then you pick a number, sequence that number, and finally pick a number, fold open that flap, and reveal your fortune hidden under the number.

In our household there was a debate about the Brown Bag Snowman….

When trying to follow the instructions for the game, we wondered if you were allowed to pick the snowman instead of a number. Would that be cheating? We did see a very nice fortune under the snowman. We wondered what Brown Bag Marketing was up to with this design.

Not until I scanned in the fortune teller, did I see the numbers as a series like a clock. Of course! The bag-snowman is the number 8! Mystery solved.

So a little confusion for we simple minded clients, but not nearly the confusion the Brown Bag Bomb Box created in New York City. More on that in my next post….

Great job Brown Baggers! Thanks for the card!!!!