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Panda Express Turns Lunar New Year Into a Story of Belonging
Panda Express launched "Traditions Shared" in January 2024, a narrative film created by agency The Many that follows a young boy named Jordan as he is welcomed into Mr. Lee's family Lunar New Year celebration, positioning the brand as a bridge between cultures rather than a product provider in the United States food and drink category.
The campaign operates as a single-film execution, released to coincide with Lunar New Year festivities across the US market. Its central mechanic is emotional storytelling: Jordan's experience of being drawn into an unfamiliar but generous family tradition becomes the vehicle through which Panda Express communicates values of inclusion, shared joy, and cultural respect. The brand never leads with its menu. Instead, it places food within the broader ritual of togetherness that defines the holiday, inviting consumers to associate Panda Express with the warmth of the occasion rather than a transaction. This positioning reflects a deliberate evolution in how the chain speaks to its audience — particularly in a United States market where Lunar New Year recognition has grown well beyond Asian-American communities. The campaign carries a Clapboard Score of 71/100, reflecting competent emotional execution with room to push further on cultural specificity and narrative originality. With more than 21 million views recorded in the Clapboard archive, the film achieved substantial organic reach, suggesting the story resonated with a broad cross-section of viewers in the United States and beyond.
Panda Express chose a narrative strategy for "Traditions Shared" because storytelling, not discounting, is the primary tool available to a brand competing for cultural relevance rather than price leadership in the United States quick-service restaurant category. The campaign's strategic logic rests on a simple but powerful insight: Lunar New Year is one of the few calendar moments where food, family, and heritage converge publicly and emotionally in ways that transcend a single ethnic community. By centering that insight, The Many gave Panda Express a platform to speak authentically to Chinese-American families while simultaneously extending the brand's appeal to any US consumer who values the idea of being welcomed to someone else's table.
The competitive context matters here. In the United States, Panda Express operates in a crowded fast-casual and quick-service landscape where peers such as Chipotle and McDonald's have invested heavily in cultural moment marketing, particularly around multicultural holidays and heritage months. For Panda Express, Lunar New Year is not borrowed cultural territory — it is native ground, and the "Traditions Shared" campaign stakes that claim explicitly. According to musebyclios.com, The Many held a creative relationship with Panda Express for approximately four years beginning around 2020, giving the agency the institutional knowledge to build a campaign rooted in earned understanding rather than surface-level celebration. The global fast-food market was valued at approximately US$788.72 billion in 2024, according to industryresearch.biz, with projected annual growth of around five percent through the early 2030s — a scale that underscores how intensely brands in the food and drink category compete for emotional share of wallet alongside market share. In that environment, a film that earns 21 million views without leading with a promotion represents a meaningful strategic wager on the long-term value of brand affinity over short-term conversion.
Director Erica Eng leads the creative execution of "Traditions Shared" with a declared commitment to cultural accuracy that shapes every production decision. As reported by Ad Age on February 10, 2021, Eng stated: "It was important to have Chinese Americans in the roles that mattered to maintain cultural authenticity. From our production designer bringing items from her own home to decorate our sets, to our food stylist pulling inspiration from her own family's Lunar New Year meals, we wanted to make sure our culture was portrayed as correctly as possible on-screen." That statement — cited again by MediaPost on February 11, 2021 — reveals a production methodology that treats cultural detail not as set dressing but as structural integrity.
The film was produced by Strike Anywhere, working alongside The Many, with Eng directing. The result is a visual and emotional register that prioritises the textures of a real Lunar New Year household: decorations sourced from personal family collections, food presentation drawn from actual family traditions, and casting that places Chinese-American performers in central roles rather than peripheral ones. These choices accumulate into a film that reads as lived-in rather than constructed. Shots.net described the campaign as a heartwarming story built around food, a characterisation that points to the film's ability to subordinate the brand's commercial interest to genuine narrative warmth. The character of young Jordan — an outsider welcomed without hesitation — functions as a proxy for the viewer, particularly the non-Chinese-American viewer who may be encountering Lunar New Year traditions for the first time through the film's perspective. The craft serves the strategy precisely because it refuses to aestheticise the culture from a distance. Ad Age designated the work an editor's pick, recognising the film's execution as a standard worth noting within the broader food and drink advertising category in the United States.
No independently verified third-party performance data for "Traditions Shared" — such as brand lift scores, sales attribution, or paid media reach figures — is publicly available at the time of writing. What the Clapboard archive records directly is a view count exceeding 21 million, alongside 1,018 likes and 160 comments. These figures, taken together, indicate a film that generated substantial passive consumption alongside a smaller but engaged audience willing to interact publicly with the content.
The view total is analytically significant for a single-asset film campaign in the food and drink category operating primarily through social channels and Hulu in the United States. Per qsrweb.com, the campaign was designed to run on Panda Express social platforms and connected television, a distribution mix that prioritises storytelling formats over interruptive display. The organic comment volume — modest relative to views — suggests the film functioned primarily as a cultural statement audiences received and shared rather than debated, which aligns with its strategic intent. According to musebyclios.com, by 2024 The Many had transitioned its remit with Panda Express toward connections strategy, media execution, and integrated audience work, suggesting that "Traditions Shared" sits at a moment of agency evolution where creative output was being measured against increasingly sophisticated audience frameworks. The Clapboard Score of 71/100 reflects a campaign that executes its emotional brief with competence and genuine cultural care, while leaving analytical headroom in areas of narrative originality and measurable brand differentiation that more ambitious future executions could address.
Panda Express launched Traditions Shared in January 2024, a narrative film created by agency The Many. The film follows young Jordan as he is welcomed into Mr. Lee's family Lunar New Year celebration in the United States, positioning Panda Express as a facilitator of cultural connection and family togetherness rather than a conventional food advertiser.
Director Erica Eng directed Traditions Shared, produced by Strike Anywhere. As reported by Ad Age, Eng prioritised casting Chinese-American performers in central roles and sourced set decorations and food styling from real family traditions to ensure the Lunar New Year portrayal reflected lived cultural experience rather than a constructed representation.
The Traditions Shared film recorded more than 21 million views according to the Clapboard archive. The campaign also generated 1,018 likes and 160 comments, indicating broad passive reach alongside a smaller engaged audience, which aligns with the film's intent as cultural storytelling rather than a direct-response advertising execution.
The Many created Traditions Shared for Panda Express. According to musebyclios.com, The Many held a creative partnership with Panda Express for approximately four years beginning around 2020, giving the agency the institutional grounding to build a Lunar New Year narrative rooted in authentic cultural understanding rather than surface-level seasonal marketing.
Traditions Shared received a Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100. This score reflects strong emotional execution and genuine cultural care in the film's production approach, while indicating room for greater narrative originality and measurable brand differentiation in future campaigns of this type within the United States food and drink advertising category.
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