OpenFortune 🥠

Crazy stat I can’t stop thinking about: Out of ~50 Ultimate Fighting Championship sponsors, eight are also OpenFortune 🥠 clients. Same brands. Same bold energy. Same zero-BS marketing mindset. Coincidence? Hell no. UFC is raw, loud, unfiltered. It's a sport where people literally bash each other’s heads in. Its figureheads aren’t exactly “corporate safe” either. Most brands won't touch that with a ten foot pole. But the ones who see the bigger value alignment? They pounce. They know attention isn't about playing it safe — it’s about owning the moment. Making a statement. 𝘔𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘺. And those, my friends, are our dream OpenFortune clients. We're allergic to playing it safe. We target brands willing to make noise, take risks, and earn attention. We’re not for everyone. Neither is UFC. That’s exactly the point.

People keep asking us which bucket OpenFortune 🥠 lives in. OOH? Experiential? Social? The answer: none of them. We’re building a new kind of platform. Something that starts offline, spreads online, and drives measurable outcomes in both places. A platform for branded content distribution. A platform for sparking curiosity and sharing at scale. A platform that lives in people’s hands, ends up in their social feeds, and drives actual organic behavior. We’re not just getting “seen.” We’re getting searched. We’re getting shared. Yes, our media shows up in the physical world. Yes, it’s tangible. Yes, it looks different than anything else in your mix. But that’s exactly the point. The second you try to wedge OpenFortune into an old-school category or 100-year old mental model, you miss what makes it work.

Every time I see a company that used to be EVERYWHERE fall off, I can almost always chalk it up to one of three marketing issues: → Their marketing lacks humor. Laughter is one of the ultimate ways to connect with people. All brands have opportunities to use humor. I’m dead serious. All. Of. Them. → They aren't creating tirelessly. Producing organic content on repeat is the oxygen of brand familiarity, recall, and — eventually — trust. Without it, brands choke. → They have no human face. Stop shoving your logo in peoples' faces and start using your leaders, your product experts, and customers as content. People want to buy from people. Shoutout DUDE Wipes' CEO Sean Riley for the perfect example of doing all the above 𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵. The dude leads with humor, never bores, and goes viral (!!) from his constant originality + he has the product and numbers to back it up.

a tale as old as time 😂

After hiring 100s of employees over the last 10 years, here is the number one thing I look for in a new hire... Coachability. → I’m way less interested in hearing shiny, cherry-picked success stories or about how many industry contacts you have, and way more focused on learning how you bounce back. → Name a time you clearly failed. What did you do to overcome it? → Pick someone in your past you didn’t get along with. How did you deal? → Tell me about your old managers, past colleagues. How would they describe you under stress? Everyone gets smacked in the face in life. But few people can look that failure straight in the eyes and talk through it with reflection, accountability, and nuance. It's by far the best predictor of success I've ever seen and you simply can't train for it. (and yes, those are boxes of client-branded fortune cookies behind us, ready for restaurants and takeout bags across the globe)

I speak with dozens of marketing leaders each week and everyone is talking about how physical marketing is making a huge comeback: after a decade of everything going online, people are tapped out... → scroll and ad fatigue → content overload → AI slop everywhere brands are starting to feel it and they’re shifting they realize that digital and physical are always gonna blend but that doesn’t mean everything needs to live online what’s happening now is the reverse of what we’ve seen for years: physical experiences that feed digital engagement and that's exactly where OpenFortune 🥠 thrives cookie at a table → someone cracks it open → gets a clever and unexpected ad and next thing you know... it’s on stories in the group chat company getting searched on Google and TikTok IRL to digital, not the other way around and I probably speak for a lot of people here when I say this...it feels kinda refreshing

What do you talk about on your Monday zoom calls???

I asked a client once why they put a QR code on a taxi top and if it performed: They had no clue. That taxi was flying down Fifth Ave at 50 miles an hour. I'd bet good money that no one scanned it. No one could. And no one ever will. We’ve gotten so used to legacy media placements that we’ve stopped thinking about actual human behavior. No one’s pulling out their phone to scan a moving target on a highway. No one’s scanning a subway ad with no cell service. And yet, those buys keep happening. Not because they necessarily work but because they’re familiar. Because they’ve been on the media plan for years. Meanwhile, we’re offering something radically simple: A format that lands in someone’s hand, at the right unexpected moment, with their phone already out. But it’s “too new.” It doesn’t fit neatly into the traditional media plan. It requires thinking differently. That’s the problem. The issue isn’t performance. It’s comfort. And if you’re only buying what’s comfortable, there's a good shot you're not buying what outperforms.

BIG news: Maral Nouri has joined the OpenFortune 🥠 team as President of EMEA to lead our international expansion. She’ll be based in Dubai, building on the momentum we’ve been seeing across the region and driving deeper partnerships with our global clients. Maral’s background speaks for itself: deep brand chops, cross-cultural fluency, and a track record of moving fast where others hesitate. Exactly the kind of leadership we need as we continue to scale. We’re now in 100,000+ restaurants. Across 30 countries. With access to 3 billion cookies a year. And we're just getting started. Let’s go!!