OpenFortune 🥠

Story time: We almost printed a picture of 21 Savage’s picture on 1.1 million fortune cookie slips. Not because it’d go viral. Not for shock value. But because for the right audience, it would’ve hit. For context, back in 2023, OpenFortune 🥠 was working on a mass-awareness campaign with Chime. At the same time, Chime was running a partnership with 21 Savage. Our job: make sure the creative hit across millions of diners in the Chicago area. We considered leaning into the 21 tie-in. But this wasn’t a Gen Z play. It wasn’t just college campuses or ATL. It was mass. So we held off. But if they had said, “We just want to reach Gen Z and college campuses,” we would’ve printed 21 on every damn slip headed to those schools. That’s what makes fortune cookie advertising different. Where 99% of OOH falls short, we give you scalable, measurable, hyper-targeted distribution—down to the audience, location, and even dining behavior. We can A/B test creative, split messaging by market, and make sure the right people see the right message. You don’t have to shout louder. You just have to speak directly. p.s. - check out this killer recap video we made about our partnership 🔥

Pumped to share how the Sacramento Kings turned Lunar New Year into a one-of-a-kind fan experience with OpenFortune 🥠. 1) Challenge Lunar New Year activations are everywhere. The Kings wanted something different. Something that made fans feel like they hit the jackpot. 2) Solution OpenFortune teamed up with the Kings and Red Hawk Casino to hand out custom fortune cookies at the Kings vs. Warriors game and across restaurants in the Sacramento area. Each fortune was Kings-branded with basketball references that NBA and Kings fans would love! And for an extra shot at luck, every slip had a QR code leading to an exclusive ‘Scratch n’ Win’ experience where fans could win tickets, merch, and more. The Kings also turned it into a full-blown content play: → Hyped up the fortunes on social before tip-off → Players cracked their cookies pre-game and shared their fortunes on Kings' social → Fans organically shared across social channels (and kept them as a souvenir) 3) Results → 4,000 scans in 24 hours (~25% of Golden 1 Center!) → Hundreds of thousands of social impressions. → A Lunar New Year moment fans will remember Big thanks to Ryan Spillers, Allison Chandler, and the entire Kings team for a killer partnership. This one was FUN.

“You ever walk a conference floor and feel like you’ve seen the same booth 47 times in a row?” That was me at Consensus 2025 in Hong Kong. New logos. New color palettes. Same exact playbook. Everyone claiming they’re reinventing the game. Everyone pitching “revolutionary” tech. But when you zoom out, it’s all the same noise just in slightly different packaging. I don’t say this to hate. I get it. It’s hard to break through when everyone’s saying they’re different while doing exactly what everyone else is doing. So we took the opposite approach. OpenFortune 🥠 didn’t show up louder. We showed up more memorable. Unexpected format. Smart placement. Actual human reactions. We had people stopping, asking questions, taking photos, sending it to their friends. And not because we threw more money at a booth. Because we did something that didn’t look like everything else. If you want to stand out at events like this (and in your broader marketing), here’s the truth: It’s not about being bigger or bolder. It’s about being weird enough to get remembered. And smart enough to know where to show up. cc Carlo Palomino - you're a madman 😂

I need this recipe for leadership on a plaque on my desk... (courtesy of Easy Crypto's Director of Marketing Operations Miguel Martins) Real leadership boils down to three things: → You build systems. → You put those systems in your teams’ hands. → You let the team loose. That’s leadership. Period. A real leader builds the tools that make their people shine. Create the right framework, remove the roadblocks, and finally (and here’s the part so many leaders screw up) get out of the way. Want to see how strong your leadership really is? Step back. If everything crumbles, you weren’t actually leading. You were babysitting.

Over the last 8 years at OpenFortune 🥠 , we’ve worked with every kind of brand you can imagine. And here’s what I always try to explain: You can play it safe with your creative. But when you do, you’re also capping your upside. We’ve A/B tested witty vs. dry copy more times than I can count. Same campaign. Same format. Same incentive. One version is clever, unexpected, human. The other is safe, literal, corporate. And the results? The witty version always wins: more shares and engagement, better scan rates, higher recall. It’s not even close. We’ve seen this play out with national credit unions, regional banks, automotive clients, healthcare industries that aren’t exactly known for being “funny.” You don’t have to turn your brand into a joke. You don’t need to sacrifice professionalism. But if you want attention in 2025, you do need to sound like someone your audience might actually want to hear from. Because no one shares something that feels like it was redlined 5 times by legal. A lot of the time, the only thing standing in the way of better performance is fear. Fear of sounding different. Fear of being too casual. Fear of trying something new. So listen closely: Humor and wit aren’t a “nice-to-have.” They’re your edge. They’re what get people to stop, smile, and remember your brand long after the moment’s over.

I just watched Big with my kids. Classic Tom Hanks, but now the movie has a new and damn good takeaway: Hanks, a 12-year-old kid, wakes up as an adult and lands a top job at a toy company. Dude knows nothing about business (duh). But he does know toys. He knows play, entertainment, and fun. And he's able to see how other people experience it too. At one point, he’s in a product pitch meeting. The execs are showing off a new toy: a skyscraper that turns into a robot. It’s clunky, overthought, not fun. He raises his hand and says, “I don’t get it. It’s not fun.” Everyone freezes. Because he’s right. The toy sucks. But nobody else had the instincts to call it out. Why? Because they weren’t playing. They were designing for kids without ever thinking like one. This should be a wake-up call for every founder, PM, and marketer: You don’t build great things by staying at a distance. You build by being close. Immersed. Hands-on. A little obsessed. Use the product. Watch how others use it. Break it. Push it. Complain about it. Fall in love with it again. Stop pretending you understand your customer if you haven’t lived and immersed yourself in their experience.

The first time Matt Williams and Shawn Porat told me their plan to print ads on the back of a fortune slip, I thought, "How hard could this be?” I figured they'd just make a few technical tweaks to machines or find a plug-and-play partner. Yeah…no. Turns out: → Very few printers come built for runs like this. → And very few cutting machines. They kept shredding our tests. → Vendor factories only turned us down — our needs were too specific. Anyone who knows our OpenFortune 🥠 team knows we don’t accept defeat. So we got to work. → We designed custom printing spools. → We invented a new double-sided, full-slip process of printing. → We re-tooled the cutting machines for better alignments. It was HARD. But so worth it. Now we’re the only – yes *only* – fortune cookie ad company doing anything close to what we do. Over 3 billion branded cookies per year to our network of 100,000 restaurants across 30 countries + food delivery. If you want to learn more about how this all works, shoot me a DM.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why new ideas get shut down. It’s not budget. It’s not lack of understanding. It’s not performance. It’s comfort. Fear of failure. Fear of looking dumb. Fear of making a call that doesn’t pan out. So if you're a marketing leader, ask your team: “What’s one idea we’d try if we weren’t worried about getting it wrong?” Try it. You’ll immediately see what your team’s actually thinking about but too afraid to say out loud. And that fear is quietly killing better ideas than any bad strategy ever will. If there's one thing that I've learned building LavCup and OpenFortune 🥠 , it's that fear quietly kills more good ideas than any bad strategy ever will. If you’re leading a team, your job isn’t to protect people from failure. It’s to protect them from never trying.