“It’s massive scale and reach,” said Matt Williams, OpenFortune’s co-founder.
Recent brand partners include Duolingo, ZipRecruiter, Chime, Manscaped and Cars.com, the company said. Most of the campaigns are directed at raising brand awareness rather than driving sales.
The history of fortune cookies is not clear, but they were likely popularized in California in the early 1900s, according to journalist Jennifer 8 Lee, who has researched Asian food history in the U.S. In the hundred years since, they have become an iconic end to meals at Chinese restaurants.
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More recently, changes in the digital ad industry are pushing brands to explore options outside of digital ad placement. In 2021, Apple heralded those changes by tweaking its privacy settings so advertisers could not judge the effectiveness of certain campaigns. Third-party cookies—the digital kind that track user activity on the web—are also on their way to obsolescence.
Social media giants like Meta have mostly recovered from the changes—the company had its highest quarterly sales growth in two years last quarter—but brands still appear to be hedging. At the New York Times, for instance, ad revenue was flat in the most recent quarter, and other media brands like BuzzFeed have cited a slowing advertisement market in news about their layoffs.
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Their loss has been OpenFortune’s gain.
Co-founder Shawn Porat said that brands that had ignored their pitches four years ago were answering their calls. “They’re telling us that what cost them $1 million before is now costing $5 million to get the same results,” he said. “And they’re not happy.”
