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Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk is known for spouting marketing wisdom and forecasting trends. But his latest venture may raise a few eyebrows–because it lies within a fortune cookie.
Vaynerchuk, who has co-founded businesses from VaynerMedia to restaurant reservation app Resy to Empathy Wines, recently invested in OpenFortune, a company that produces ad campaigns that run on the paper slips in fortune cookies. OpenFortune’s new stakeholder has “significant” equity in the business, said co-founder and chief fortune officer Shawn Porat, who declined to disclose a specific figure.
According to Porat, OpenFortune aligned with Vaynerchuk’s tenet of investing in platforms with “underpriced attention”—those that are nascent and not yet fully understood by marketers, but are poised to have massive reach.
“I invested in OpenFortune because it just made complete sense to me. I believe the idea and believe in the co-founders’ ability to execute–that made me go all in,” Vaynerchuk said in a statement.
The investment from Vaynerchuk is a significant step for OpenFortune, which launched in 2017, creates fortune cookie advertising for 47,000 restaurants and delivery platforms in the U.S. and supplies printed messages to more than a dozen fortune cookie factories worldwide. The founders have set their sights on improving diners’ experiences and wooing more advertisers with their unusual proposition, claiming a comparable reach to Super Bowl commercials or tech platforms.
“This is Super Bowl-esque. Thirty-five percent of our brand partners have shifted their marketing budgets from sports sponsorships to us. That’s the area we play in,” said Porat.
The fortune you seek
Before OpenFortune, Porat was an entrepreneur in a different industry, grappling for success and attention. Then, one day while eating at a Chinese restaurant, “I saw how deeply people cared about fortune cookies–reading them aloud, laughing, passing them around the table,” he recalled. “I wished people spoke about my company that way, that it would get that kind of attention.”
Porat connected with Matt Williams—OpenFortune’s co-founder and chief cookie officer—who came from the ad industry, and the two hatched the unusual idea to advertise within fortune cookies. On one side of the paper slip would be the usual fortune, and the other side would hold a brand message. The concept made sense to them for a few reasons.
“In the moment you open a fortune cookie, you’re not distracted or on your phone. You’re completely focused on the fortune cookie, reading it and anticipating what’s next in your life,” Porat explained. “With other forms of advertising, everyone knows it’s mass marketing. A fortune cookie feels like it was meant for you.”
