Chris Dreyer:
You've seen the billboards, you've heard the jingles, but what if the most persuasive app your firm could run was inside a cookie?
Shawn Porat:
We could put 20, 30, 40 different messages to see what stands out the most for consumers with different QR codes and see which ones got the most scans.
Chris Dreyer:
That's 300 million brand impressions, hand-delivered at the exact moment people are open to suggestion.
Shawn Porat:
When you get your fortune cookie, you feel like there's a one in a billion chance that came into your hands, one in a billion chance.
Chris Dreyer:
It's not just memorable, it's measurable. This is Personal Injury Mastermind Podcast. PIM is powered by Rankings.io, the elite marketing agency for personal injury firms.
Why 6% of fortune cookies get posted to social media — and how to turn yours into a viral personal injury marketing win
Shawn Porat:
You put 10 million cookies out there, you're getting 600,000 organic. No one's had the organic social posts from people, which is just insane.
Chris Dreyer:
I'm Chris Dreyer. Let's get into it.
This episode, we're talking to Shawn from OpenFortune. And he's doing something entirely outside of the box, or should I say inside of the box? Go puns, early. Shawn, welcome to the show.
Shawn Porat:
Thank you. Thank you. Glad to be on.
Chris Dreyer:
I guess just out of the gate, can you explain what OpenFortune is and just maybe a brief story of one of the success stories you've had out of the gate?
Shawn Porat:
Sure. To sum it up, we own the fortune cookie that you receive at the end of your meal in Asian restaurants across 30 countries. So we're reaching 300 million people every single month across the world inside fortune cookies, and we inject brands into that experience via sponsorships.
Chris Dreyer:
I'm not going to lie, I was a little, now that I've ordered my local Chinese and I've started looking at the fortune cookies, ever since we talked, a little bit differently. I'm like, am I being manipulated here?
Shawn Porat:
That, oh yeah. Oh yeah. We do have rules, by the way. We're not going to say, "X brand is in your future," on the fortune side. We will keep the fortunes traditional and we'll never take that away. It's more on the other side that we place the brand into that experience.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, so let's just talk about a few of these. I want to call out one of the ads. I think you did a, this too shall pass, and it was an ad for Dude Wipes. So talk to me about that campaign.
Shawn Porat:
Oh yeah, it was so much fun. So again, "Dude Wipes is in your future," will never be on the front, but we will change the fortune to speak in the brand tone, and have fun with it, and transition into the brand side. So the whole idea is get people into the mindset that the brand wants you in.
So when, "This too shall pass," again, you're thinking about something passing in your life, etc. And then you see the brand and you laugh, you have fun at the table. That was a really, really fun partnership, still working together and went viral many times. So a lot of people don't realize this, but six out of every hundred fortune cookies get posted to social media. So when you put 10 million cookies out there, you're getting 600,000 organic. No one's had the organic social posts from people, which is just insane. And when you have 600,000, a lot of them go viral, and that's what happens with each of our partnerships.
Chris Dreyer:
So I guess the audience is listening, Chris, why the hell do you have Shawn on the show? And for me, look, it's like a billboard in the fortune cookie. Like, we're trying to be persuasive. We're trying to stand out and be different. I've seen the billboards on the side of the road a million times. You've seen people just copy idea and idea over and over, but just from a distribution perspective, it's amazing what you guys do.
Shawn Porat:
Yeah, no, it's incredible. And even besides the social piece, people keep these as collectibles. It's not just getting into that moment at the dinner table around family and friends during conversation, but it leaves that experience and goes onto social, it goes on your wallet, goes on your fridge. It's an incredible, incredible platform.
And the reason why it works so well is that you have to ask yourself what state of mind are people in when they see that billboard, when they see that bus shelter ad. They're running to something, they're on a call, they don't care. There's no relationship. There's no intimacy between that experience. While here, when you get your fortune cookie, you feel like there's a one in a billion chance that came into your hands, one in a billion chance. And that's where the superstition comes in. 72% of America feels like they have to compare their life to this fortune, and it's some way meaningful for them. And that's why it worked so well. And that's why people are open to suggestion at that moment, when there's nothing else like it in the world, out-of-home, sports sponsorship, nothing compares to it.
How Gary Vee called OpenFortune “the new Super Bowl spot” — and what PI firms can learn from high-impact law firm advertising
Chris Dreyer:
I got to tell you, just geez, I think a couple days ago, me and the wife, we got some Chinese. We got a local spot that's amazing. And she rips open the fortune cookie and she's like, "Hey, hey," and gets my attention and wants to read hers to me. So now I'm focused in, it's not just the individual reading. Now she's telling me. Like you said, they post to social media. But then it's weird. It's like, then I want to read mine and she wants to hear mine. So it makes me think of that, the biggest relationship that I think of is Gary Vaynerchuk, where he talks about how he loves the Super Bowl ads because everybody wants to watch the commercials. That's how I think about fortune cookies.
Shawn Porat:
I love that you brought up Gary. So Gary actually came to us and said, "I want to put VeeFriends on here and do a big national partnership because I love what this is, but I want to see the impact." I did a national partnership. He said it blew away anything he's ever touched. He called us, said, "Come into my office, we need to talk," wrote us a big check and became a partner in our company. Now he owns a piece of OpenFortune and said that we're the new Super Bowl spot.
Chris Dreyer:
Unreal. So guys, this was not planned. It just made me think of Gary V and just like how he's so in tune with attention and interest. And wow, I didn't know that at all. So that's exciting.
Shawn Porat:
Oh yeah.
Chris Dreyer:
You work with huge brands. I mean Duolingo, Liquid Death. Maybe you could just share just another story of a brand that you've worked with that was a success that, just for our audience, because I'd love the stories and hearing how you're utilizing the fortune cookie.
Shawn Porat:
Yeah. So I'll start off with the first one. So in 2018, we launched with Capital One in a national partnership. And the budget they gave to us, even though it was a nice six figure budget, it was still under 1% of the total campaign. They didn't really care about us, we were just something extra part of it.
Within 24 hours of launching this campaign, the CMO of Buzzfeed got takeout in New York City for his sick wife, opened the fortune cookie, saw the ad on the back, posted on Twitter, went to sleep, woke up, millions of views, went viral, everyone talking about it on Twitter. It got reposted to Reddit, another 18 million views, and tens and tens of thousands of upvotes. And then the chief brand officer at Capital One calls and says, "what in the world is this? I've never heard of this. We're not ready to respond to the thousands of social posts coming in mentioning Capital One and the Savor Card. How are we handling this?"
So that was a really fun, and showed us, by the way, because we always knew this was powerful, this platform, but we didn't truly know until we shot out millions of cookies for Capital One in that first partnership where we truly realized, holy crap, what do we have here?
Proven measurable marketing tactics that turn a dinner table fortune into long-term brand awareness and client recall
Chris Dreyer:
That's one of the things about marketing, and by and large, I think the attribution conversation is a complete and utter joke for the most part, first touch and last touch, and all these different things. I think there was a study done several years ago that said the consumer had to see a brand like seven times before they made a decision. And the study was just released again recently. Now it's 13 times.
So in that scenario where the CMO posted on Buzzfeed and you're like, oh, this is the signal that's driving all the attention. What are some of the things that you do that where you can actually measure the impact? How do you know if it's working?
Shawn Porat:
So after that experience and realizing that 6% of people post on social, and by the way, that number 6% is based on a 20,000 person panel conducted by Nielsen. That's where we learned six out of a hundred people post on average. So after that, we hired a company to build an image recognition tool that scours social media and finds any social posts with our fortunes. And we take screenshots and we send it to our partners every two weeks. So they're getting hundreds of social posts, if not thousands, sent to them. And they see them and they're just flabbergasted. They're like, we can't even get one from a billboard we put up. And you guys, every two weeks like clockwork, just sending me tons of social. So that's the first thing that we do.
The second thing that we do, market research studies. We have a partner that goes out to restaurants, they stand outside, and as people exit the restaurant, they're asked questions like, "Do you remember the name of the brand you received in the fortune cookie? Have you heard of them before?" etc. And we do that every quarter during our partnerships.
The third thing that we do is we place QR codes inside the fortune slip. So again, not for performance purposes, we're not a performance platform, but for brand awareness and to check which creative resonated the most with consumers. So unlike a billboard, you're putting up one piece of creative, here, we could put 20, 30, 40 different messages to see what stands out the most for consumers with different QR codes and see which ones got the most scans.
Chris Dreyer:
That's amazing. I love the unaided recall, which brands do you remember, as opposed to giving them those types of studies that I guess PI attorneys are very familiar with when they're doing these large TV campaigns.
Let's say I am a PI firm in Austin, Texas. They have a targeted DMA. Maybe they're not covering the whole state of Texas. What would an engagement look like in terms of how would they approach this and working with you? Let's just do a mock type of thing here.
Shawn Porat:
So our structure is set up as a subscription. So you come in and you tell us, "Hey, this is my budget for the month," and it's a month to month agreement. You could cancel any time with notice, but it's a month to month agreement. It's not a standalone transactional type of partnership. All of our partners, we're very close to them. We're kind of an extension of their creative team, ops team, marketing. We help them strategize. We put together all the creative for the fortune cookies. We come up with different ideas. We set up landing pages even for them sometimes. We really do a lot for them. We do PR for them, we do pitches, do everything surrounding the fortune cookie experiences. It's a 360 approach.
Chris Dreyer:
Unreal, unreal. And then would that be the question that I know the PI attorneys want to ask? Because on TV and radio, you're limited to spots, and they all want their exclusivity. I mean, is it a, hey, we have a certain distribution amount, and if you hit that capacity, we'll give you exclusivity? Or what's that look like in a market?
Shawn Porat:
So every time we go into a category, we assess how should we break this up? Should we have exclusivity? Should we not? It really depends on the category and the demand for exclusivity. So we really let the market dictate that.
So take colleges for example. When we approached take in Arizona, Northern Arizona University, it was about, I think it was 2018 or 2019. Northern Arizona University, NAU, said, "We don't want anybody else touching this. This worked so well when we started our month-to-month agreement that we want to lock this in for three years." So we signed an exclusivity where they are the college partner of the fortune cookie in Arizona. So we locked them in. Three years passed by, we're thinking, okay, we're going to go find another partner in Arizona. They said, "No, we want to renew this. We'll pay more. We're renewing this. We don't want to get out."
So it works really, really well. And we're open to exclusivities by counties, by state, by regions, in the country. We've signed them, but we usually let the market dictate that.
Creative ways Personal Injury law firms can connect with potential clients without the hard sell — and still win more cases
Chris Dreyer:
Let's zoom out just a bit. You've probably thought about this in advance since we talked, but how would you tie this in for an injury firm, their one, auto accidents? Have you thought about maybe the language and what would go in the fortune cookie? How do you tie it back to the firm and get that brand affinity?
Shawn Porat:
I don't think it's about call now. It's not about that kind of a forceful call to action. I think it's about saying, "We're here for you. Here's our success. Keep us in mind. Save this for when you need it. We're leaving you with this piece of paper. Even put it on your fridge." Those types of messages I think will go a long way and make people feel a lot more comfortable, than just that blatant call to action ad.
Chris Dreyer:
Got it, got it. So not really direct response, more brand top of the funnel awareness.
Shawn Porat:
And it works extremely well. So we have another client in the finance space, their CPA is about $600. And they worked with us for about a year and eight months. It went down 27% across all their partners, affiliate and otherwise, everyone they work with, because of what we're doing on the brand front for them.
Chris Dreyer:
That's really unique. And I got to imagine too, the cost acquire client across the nation, I heard a stat lately for auto where it's risen to about 3,200 bucks. So I imagine there could be significant lift and significant opportunity there.
Shawn Porat:
Oh yeah, definitely.
Chris Dreyer:
Every market would be different from a pricing perspective, but a lot of the firms listening are accustomed to, if it's an awareness campaign, it's priced on a CPM, like cost per thousand. But it's a bit different because you have their attention. That cost per thousand, it's like out of the thousand, who's actually paying attention to the TV commercial? So without giving details on your pricing, because every market will be different from a distribution perspective, what's that look like?
Shawn Porat:
So we price on a CPC, cost per cookie.
Chris Dreyer:
That's good.
Shawn Porat:
And it's really each of these cookies, it's not, impressions don't even fall into this world. It's truly an experience, an engagement. It's very, very different. You're really inserting yourself into a century old tradition. And as I said earlier in the conversation, when people are open to suggestion. You could hit somebody with 5,000 impressions and if they're not open to suggestion and their guardrails are up, it's all a waste of money. It's not going anywhere.
So we look at it as, hey, you are completely paying attention. Not just paying attention, you're also open-minded to change. You're open-minded to what's next for me, what's next in my life. You're in that state of mind. It's very, very, very rare to get people into that state of mind.
So yes, summing up, we price per cookie for this.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I love it from the earned media capacity component too, right? It's like those viral moments where they share it on social and complementing those other channels. And Chris Walker, there's a marketer talks about it. I hate this phrase, but he calls it dark social. It's like the conversations and the DMs, and the re-shares through the text messages.
Do you get real cheeky with it from a humor perspective? I guess it's a brand by brand?
Shawn Porat:
Yeah, so I'll give you a quick example. You mentioned Duolingo earlier in the conversation. They came to us and said, "We only do performance, only app downloads. That's who we are. That's all we care about." We're like, "Okay, you have two choices right now. One choice, walk away, we're not a right fit. Or second choice, let us handle the creative. Let us figure out something that will go viral, and have fun with it." They said, "Fine." After a couple of conversations they gave in.
So we came up with, put Duo in the fortune slip and say, "I got you. I found you. Why aren't you learning your language right now? Why aren't you taking your lesson?" calling people out in a fun way. We got so much social. They were just flabbergasted. Like one post on TikTok, millions of views, 500,000 shares. It was insane. And she's just on the video talking about, "Duo, please don't hurt me. I have a family." And this is all organic that came out of it. It was incredible.
Chris Dreyer:
I immediately was thinking, why aren't you getting your treatment, injured person, to maximize your claim?
Shawn Porat:
That's a good one.
Chris Dreyer:
Go to the doctor. You deserve to get your back fixed.
Shawn Porat:
Yeah, that's additive, that's fun. That's community. Those are great things. And that's what we come up with. That's what we help all our partners do.
Chris Dreyer:
How often do you rotate the messages? How do you track decision fatigue or when something gets stale?
Shawn Porat:
Great, great point. So we change creative every quarter for our partners at a minimum. And then during each of those quarters, there are many different messages. So it's not usually one brand message. Usually there's at least two or three. So if you're going back to the same restaurant, you're not getting the same brand message on the back. And on the front, there's usually over a hundred fortunes. So everyone at the table is getting a different fortune experience each time.
You should have seen in the beginning when we didn't know any better, and we just put four or five fortunes, and people would get the same fortune at the table, all hell will break loose. They would complain to the managers of the restaurant. Managers would call the distributors. Distributors would call the factories. Factories call us and saying, "You're ruining the experience. People's fortunes, they're getting the same ones as others at the table. It's not unique to them." And that's when we learned our lesson.
Chris Dreyer:
That's funny. Yeah, that's frustrating. I've had that experience happen, so nobody likes that.
What questions didn't I ask in regards to this? I think to summarize for me is like, look, this is a unique way to stand out, that every time I hear the next Turkey giveaway or backpack giveaway, I'm like, yeah, you're doing some goodwill, but everybody in your market does that. This is something unique where you stand out.
What questions didn't I ask that you think would be important for the audience?
Shawn Porat:
So I think that people overcomplicate it sometimes when it comes to this. I think you have to ask yourself, when you're around family, and you're at a restaurant, and you're opening the cookies, and you're reading it aloud, put yourself into that experience, and think about humanity in its most basic form. We're all looking for guidance on where we're going in the future. What's next for us? That's really what we're all yearning for. We want that good, nice, warm feeling of like, okay, this is your path. This is what's next for you. That's what this is giving people. That's what a lot of people don't get to in that partnership conversation with us, but if they really dig deep, they truly understand that's what you are buying into here.
But to answer your question more directly, what's happening next for us? A lot of people ask what happens after the fortune cookie? So we're going to run out of space at some point. And we're not digital. We can't just create billions of impressions off multiple different websites where people just jump to or scroll down the page, et cetera. So we're going to sell out at some point in the next couple of years.
We've been toying with the idea of taking the fortune cookie, which is a circular pancake in its most basic form before it's folded, and when you fold it in half, the same circular pancake, it becomes a taco. And we've been testing, placing that in Mexican restaurants at the end of the meal as a fortune, taco-shaped. And it's been having great results. So we're going to be launching that at some point in the next year, and very excited about that expansion of this current tradition in Asian restaurants.
Chris Dreyer:
I love that. I think that'll kill it. It just adds to the whole experience. You get the chips and salsa at the beginning. And you got the fortune taco at the end, so I love that idea. I think that's awesome.
Shawn Porat:
Yeah. And we're going to give access to that to our current partners. So anybody who's currently already partnered with us, they will have first dibs on that.
Chris Dreyer:
Incredible. Shawn, one final question for our audience that wants to get in touch with you and learn more about this, what's the best way to get in touch with you?
Shawn Porat:
So if you want to reach out to my team, openfortune.com. And you could schedule a call there. If you want to reach out to me, it's Shawn at openfortune.com, S-H-A-W-N, @openfortune.com.
Chris Dreyer:
If you're looking for a way to stand out, not just show up, this might be the move. Shawn's offering an exclusive discount just for PIM listeners. Head to openfortune.com/pim to start the conversation and see how your brand fits inside 300 million dinner tables. That's openfortune.com/pim. Check it out.
