← Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
345. This Cookie Outsells Billboards: Fortune Cookie Marketing w/ Shawn Porat
00:23:55
How Fortune Cookies Became the New Super Bowl Spot
Loading summary
Transcript56 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hey there, future VIP. I'm Kinsey, your on site concierge for PEMCON. The Personal Injury Master Rhyme Conference, October 5th through the 8th. When you go VIP at PEMCON, you're getting the full experience. Luxury accommodations included at the five star Phoenician resort. $250 in resort credit for the spa, golf course, or wherever your mood takes you, a private VIP dinner and exclusive access to the biggest names in personal injury. Grab your VIP tickets while you still can at pemcon. That's P I M C O n dot O R G. See you this fall in Scottsdale.
- [00:43]
B
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?
- [00:50]
C
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.
- [00:59]
B
That's 300 million brand impressions hand delivered at the exact moment people are opening to suggestion.
- [01:05]
C
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.
- [01:12]
B
It's not just memorable, it's measurable. This is personal injury. Mastermind PIM is powered by Rankings IO, the elite marketing agency for personal injury firms.
- [01:22]
C
You put 10 million cookies out there, you're getting 600,000 organic. No one sent the organic social posts from People, which is just insane.
- [01:32]
B
I'm Chris Dreyer. Let's get into it this episode. We're talking to Sean from Open Fortune, and he's doing something entirely outside of the box. Or should I say inside of the box? Go puns early. Sean, welcome to the show.
- [01:46]
C
Thank you. Thank you. Glad to be on, I guess.
- [01:49]
B
Just out of the gate, can you explain what Open Fortune is and just maybe a brief story of one of the success stories you've had out of the gate?
- [01:56]
C
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.
- [02:16]
B
I'm not gonna 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?
- [02:28]
C
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 will never take that away. It's more on the other side that we place the brand into that experience.
- [02:45]
B
Yeah. So I, you know, let's just talk about a few of these. I want to call out, you know, one of the ads I think you did a this Too Shall Pass. And it was an ad for Dude White. Talk to me about that campaign.
- [02:57]
C
Oh, yeah, it was so much fun. So, so we. So again, Dude Wipes is in your future will never be on the front. But we will change the fortune to kind of speak in the brand tone and have fun with it and kind of transition into the brand side. So the whole idea is get people into the mindset that the brand wants you in. So you know, when this too shall pass. You know, 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 sent them 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, you know, So I guess.
- [03:54]
B
The audience is listening. Chris, why the hell do you have Sean 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. Like, I've seen the billboards on the side of the road a million times. You've seen, you know, people just copy idea and idea over and over. But just from a distribution perspective, it's amazing what you guys do.
- [04:19]
C
Yeah, no, it's, it's, 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 kind of leaves that experience and goes onto social. Goes on your wallet, goes on your fridge. It's just, 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 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 works 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.
- [05:22]
B
You know, I. I gotta 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 we. She rips open the fortune cookie and she's like, hey. And like, gets my attention and wants to read hers to me.
- [05:38]
C
Right?
- [05:38]
B
So like, now I'm focused in. It's not just the individual reading. Now she's telling me, like you said, they posted some social media. But then it's weird. It's like, then I want to read mine and she wants to hear mine. So it's kind of makes me think of that the biggest relationship that I think of is like, Gary Vaynerchuk, where he talks about how he loves the super bowl ads because everybody wants to watch the commercials. That's how I kind of think about fortune cookies.
- [06:00]
C
I love that you brought up Gary. So Gary actually came to us and said, I want to put V friends on here and do a big national partnership because I love what this is, but I want to see the impact. 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 open fortune and said that we're the new super bowl spot.
- [06:27]
B
Unreal. So, guys, this was not planned. I just. It just made me think of Gary Vee 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 really. That's exciting.
- [06:41]
C
Oh, yeah.
- [06:41]
B
You work with huge brands. I mean, duolingo liquid. Like, 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 love the stories and hearing how you're utilizing the fortune cookie.
- [06:55]
C
Yeah. So I'll start off with the first one. So in 2018, we launched with Capital One International 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 in the back, posted on Twitter, went to sleep, woke up, millions of views went viral. Everyone talking about on Twitter, they 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 kind of showed us by the way, because we, 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?
- [08:08]
B
You know, 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 like all these different things, right? 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 you know, in that scenario where the CMO posts it on BuzzFeed and you're like, oh, this is the signal, this is, that's driving all the attention. Like 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?
- [08:48]
C
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 6 out of 100 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, they're just flabbergast. 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 receiving 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 are 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.
- [10:17]
B
That's amazing. I love the, the kind of, the unaided recall, you know, which brands do you remember? You know, as opposed to giving them, you know, 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'm a PI firm in Austin, Texas. Right. They have a targeted dma. Maybe they're not covering the whole state of Texas. You know, what would an engagement look like in terms of, like, how would they approach this in working with you? Like, let's just do like a, like a mock type of thing here.
- [10:48]
C
Yeah. 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 anytime with notice, but it's a month to month agreement. It's not a standalone transactional type of partnership. All of our partners were 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 experience. It's kind of a 360 approach.
- [11:30]
B
Unreal. Unreal. Even up is excited to announce their latest solution. AI Playbooks. Drive proactive case decisions with AI Playbooks by automatically flagging critical information across every case file from intake to resolution. Even up is pioneering AI solutions tailored to help personal injury law firms save time, resolve Cases faster and consistently settle for more. Backed by $235 million in funding, they support over a thousand firms nationwide. From solo practitioners to leading PI firms in the country. Learn more today@evenuplaw.com and then, you know, would that be, you know, the question that I know the PR attorneys want to ask? Because on tv, you know, you're in radio, you're limited to spots, right? So they, and they all, 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 is there, you know, like what's that look like in a market?
- [12:27]
C
So every time we go into a category, we kind of assess, how should we break this up? Should we have exclusivity? Should we not really depends on the category and the demand for, 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, you know, we're gonna 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 wanna 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.
- [13:33]
B
Let's kind of zoom out just a bit. You know, you've probably thought about this in advance since we talked, but like how would you tie this in for an injury firm? You know, they're wanting auto accidents. Have you thought about maybe the language and like what would go in the fortune cookie? Like how do you tie it back to the firm and get that brand affinity?
- [13:52]
C
I don't think it's about call now. It's not about that kind of 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, like even put it on your fridge. Like those types of Messages I think will go a long way and make people feel a lot more comfortable than just that blatant kind of call to action ad.
- [14:21]
B
Got it, got it. So not really direct response, more brand.
- [14:25]
C
Top the funnel awareness and it works extremely well. So we have, we have another client in the finance space. Their CPA is about $600. Okay. And they work 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.
- [14:51]
B
That's really unique, you know. And I gotta imagine too, you know, the, the cost to acquire a client across the nation. I heard a stat lately for auto where it's risen to about 3200 bucks. So I imagine there, there could be significant lift and significant opportunity there.
- [15:07]
C
Oh yeah, definitely.
- [15:09]
B
Every market would be different from a pricing perspective. But like, you know, a lot of the firms listening are accustomed to, you know, if it's an awareness campaign, it's priced like on a cpm, like cost per thousand. But you know, it's a bit different because you have their attention. Right. That cost per thousand, it's like out of the thousand who's actually paying attention to the TV commercial. Right. So you know, without giving details on your pricing. Because every market will be different from a distribution perspective. Like, like what's that look like?
- [15:38]
C
So we price on a CPC cost per cookie. That's good. And it's really, and it's really each of these cookies, you know, it's not. Impressions kind of don't even fall into this world. It's truly experience and 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're 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, sum it up. We price per cookie for this.
- [16:35]
B
Yeah, I love it from the earn media capacity component too. Right. It's like those viral moments where they share it on social and kind of complimenting 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 reshares through the text is, you know, do you get real cheeky with it?
- [16:56]
C
Do you?
- [16:56]
B
You know, from a humor perspective, I guess it's a brand by brand.
- [17:01]
C
Yeah. So I'll. 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 are 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.
- [18:00]
B
I immediately was thinking, like, why aren't you getting your treatment, injured person, to maximize your claim?
- [18:09]
C
That's a good one.
- [18:10]
B
Go to the doctor. You deserve to get your back fixed.
- [18:14]
C
Yeah, that's additive. That's fun. That's comedic. Those are great. And that's what we come up with. That's what we help all our partners do.
- [18:22]
B
How often do you rotate the messages? How do you track, like, decision fatigue or like, you know, when something gets stale?
- [18:29]
C
Great, 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 message, 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 it in the beginning when we didn't know any better and we just put like 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. That's funny.
- [19:19]
B
Yeah, there's. That's frustrating. I've had that experience happen, you know, so nobody likes that, you know. What questions didn't I ask in regards to this? I think. I think kind of 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, that's. That's. You're doing some goodwill. But everybody in your market does that. Right? You know, this is something unique where you stand out. What questions didn't I ask that you think would be important for the audience?
- [19:48]
C
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 kind of 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, 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're buying into here. But to answer your question more directly, what's happening next for us? So a lot of people ask, like, 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.
- [21:28]
B
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. You got the. The Fortune taco at the end. So I love that idea. I think that's awesome.
- [21:37]
C
Yeah. And we're. And we're going to give access to that to our current partners. So anybody who's currently partnered with us, they will have first dibs on that.
- [21:47]
B
Incredible. Sean, you know, 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?
- [21:56]
C
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 SeanPenFortune.com S H A W N@OpenFortune.com if you're looking for a way.
- [22:11]
B
To stand out, not just show up, this might be the move. Sean's offering an exclusive discount just for PIM listeners. Head to openfortune.com PIM to start the computer conversation and see how your brand fits inside 300 million dinner tables. That's openfortune. Com him check it out.