“Why is there a half-naked lady in my fortune cookie?!”

My friend Jenny couldn’t wait to tell me this morning that she and her familly had ordered Chinese takeout last weekend.

But that obviously wasn’t the story. This is:

After they ate, she and her husband followed that time-honored tradition of cracking open their fortune cookies, eager (I’m sure) to yell “IN BED!!!” after reading whatever words of wisdom lay inside.

What they found in their cookies instead: underwear ads.
Yep. Jockey has forged a path to…the crispy, golden-brown final frontier of marketing?

HONESTLY, IS NOTHING SACRED?! 🥠

Apparently there’s an entire business built around this. It’s called OpenFortune, which proudly proclaims on its website that they’ve “transformed the fortune cookie into the ad world’s best kept secret.”

They’ve partnered with nearly 50,000 restaurants in “99% of ZIP codes” to reach households everywhere through Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Seamless food deliveries.

Gag me.

Where’s the button to opt out of THOSE cookies?

The good news for me is I’m a Thai-takeout girl and, as such, will rarely be subjected to such a horror, but this is clearly not the point.

What pulse-having hominid is actually going to be more likely to act if they see a marketing message in a cookie after stuffing their faces with orange chicken?! Really?!

In Story School, my students spend the entire first unit thinking about their dream customer, understanding what they want and, in part, figuring out where they spend their time and what they talk about in those spaces.

Unsurprisingly, no one discovered that their dream customers are deep in thought about how to solve their biggest problems on a Friday night
while they fumble around with their chopsticks
doom scroll
and let another seven episodes of Suits roll in the background
until they wake up on the couch at 3 a.m.
and drag themselves to bed.

Listen, just because you can hawk your product in a fortune cookie doesn’t mean you should.

Having your brand and your message EVERYWHERE might seem like a good idea, but at some point, folks are just going to become desensitized to your brand thanks to all the noise you’re creating.

Some will quickly train your brains to trash your glossy postcards, send your unwanted and un-unsubscribable emails to spam, take the extra moment to hide or report your ads on Instagram, and generally ignore you.

(Me. It’s me: super tuned-in to crappy marketing and petty as hell.)

So for the love of General Tso, think about what messages will actually resonate with your dream customer. Be intentional. Be judicious.

Induce delight, not eye-rolls.