On an otherwise normal Thursday evening, as my wife and I finished our Chinese food takeout (shoutout to Main Moon 2 in Racine, the second-best of the Main Moon locations), I cracked open my first fortune cookie. Inside, instead of the lucky numbers I was expecting, there was a picture of underwear.
Huh!?
Advertising has now cracked into Chinese food.
The photo of underwear I was surprised by is one of 3 million fortune cookies that are part of a new ad campaign launched by Jockey, the Kenosha-based clothier specializing in undergarments.
Inside the fortune cookies produced by Winfar Foods Inc. – a Chicago company that, according to its website, makes nothing but fortune cookies and provides them to more than 11,000 restaurants – you can now find advertisements for Jockey underwear on one side with fortunes embedded with ad words on the other.
On the side of the fortune without underwear on it, I was told, “Trust in your authentic self, for that’s where your comfort lies.” (Emphasis added.) On the side with an underwear model’s exposed midriff wearing the briefs Jockey revolutionized was the text “Eating at home, the only dress food is comfort.” It’s a rather cheeky tagline that resonated with the target audience – me, wearing only an undershirt and paint-stained sweatpants as I slurped up the last of my lo mein.
The new ad campaign launched in the fall, with Jockey buying 3 million of these fortune-ads, to be placed in cookies across the metro Chicago and Milwaukee markets.
The New Kings of the Cookie
Google “Fortune Cookie Advertisement” and your number one result will probably be for the tech startup OpenFortune, which Forbes lists among America’s fastest-growing companies. The NYC-based ad firm has been trying very hard to make its bite-size advertisements both ubiquitous and trendy. Its website brags “We’ve got more restaurants in our arsenal than the number of McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King and KFC combined. And no, we don’t dabble in the metaverse – we like our cookies tasty, relatable and far from virtual” – even though their fortunes are written by AI. Zoltar must be out of a job.
The company’s founder said in a Q&A last year that OpenFortune “controls nearly 90% of fortune cookie production, writing traditional fortunes on the front slips and placing advertising partners on the back slips.”
OpenFortune’s clients tend to be cash-rich and diverse: Entertainment giant Disney and its subsidiary Hulu. Grooming brand Manscaped. Language app Duolingo. Colleges like Illinois State University and Northern Arizona University. Tax filer TaxAct. Cryptocurrency firms. And – as seen firsthand – Jockey.
“If Jockey alone had placed an advertisement on a billboard or website, in a magazine or newspaper, it is likely we would not have received interest about the campaign from news media,” Dan Ouweneel, Jockey’s head of brand marketing, tells me in an email. (To prove Ouweneel’s point: You’re reading this article. You probably wouldn’t care if some other brand rented some billboards.)
From Japan to Instagram
Using fortune cookies to spread a message may be a new fad, but also not entirely novel.
The oldest instances I could find of fortune cookies being used for promotional purposes were from the 1960s when multiple politicians used them in electoral campaigns, including three-time presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. It wasn’t until around 2001 that ad space was explicitly being sold by fortune cookie-makers, and the market really seems to have only been cracked open in the last five years. (OpenFortune launched in 2018.)
There’s a common myth that fortune cookies are not a Chinese invention, but rather an American creation. That isn’t entirely true.
There are records of an antecedent to fortune cookies being prepared in Japan in the 1800s – albeit, they were made slightly thicker than what Americans are now accustomed to, with a little more umami flavor than sweet. But those Edo Period cookies would still be recognizable compared to what we have today, as they included a paper fortune being tucked into a wafer’s folds, fitting the very definition of a “fortune cookie.”
By the late 19th century, modern fortune cookies were being sold by Japanese immigrants in California’s Bay Area as an accoutrement to tea. They became known as “Fortune Tea Cakes,” and began to be incorrectly associated with Chinese cuisine rather than Japanese around 1941. We all can guess why. (Keyword: Internment.)
By the second half of the 20th century, the transition was complete – they had taken on the mass-produced shape and flavor profile we know today. There weren’t really any innovations on the dessert until the 21st century, when ads for undies started appearing inside.
Disruptive Marketing
Some people are really mad about this new foray.
Look up recent Google Reviews of Winfar Foods and you’ll find one from username “Potato Potato” who wrote: “I go to lovely Chinese restaurant and partake in a delicious meal. After I finish and get my cookie I find my fortune is just an ad for crypto. I was affronted! I decide to be extreme and find the manufacturer of the cookies just to write a bad review and find tons of people have already done so – as they should because this place is a sell out – and gained satisfaction upon seeing this company’s low star rating. STOP RUINING COOKIES AND WRITE GOOD FORTUNES.”
Another reviewer wrote: “WHAT IN THE CAPITALISM?! Friggin advertisement in my cookie ?!”
OpenFortune is aiming to profit off the attention, in an “All press is good press” sort of way. (Although, they didn’t reply to my request for an interview.) OpenFortune’s website features a scroll of posts from countless Instagrammers talking about the ads. The company attests that 6% of people who see the ads will post about them on social media. That’s an insanely high engagement rate, the definition of “disruptive marketing.”
Regardless, I asked Jockey about these negative reactions popping up on social media. Here’s what Ouweneel told me, in full: “Jockey has a rich history of innovation, not only in product development but also advertising and marketing, from inventing the men’s brief as we know it today to featuring athletes in advertising. This current campaign and its medium are new to Jockey but one that has strong engagement and interaction from the consumer.
“Prior to us partnering with OpenFortune, we knew there could be a high engagement rate on social media. Now, halfway through the campaign, we are seeing above average engagement and a majority of it is overwhelmingly positive.”
