New advertising strategy puts the pitch on the plate

07/02/2003

By TOM MAURSTAD / The Dallas Morning News

There are all the familiar ways to gauge the times in which we live: The planet is (or isn't) warming; road rage is (or isn't) on the rise; civilization is (or isn't) on the decline.

But here's one you might not have heard before: We live at that moment in history when someone who has made a lot of money in the ad biz refers to fortune cookies as "a new marketing medium" and "one of the last branding frontiers."

And he is completely serious.

His name is Mark Hughes. He is the CEO of Buzz Marketing, a firm specializing in that most desirable and elusive form of publicity -- word-of-mouth, people talking to one another about your product.

In a word, buzz.

Which is where fortune cookies come in.

For most people, these cellophane-wrapped tidbits are something to crack open at the end of an Asian-themed meal and read while waiting for your change.

But to Mr. Hughes, they are an unexploited marketing medium, with those little rectangles of paper as minibillboards.

In language particular to marketers and political pollsters, Mr. Hughes speaks in a stream of demographic statistics. So he rattles off:

"Ninety-seven percent of people read their fortunes when they're given fortune cookies. Sixty-seven percent of those fortunes get read aloud to the people they're eating with. Think about what an opportunity that is -- if you have the right message there, people are naturally going to talk about it."

You see how it's supposed to work? You're out with friends at a restaurant -- or staying in and getting take-out. You're talking; you open your fortune cookie and there's not only a fortune -- "You will make a new friend" -- but a clever little pitch for, say, a new movie. And so you and your friends start talking about that movie: Who's in it, are you going to see it? Buzz, buzz, buzz.

And what once was a throwaway confection becomes a conversational prompt.

"It's all about harnessing the most powerful force in marketing. Fortune cookies are a new and different way of creating a word-of-mouth campaign."

"New and different" is important. It's Mr. Hughes' bread-and-butter. This is, after all, the guy who back in 2000 as the marketing guru for Half.com -- an online retailer of used books, CDs, etc -- generated oodles of buzz when he convinced the town of Halfway, Ore., to rename itself Half.com.

That company, later bought by eBay, also took a foray into fortune cookie marketing in 2001 with $5-off coupons tucked inside.

"The reality is people don't pay attention to conventional advertising anymore," Mr. Hughes says. "Traditional forms of marketing don't work the way they used to because people have become very skilled at just tuning out. There's so much clutter now. The challenge is to find a way of cutting through all of it, of getting people to tune back in."

In a world of product placement and cross-promotional synergy, "cutting through the clutter" has become the marketer's mantra. And with good reason. It's like the whole world has been NASCAR-ized -- every square inch of everything has been covered with logos and brand names.

So every marketer is endlessly inventing new ways of getting his message through.

The funny, isn't-it-ironic effect of all these anti-clutter strategies is -- you guessed it -- more clutter: product placement in video games, pop-up promotions during TV shows, advertisements in fortune cookies.

"That's classic clutter," says Jim Warren, CEO of Warren Direct, an Austin-based marketing firm. "That's the problem: Everybody thinks their clutter is going to be different. It's going to be smart clutter or cool clutter.

"But I think most people think that clutter is just clutter."

Time will tell. Mr. Hughes has agreements with six fortune-cookie manufacturers providing 7 million cookies a week to restaurants across the country, including 300,000 in Dallas. Just one advertiser, Showtime, has signed one, but he says many have expressed interest.

The future of fortune-cookie advertising remains unclear. But whether it's clutter-cutter or just more clutter, that will be the way the cookie crumbles.