Not Even Your Fortune Cookie Is Safe From Ads Anymore
There’s a moment of ritual to cracking open a fortune cookie — small, sweet, the promise of something vaguely wise or lucky tucked inside. It’s not exactly profound, but it’s a tradition people have affection for.
Jared Holt, a senior researcher at Open Measures and podcast host, cracked his open after takeout recently and found something else entirely.
Not a fortune. An ad. Specifically: a paper slip advertising Polymarket, the prediction market that critics describe as a gambling platform, complete with a QR code for him to scan. The slip read, “Yes, we paid for a fortune cookie ad.”
“For f***’s sake,” Holt wrote on social media, sharing the photo. The image went viral across Bluesky and X, racking up millions of views almost immediately.
“I’d quite literally never order from this place again,” entertainment writer Ethan Dayton replied. “We have truly hit rock bottom,” said another user. Someone else simply called it a “misfortune cookie.”
This Is Already a Thing — and It’s Been Growing
As jarring as Holt’s discovery felt, fortune cookie advertising isn’t new. A company called OpenFortune has been placing brand advertisements inside fortune cookies at partner restaurants for years. By 2019, Vice reported the company was working with approximately 45% of Chinese restaurants in the United States. That percentage has continued to grow.
The ads that have shown up in cookies over the years include casino and gambling promotions, pharmaceutical ads, Verizon promotions, ZipRecruiter job listings, and Hard Rock sports betting. The pitch to restaurants is essentially free fortune cookie inventory in exchange for allowing branded inserts — a way for restaurants to cut costs, and for brands to reach customers at a moment of physical, tactile engagement that digital advertising can’t replicate.
The companies doing this argue it’s innovative. The people eating the food tend to argue something else entirely.
Why It Hits Differently Than Other Ads
People see hundreds, if not thousands, of advertisements every day. Banner ads, pre-roll video, sponsored posts, billboard displays — the volume is so high that most of it is effectively wallpaper. Nobody gets viscerally upset about a banner ad.
Fortune cookies are different. They’re a food item handed to you at the end of a meal, associated with a moment of small pleasure and tradition. The expectation — a fortune, something goofy or vaguely meaningful, maybe some lucky numbers — is baked into the ritual. Replacing it with “Yes, we paid for a fortune cookie ad” doesn’t just insert an advertisement; it explicitly acknowledges the intrusion and dares the recipient to be annoyed.
The reaction was essentially universal across comment sections and reply threads: gross, intrusive, a line crossed. “Ads on fortune cookie fortunes is nuts.” “That’s end stage capitalism right there.” “Feels slivy and invasive to have an ad inside your damn food.”
What makes the Polymarket version particularly sharp is the copy. Most fortune cookie ads are at least trying to be subtle about what they’re doing. “Yes, we paid for a fortune cookie ad” is openly contemptuous of the format it’s colonizing — leaning into the absurdity as a brand move. Whether that’s clever self-awareness or just more obnoxious depends heavily on how you feel about Polymarket to begin with.
Who Exactly Did This
Details remain thin. It’s not confirmed whether Polymarket itself orchestrated the campaign or hired a third-party advertising company — like OpenFortune — to place the ads. Polymarket has not commented publicly on the campaign as of publication. The restaurant that served Holt his cookie hasn’t been named.
What is clear: fortune cookies with ads inside are legal, they’ve been distributed at scale for years, and most people eating takeout have no idea that the cookie at the end of their meal may have been co-opted by a brand they’ve never heard of.
The fortune-telling business has apparently been outsourced. The new message is: scan this QR code.
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