Deals
Behind MrBeast’s Fortune Cookie Campaign
Fortune cookies, a staple of Westernized Chinese food, are normally a message contained within a small fried cookie. Aside from an actual “fortune”, the message within the cookie may have a Chinese phrase, a saying or proverb and lucky numbers. But soon, the cookie from your Chinese take-out order may display a different message. Starting January 13, 2026, millions of fortune cookies distributed across Chinese restaurants and food delivery services in the United States and Europe began carrying custom messages promoting Beast Games Season 2: Strong vs. Smart, the Amazon Prime Video competition series created by Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast.
Campaign partner OpenFortune sells advertising inside fortune cookies. According to their research, roughly 2.5 million cookies were circulated as part of the advertising campaign, making it one of the largest physical media drops attached to a streaming series in recent memory. So, why fortune cookies? When speaking to Fortune Magazine (I swear I’m not doing this on purpose), OpenFortune’s cofounder Shawn Porat said – “The fortune cookie is one of the last truly shared media moments people still slow down for, read out loud, and share.” “It’s intimate, social, and culturally ingrained—everything advertising often isn’t anymore.”
OpenFortune’s internal data suggests that almost every fortune cookie is opened and read. In contrast to digital impressions that may last fractions of a second, the fortune cookie creates a shared moment that naturally invites reaction and discussion. In an era of advertising overload (and many options to block digital advertisements), a company that can orchestrate marketing campaigns that offer high visibility and brand recall is quite the rarity. For Beast Games, a series structured around anticipation, reveal and audience participation, that kind of exposure is important. Contestants make choices without knowing outcomes. Viewers watch tension build before results are shown. The fortune cookie mirrors the action of the series.
Jeff Housenbold, CEO of Beast Industries, described the campaign as an attempt to reach audiences “outside the feed” by embedding the show into everyday rituals rather than interrupting online behavior. Beyond placement and scale, the campaign also included targeted distribution in specific regions to maximize reach. OpenFortune worked with local restaurants and delivery networks to ensure cookies reached major cities and suburban areas alike. While the vast majority of messages promoted the series, a small percentage contained numbered messages written by MrBeast himself. Fans who discovered these rare cookies began sharing images and videos on social media, creating organic buzz that extended the campaign beyond the initial offline distribution.
The integration of physical media into a digital-first franchise reflects a growing trend among content creators. Streaming platforms and social media feeds are increasingly crowded, making audience attention more difficult to capture. By leveraging an offline channel, the campaign offered a high-visibility opportunity that could not be skipped or muted. Analysts note that for creators with established followings, physical activations like this provide a measurable way to supplement online promotion while reaching new audiences.
Early social media tracking suggests that the campaign generated engagement in multiple forms. Photos of the cookies appeared on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, with users highlighting the numbered messages or sharing the standard promotional lines. The offline interaction created a secondary wave of online content, effectively turning the fortune cookie into a hybrid touchpoint linking physical and digital marketing. The Beast Games Season 2 campaign was not without naysayers however, as some social media users have complained that the advertisement and similar marketing campaigns had taken away from the fun of fortune cookies.
Beast Industries emphasized that the campaign was designed to complement traditional digital promotion rather than replace it. By embedding the series into a familiar ritual—dining—the initiative aimed to reinforce awareness among both casual viewers and the franchise’s existing fanbase. The campaign also demonstrates how large-scale entertainment properties are experimenting with unconventional placements to maintain visibility in a competitive media environment.
Overall, the fortune cookie campaign illustrates how creators are expanding the boundaries of marketing beyond digital feeds and algorithmic targeting. By situating content in a physical medium that is widely distributed, shareable, and difficult to ignore, MrBeast and his team created a multi-layered promotional strategy that engages audiences on multiple levels. It highlights the potential for hybrid campaigns in which offline and online experiences reinforce one another, and it underscores a broader trend in entertainment marketing: attention is increasingly earned not only through reach but through strategic placement and context.
Deals
Recho Omondi’s Cutting Room Floor Signs 3-Year Patreon Deal
Five years of handshake exclusivity just became a three-year contract. Inside the Patreon deal that lets the fashion podcaster keep every piece of the brand she built behind a paywall.
For five years, Recho Omondi kept her fashion podcast The Cutting Room Floor exclusive to Patreon on a handshake. It took a rival platform trying to poach her to turn that arrangement into a contract.
Fast Company reported the deal on June 3. The partnership runs three years. Patreon will fund joint marketing and help build out the show’s production and team infrastructure. Omondi keeps full ownership of the brand. The agreement marks the podcast’s transformation into an independent media company. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The same report placed The Cutting Room Floor in the top 1 percent of Patreon’s podcasts by earnings. Paid memberships more than doubled year over year. For independent fashion media, that is the part worth studying. A platform is paying to grow a creator’s business it does not own. The legacy model ran the other way: a publisher bought the title, and the voice answered to new owners.
The masthead stays hers.
A Rival Made the First Move
Omondi launched the show across streaming platforms in 2018. Two years later, she shut down her fashion label, Omondi, to make the podcast her full-time work. In 2021, during its third season, she moved the show exclusively to Patreon. It went fully paywalled and ad-free, with no formal platform agreement.
The exclusivity ran on trust. Then a competing platform came calling this spring. “The impetus was because there was a competitor to Patreon that was poaching me very aggressively to leave the platform. It inspired me to bring that deal to Patreon and they agreed,” Omondi told The Publish Press.
Paywalled on Purpose
Episodes will stay where they have always been: behind the paywall, with no ads. Omondi has been explicit that this is strategy, not stubbornness. “I think a lot of people use Patreon as an early release, which I think is so futile,” she said in April 2025. “That doesn’t seem like a competitive play to me. So I use Patreon as a completely different offering.”
The free side does the recruiting.
Omondi has said clips and social video are her top subscriber acquisition tool. A video team of four produces them.
On TikTok, her videos have topped 1 million views, and she has tallied nearly 200,000 followers. The episodes themselves move slowly, on purpose. She wants to give listeners, in her words, “things that they can take a week and a half to chew on before the next one comes out.”
What Each Side Bought
Patreon locked in one of its flagship fashion shows for three years. It also bought a proof point: a paywall-first podcast can become a media company without leaving the platform. “We share a vision of investing in the next generation of creative voices, and this partnership is about building that future together,” said Betsy McCormick, Patreon’s VP of creator success, in a statement.
Omondi bought infrastructure on her own terms. The partnership funds team growth, new content formats, and community events. The brand stays entirely her own. Her official statement kept the focus on the editorial product itself: “Our ethos has always been to make fashion and culture content that is intelligent, educational and entertaining.”
She marked the deal with a commemorative episode on announcement day. The guest was Patreon co-founder Jack Conte.
The new formats, community events, and expanded programming are set to roll out by autumn. The name above all of them stays Omondi’s.
Deals
Marlon Garcia Signs With Nike, Second Streamer After Kai Cenat
He was streaming through homelessness in New York not long ago. This week he signed with Nike.
Marlon Garcia, the Swedish Twitch streamer and former college basketball player, has officially signed with Nike, announcing the deal on his Instagram account @marlon3lg. It makes him the second major streamer to join the brand, after Kai Cenat.
The distance Garcia covered to get here is the whole story. He has been open about experiencing homelessness in New York City while he kept streaming, grinding through broadcasts with no guarantee any of it would work. The kid who once had nowhere to sleep now has a Nike contract.
His path to the brand runs through two sports and a career change. Like most kids, Garcia started on a football pitch, and he has said that signing with Nike and becoming “the biggest baller in the world” was one of his earliest dreams. He went on to play college basketball, suiting up at guard for Lower Columbia College in Washington, before walking away from competitive sport to pursue content full time. He thought the Nike dream had died with the jersey. It did not.
Both @NikeFootball and @NikeLA welcomed him from their verified accounts within the comments. @NikeLA wrote “Welcome fam, time to lock in,” while @NikeFootball added “Welcome to the family, let’s cook.” For a creator rather than a drafted athlete, that kind of direct embrace from the brand’s official channels is the signal that the relationship is real, not a one-off product seeding.
The support extended well beyond Nike. Creators including FaZe Rug, OussiFooty, and Lacy turned out in the comments and on their own feeds. Lacy, who released the second drop of his collectibles brand TapCap earlier the same day, posted his congratulations publicly.
Garcia’s signing is the operational story for working creators. He built modeling and streaming as parallel tracks, signing with IMG and walking for fashion houses while growing his Twitch audience. Marlon converted that combined profile into a sportswear deal of a kind the industry long reserved for professional athletes. The brand is not buying a basketball career. It is buying an audience, and the reach that comes with it.
Complex reported that Kai Cenat announced his own Nike partnership in February 2024, becoming the first major streamer to sign with the brand. Garcia now stands second in that line, and the gap between the two signings, barely two years, is the real headline: the lane is widening fast.
Nike nor Garcia have disclosed a date for specific deliverables or campaign launches as of this writing but it is safe to assume there will be activity around the World Cup.
Deals
Snap Promotes Malhotra After Meta Poaches Snappys Producer
Meta recruited the producer of the Snappys. Snap promoted a 10-year veteran the same week. The creator economy wins the bidding war either way.
On March 31, at the first-ever Snappys at Snap’s Santa Monica headquarters, David Dobrik took a moment on stage to salute the man who put the night together, “Thank you to Jim Shepherd, the #1 Snap boss.”
Two months later, Meta came calling for the #1 Snap boss.
Snap had the answer ready. The company announced on June 3 that it promoted Anmol Malhotra to global head of content and partnerships, Variety reported. The 10-year company veteran now owns Snapchat’s creator ecosystem, editorial strategy, and global partnerships across sports, media, entertainment, and music. He succeeds Shepherd, Snap’s former senior director of global content partnerships, who departed for Meta as director of content and creator partnerships with a specific focus on the company’s wearables business, per The Hollywood Reporter.
The Exec Is the Asset Now
The back-to-back moves put a sharp point on where platform competition has shifted: the executives who build creator ecosystems are now recruited like the creators themselves. Shepherd was not a back-office hire. He was the public architect of Snap’s creator relationships, the man who announced the Snappys and produced them, by his own description on LinkedIn adding “award show producer” to his resume. The night ended with the platform’s newly crowned Creator of the Year thanking Jim from the stage.
For Meta, that is a quality hire by any measure. Shepherd arrives to bring celebrities and creators into the Ray-Ban and Oakley glasses push, a product line whose sales more than tripled in 2025, and he brings exactly the relationship-building track record that work requires. Nor is the pattern isolated: OpenAI recruited Instagram’s longtime partnerships chief Charles Porch earlier this year. Across the industry, the people who know creators have become as sought-after as the creators they know.
And if there is a compliment buried in the recruitment, it is aimed at Snap. Companies do not poach from weak rosters. Snap built an executive worth hiring away, and had his successor named the same week from a legacy ten years deep.
Snap Has Been Here Before
There is a familiar shape to a Snap-built playbook scaling inside Meta. Snapchat invented Stories in 2013; Instagram launched its own version in 2016, and Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom was direct about the lineage at the time, telling TechCrunch that Snapchat “deserves all the credit.” The format went on to power Meta’s apps and much of the modern social internet. Camera glasses follow the same arc: Snap shipped Spectacles in 2016, five years before Meta’s first Ray-Ban collaboration, and is preparing its next generation of AR glasses now.
Seen through that history, the Shepherd hire is less a raid than a rerun of the industry’s oldest dynamic with Snap in its usual position: ahead of the curve. Snap pioneers the category, the largest player in social scales it, and the talent that learned the craft at Snap becomes the most valuable in the market. Both things can be true at once. Meta is getting a proven operator for its biggest consumer hardware bet. Snap keeps the laboratory where operators like that are made.
The Commercial Stake
Snap’s side of the ledger is growing. The company announced in February that Snapchat+ had surpassed 25 million subscribers, pushing its direct revenue business to a $1 billion annualized run rate, per a Snap newsroom announcement. Installing a dedicated global partnerships chief at this moment is a structural signal. Snap is treating creator and media deal-making as a revenue function, not a marketing one.
The financials support the posture. Snap reported Q1 2026 revenue of $1.53 billion, up 12 percent year over year, with its net loss narrowing to $89 million from $139.6 million in the same period a year earlier. Subscription growth now sits alongside ad revenue as a stated priority metric. Every one of those lines runs through the creator ecosystem Malhotra just took over, which is exactly why the role was elevated rather than backfilled.
What Malhotra Brings
Malhotra joined Snap in 2015 and most recently led sports and media partnerships, building relationships with broadcasters and rights holders including NBC, ESPN, the NFL, the NBA, the UFC, FIFA, and the IOC. In the expanded role, he also oversees Snap’s international growth initiatives across North America, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America. The promotion consolidates creators, editorial, sports, music, and global expansion under one desk for the first time, and hands that desk to the executive who already holds the rights-holder relationships a sports-and-media-heavy creator strategy runs on.
It also hands him a calendar. The Snappys debuted as a flagship annual property, and year two is now Malhotra’s to deliver. Shepherd builds the creator roster for Meta’s glasses. Malhotra scales the one he inherited at Snap. For creators, this is the rare executive shuffle with no losing side. Two well-resourced platforms just signaled, in the same week, that the people who build creator relationships are worth competing over. The bidding war is the compliment, and creators are the ones who get paid in it.
