A Winning Bet in a Bite-Sized Cookie: America’s Cardroom’s Well-Played Hand

There’s online poker, and then there’s America’s Cardroom. It’s one of the hottest tables in town for eGamers and sports wagers, thanks to its high-octane tournaments, spicy prize pools, crypto-friendly payouts, and compliance-friendly playability in well over 90% of U.S. states.

But ACR isn’t just dealing in digital chips. Players can walk away now with winnings in bitcoin – a newly launched feature and clear platform USP. Throw in a growing sports wagering feature set, and ACR seeks to reshape how digital poker players bet, win, and brag all about it online.

America’s Cardroom knew they needed to push their brand awareness beyond the die-hard poker crowd. But it couldn’t be just any old spray-and-pray awareness.

The brand needed to hit the jackpot of an important trifecta: Engagement, compliance, and appropriate age-gating.

All in an OOH format to match the adrenaline found within their poker tournaments with select bitcoin payouts.

Talk about high stakes:

• Reaching the right demographics: Their target? A 21+, eGaming savvy, and ideally crypto-curious player. Not exactly your average banner-ad scroller.
  

• Tight regulations: Online poker, gambling, and sports wagering all come with a laundry list of legal guardrails difficult for the average in-house performance marketing crew to navigate solo. Not to mention added scrutiny across most digital media platforms.

• Bitcoin integration: Even with a forward-thinking, crypto-cool factor dialed up to max, bitcoin still makes some folks nervous. ACR needed a way to turn crypto winnings into an approachable add-on, not a barrier.

OpenFortune has built a name for itself as an undisputed champ, turning tiny folds of paper into powerful marketing real estate, particularly for highly regulated brands. America’s Cardroom saw the clear benefits in playing that hand.

Together, OpenFortune unveiled a national campaign using fortune cookies as a compliant, creative, and completely age-gated channel to deliver ACR’s bitcoin-winning poker promotion.

Here’s how we shuffled the deck for our client:

Objective: Promote ACR’s latest features – tournaments, prizes, and bitcoin-winning gameplay – in a way reaching real players, not just passersby..

Execution:

• Front-of-slip: Fortunes about luck, prosperity, and the thrill of taking a chance.

• Back-of-slip: ACR’s logo, a clean hook, and a clear CTA invitation to play poker and win crypto.

Distribution: Nationwide rollout across restaurants vetted for 21+ audiences.

ACR’s national promotion offered a precision play, engineered to excite the right players in the right places at just the right time (read: dinnertime).

Let’s just say America’s Cardroom got to play their hand exactly right:

• 84% Unaided Recall: Nearly 9 in 10 people remembered ACR without prompts, reminders, or retargeting. That’s brand awareness worth betting on.
  

• 156k+ Organic Social Shares (and counting): People loved their fortunes, so much so they went online to post about ‘em unprompted. That’s serious earned media without spending a cent on influencers or risking regulatory woes.
  

• 3.1 Million Website Visits: From cookie to conversion, this campaign spurred considerable organic traffic, marking a valuable uptick for ACR. That’s a tiny slip with a measurable payoff.

In a world where gambling campaigns often get bogged down by red tape and ad restrictions, OpenFortune gave America’s Cardroom a fresh, fun, and fully compliant way to win big.

A campaign that turned beloved cookies into clicks, conversions, and cardroom buzz.

Luck may help. Posts and virality can feel as mystifying as the house winning. But with OpenFortune, the odds come stacked in your favor, in spades.