How Fancy Dance Casino Drove a 13% YoY in Gaming Volume with OpenFortune

Fancy Dance Casino, located along Oklahoma’s I-35 corridor, faced a familiar challenge for regional gaming operators: growing brand awareness and attracting new visitors in a saturated market.

While online sportsbooks and iGaming brands fight for digital attention, land-based casinos face a different problem: cutting through physical noise. Billboard clutter, repetitive radio ads, and local sponsorships all blend together, leaving few ways to reach new visitors meaningfully.

Fancy Dance’s leadership team saw that challenge early. With two new venues under construction and a major property expansion on the way, they needed to grow their player database before the state legalized sports betting. “It’s our job as operators to get you in the doors,” McCoy said. “Once you’re here, we can show you the value of our program—but we can’t do that without first capturing your attention.”

For Fancy Dance, traditional marketing tools like billboards, radio, and social ads had plateaued. That’s when FancyDance discovered OpenFortune.

“I can get your attention for maybe three seconds on a billboard depending on how fast you’re going,” Travis McCoy said, “but once you open a fortune cookie, I’ve got it for 30 and you’re fully present.

McCoy first connected with the OpenFortune team at the NEXT Summit in New York. The idea was unconventional, but the logic clicked: in a world of endless screens, a physical medium that surprised people could cut through the noise.

“We met with Dylan and Carlo and immediately vibed,” McCoy said. “We understood each other. Everyone’s trying to capture attention in a different way and no one was doing it in our space.”

FancyDance targeted restaurant networks between Oklahoma City and Wichita, aiming to reach high-traffic corridors where potential players lived or traveled. The creative execution leaned on curiosity: one fortune read, “This fortune may be worth up to $2,000.”

The message wasn’t a promotion — it reflected FancyDance’s average jackpot payout. But it worked. “People came in asking how to get their $2,000,” McCoy laughed. “Once they were here, we could tell our story.”

The internal experience with OpenFortune was equally positive. From initial creative selection to launch, the process stayed personal. “Usually you sign the contract and get handed off to an account manager you’ll never meet again,” he said. “With OpenFortune, I’ve met new people there, but still talk to the same people since day one. That’s rare.”

The campaign launched quietly on June 1. McCoy and his CEO didn’t announce it to staff or the board. They wanted to see organic reactions…

It didn’t take long.

• Employees started bringing in fortunes with the casino’s logo.
  
  

• Board members got texts from friends asking, “Are you guys advertising in Chinese restaurants now?”
  
  

• Tribal partners and other land-based casino operators started asking how FancyDance pulled it off.
  
  

• New Players were walking in their doors with their branded Fancy Dance fortune in hand to play their hand at winning $2,000.
  
  

That organic curiosity turned into a measurable impact. From June through August, the property saw a 13% year-over-year increase in gaming volume, coinciding with the campaign’s first full quarter.

The initial success led Fancy Dance to lock in a five-year exclusive partnership with OpenFortune across Oklahoma — a market with more than 80 casinos. “We wanted to be the little guy who could say to the big ones, ‘You can’t do this for at least 5 more years, but I can tell you how good it’s going for us.’”

For Fancy Dance, OpenFortune proved that offline attention still wins when it’s creative, tangible, and shareable. The partnership didn’t just boost traffic, it reshaped how McCoy thinks about advertising altogether.

As Fancy Dance expands its footprint and gears up for sports betting, fortune cookies are not a novelty, but rather a differentiator in one of the most competitive casino markets in America.