How Super.com Reimagined the Airport Advertising Playbook with OpenFortune

Super.com has built its reputation around a simple but popular promise: Help consumers save money on the things they’re already buying, from gas to prescriptions to online games. But their superest savings come in one category: travel.

Think a rewards platform with a full suite of discounted hotels, flight savings, car rentals, and smarter booking tools meant to streamline savings and make trips affordable. Plus it’s fast, mobile-first, and designed around modern customer expectations (immediate value and stackable perks without having to jump through hoops).

But even the most compelling travel offer can get lost in the crowd — especially the literal ones in bustling cities and their airports.

Take NYC, for example. You can’t travel more than a stop along the Lexington Ave. line without getting peppered with OOOH: Think subway ads, digital, and print billboards flashing for your attention.

Then there’s JFK. Its terminals are dense with screens, signage, noisy announcements, and constant distraction. Everyone is moving. Everyone is looking down at their Delta notifications. In all that noise, most ads won’t be noticed.

Super.com looked around and said there had to be a better way to land attention in these transit moments that mattered.

Transportation marketing hasn’t evolved in years.

In places like airports, most brands overwhelmingly fight for wall space and cluttered digital boards. From there, they rely on the same tactics of message repetition and 1 to 2-lined slogans just to generate fractional recall.

Such a space might be high traffic, sure. But travelers are realistically juggling boarding passes, flight updates, luggage, time, schedules, and stress — all without much capability to take action from any ad. It’s an environment that favors visibility, yes, but not engagement.

For Super.com, that wasn’t going to cut it. Increasing awareness while also getting leads to actually, meaningfully engage with a direct offer requires a medium that itself irresistibly (and organically) invites action. It had to be low-friction, but highly captivating.

The team also had comparative data from past placements. Digital ads featured inside NYC taxis, for example, generated a 0.1% QR scan rate average. Not great.

They knew they needed to step up their game with a complete NYC transit takeover. That meant going beyond airports and entering subway car panels, digital boards, station print panels, and NYC in-taxi video ads.

Capturing Diners and Travelers

Finally, Super.com wanted to complete the picture with restaurant distribution, to the tune of 500,000 cookies per month. 

This two-pronged approach needed a serious creative engine powering it all. They needed a partner capable of helping them target hundreds of thousands of distracted diners across NYC establishments, on-the-goand inside their own homes.

Instead of competing for attention from another glowing rectangle in a sea of glowing rectangles, Super.com partnered with OpenFortune to do something fundamentally different: They inserted the brand directly and effortlessly into the traveler’s physical airport experience.

Together, we produced two million Super.com-branded fortune cookies, then deployed them across 20 major U.S. airports — from JFK to Tampa — as well as restaurants throughout New York City itself. Travelers encountered cookies right there at retail checkouts, got to pick them up with their purchase, and carried them on-hand to their gates and flights.

The medium was intentionally designed for the realities of airport behavior: Nobody has time to open a fortune cookie while sprinting through security. They open it once they’re seated, comfortable, more relaxed, and actually looking for moments of engagement.

• Inside each cookie was a clear, compelling incentive: Scan the QR code to unlock an extra savings on your next hotel booking.

• Messages were complemented by ongoing video ads running on 50-inch digital displays also at points of purchase.

And it’s that shift in context which changes everything.

The contrast with other ad channels tried by Super.com couldn’t have been clearer.

• 70% unaided brand recall generated from distributed cookies.

• 1.8x the lift in consumers more likely to seek further info about Super.com.

• 16% autonomously searched the brand online.

You could also say the cookie’s QR code results couldn’t have turned out more super:

• Past taxi screens delivered just a 0.1% scan rate.

• Meanwhile, the airport fortune cookies averaged 8.1% — an unheard of conversion figure.

What’s more:

• 70% of New York diners who received a Super.com fortune had a conversation about the brand.

• 14% said they talked about it for 5-10 minutes.

• 4% admitted Super.com was at the super center of their dinner for a whopping 10+ minutes of conversation.

Two million physical touchpoints placed directly into travelers’ hands also both increased visibility and drove measurable action tied to a deeply on-brand incentive (travel discounts). The offer was opened, read, considered, and acted upon during a natural pause in the travel journey.

Most importantly, this partnership demonstrates what happens when a brand is willing to rethink the actual ad environment before increasing ad spend.

From there, it was inevitable to realize transportation and restaurant advertising doesn’t necessarily need more flash or noise. It just needs more intention.

Super.com was able to choose the unexpected – and unexpectedly thoughtful — path. Results followed.

It’s a clear sign for other marketers: If you’re competing for attention, recognition, and remembrance in a high-traffic environment, you have to consider the timing of your message, not just the message itself.

Trust us, doing so makes all the (tasty) difference.