Jackpot City Wins Big Betting on OpenFortune
Jackpot City prides itself on building today’s best online casino experience. Blackjack, poker, slots, roulette, and more — it pixel-perfects the most popular real-money casino games digitally, plus offers enticing daily prizes and player rewards on repeat.
With big goals looking to deepen its presence across the Northeast region, Jackpot City’s VP of Marketing, Mike Addonizio, understood having to play his cards just right.
His team needed to make every marketing budget dollar count in their highly regulated industry, creating brand awareness at scale and spurring serious performance-based ROI while warming a wider group of leads to mobile casino gaming.
Like its casino i-games, Jackpot City’s primary marketing strategy has always been laser-focused on digital. Measurable performance is paramount, with every campaign tied to distinct, quantifiable metrics benchmarked against historical averages and new targets.
Yet Addonizio and his team began to realize you sometimes have to bet big to win big:
“It’s really easy to spend all of our budget on trackable digital channels, like Facebook and Google… We’ll always be using them. But that’s what everyone else is doing. It’s really hard to stand out.”
Mike Addonizio, VP of Marketing
Jackpot City understood the inevitability of diminishing returns playing the same old digital game. What’s more, their cost-per-acquisition (CPA) needed a shakeup. They wanted all-in on a fresh but still on-brand campaign with contextual relevance to casino games — luck, fate, the thrill of the unpredictable — paired with ultra-measurable performance beating out the baseline.
Its collaboration with OpenFortune allowed Addonizio and Jackpot City to hit that performance-marketing lottery.
OpenFortune devised a full-stack fortune cookie campaign customized around thrill-seeking messages ideal for its target audience. The duo conceived and tested several new offers and markets to release the branded cookies in restaurants across the Northeast region, plus a measurement plan that contained QR codes with vanity URLs inside every slip.
“You expect radio ads, TV ads, stuff in the mail… with fortune cookies, you cut through the noise and very few advertising platforms allow you to do that. OpenFortune is one.”
Mike Addonizio, VP of Marketing
Addonizio was particularly impressed with each cookie’s ability to tap into the very same experience his existing customers feel playing Jackpot City’s games. He sees the ongoing collab with OpenFortune as a natural brand fit — and one so successful, he’s afraid his own i-gaming competitors might also go all-in soon on fortune cookie ads.
Jackpot City’s bet paid off. Its average cost-per-acquisition with OpenFortune fell nearly 20% compared to CPAs from all other channels. Each fortune cookie slip’s viral shareability also drummed up an increase in trackable social shares and engagement, with ripple effects on brand recall.
As Addonizio himself summarizes the campaign’s success, “You're reaching people at a lower cost than a billboard, for example — but with way more focus. You actually have their full attention. Honestly, it’s not even comparable. How often do you see someone posting a billboard on the side of the highway on their social feed?”
Jackpot City also experienced an ongoing measurable impact across customer lifetime values. Customers captured through OpenFortune cookie slip’s QR codes and vanity URLs ended up generating identical average lifetime values compared with the company’s traditional existing customer base — but alongside their lower CPAs and CPRs, you hit the ultimate lead-gen jackpot.
It’s not everyday a brand triples down on consistently profitable customer lifetime values, lowers its acquisition costs, and explodes its social performance — all while breaking the stereotype fortune cookie ads are a top-of-funnel gimmick. That's a payout any marketer will take.
