Use it Or Lose It

You deserve to take a risk with that leftover marketing budget.

Author

Carlo Palomino
October 03, 2025

Welcome back to The Friday Fortune! We’re officially in October, that magical time when marketers juggle end-of-year pushes, budget resets, and somehow convincing ourselves that holiday campaigns won’t creep up faster than last year (spoiler: they will).

Take this as your sanctioned coffee break, your weekly hit of inspiration wrapped in wit and wisdom, no performance reviews required.

Each week, we bring you sharp insights from top CMOs, creative disruptors, and brand leaders who are shaping culture as much as they’re shaping balance sheets. From bold campaigns to new marketing playbooks, we’re here to fuel your next big move and make it entertaining along the way.

Here’s what’s on deck this week:

  • What to do with your ‘use it or lose it’ marketing budget

  • Purple x OpenFortune

  • ChatGPT lets shoppers buy products within the platform

📈 Use it or Lose It

Welcome to Q4, a magical time when marketers everywhere discover one of two things:

  1. They’re out of budget.

  2. They’re about to lose the budget they didn’t know they still had.

We’re talking about the sacred, mysterious, often-hoarded use-it-or-lose-it budget. The money that quietly exists in your spreadsheet’s final column until Finance shows up in a black turtleneck and says, “If you don’t use this by year-end, we’re taking it back.”

Now, most teams will panic and funnel those dollars into “just one more paid push” or “some extra OOH spots.”

Respectfully: don’t.

There’s a better way.

It involves cookies. And not the kind that track your browser.

Yes, they’re real. Yes, we make them. Yes, they work.

OpenFortune helps brands stand out by putting their message in the hands (and sometimes mouths) of millions. 

We partner with bold brands like Liquid Death, Dr. Squatch, and the Sacramento Kings to deliver unforgettable ads inside real fortune cookies. These bite-sized ads reach hundreds of millions of consumers across 100,000+ restaurants worldwide, right when they’re most engaged present, and emotionally primed.

This video explains it all: 

Fortunes usually get cracked open at the exact moment people are talking about the big stuff: relationships, money, careers, college, whether or not Dad’s new girlfriend is “serious.” 

If your brand shows up in those conversations? Congratulations — you’re not an ad anymore. 

You’re part of the story.

That’s why fortunes get saved, shared, read out loud, and screenshotted into group chats. It’s “surprise and delight” baked into one of America’s most treasured cultural moments. 

Trust us. Your customers are out there. Eating. Laughing. Opening little folded messages from the universe.

So if you’ve got some extra budget lying around, we can help you do something with it that’s fun, fast, and makes your year-end wrap deck look dangerously clever.

Spend the money.
Steal the spotlight.
Save your budget from eternal exile in Accounting’s cold, unforgiving arms.

Fortune favors the bold (and the well-funded)

Crack open a handful of the week’s best marketing links—because good fortune favors the curious.

That’s a wrap for this week’s Friday fortune.

If you enjoyed the read, pass it along to your favorite marketer who could use a little extra inspo in their inbox.

Until next time, may your marketing be memorable and your cookies always be fortunate!

— The OpenFortune team