Alphabet’s well-funded poster child for driverless tech recently launched a campaign as uncharacteristic as it is crunchy. In a gambit to accelerate the company’s once modest branding, Waymo’s latest marketing stunt didn’t come from the data mines of Google HQ, but inside a sugary piece of prophetic pastry: the fortune cookie. Somewhere between the Kung Pao and the check, San Francisco customers cracked open a glimpse of Waymo’s vision of tech utopia alongside QR codes and invitations to “steer your own destiny”.

Waymo’s not the first to bake tech ads into these after-dinner delights; Verizon took its own crack at cookie clairvoyance back in Q2, albeit to perplexing reception. Thanks to Gary Vee’s investment in OpenFortune last year, fortune cookies have gone from novelty to darling in the booming world of “context-shock” marketing—aka ambient marketing, the guerilla marketing equivalent of a flash mob. (Turns out, around 3 billion of these sweet soothsayers are snapped open every year, which means fortune-cookie ads offer the perfect cocktail of quiet omnipresence and snackable virality.)

Behemoths might be counting on paper-wrapped fortunes to reel in the cash, but that doesn’t mean every tech startup with an MVP and a dream should be debating whether to whack a logo on taxi-cab ceilings and parking tickets in the next marketing meeting.

Tech Goes Guerrilla: Ads Popping Up In All The “Wrong” Places

Context-shock marketing has become the viral elixir for consumer brands starving for attention. Neuroscience has an explanation for this: novelty bias. Our brains can’t resist what’s unexpected; it lights up dopamine circuits and makes us remember. Done right, it lodges itself in memory and conversation, like a cultural glitch—at least until the next big shock rolls through.

Take Liquid Death, which hijacked the idea of health. Where water brands typically preach purity and wellness, they made hydration feel like a Marilyn Manson concert, wedging their brand onto skate decks, into mosh pits, even inside severed doll heads—spaces typically reserved for energy drinks, contraband, and actual danger. Liquid Death? More like “Liquid Defiance”.

Then there’s Pizza Hut, a brand that’s turned boxes into broadcast. From boxes that morphed into record players and foosball tables, to their recent “ReZames” push that’ll make C-Suite salivate over your CV, Pizza Hut’s spending more on design than on dough. They’ve made the packaging more captivating than the pizza inside, knowing full well that in a world that snaps before it snacks, sometimes the experience matters more than the product.

Ironically, the same industry that practically invented the digital ad are climbing on the context-shock bandwagon. Desperation is the surface reason. Digital is stale, ad-blockers are ubiquitous, costs are through the roof, and GDPR’s anti-tracking regulations have made targeting look like blindfolded darts. Even social media has turned hostile, adapting algorithms to force brands to stay confined within platform limits. The digital playground tech once ruled is now riddled with obstacles.

But keep nosing around and you’ll see that tech’s knee-deep in a PR crisis. The public’s gone from thinking tech is clever to suspecting it’s predatory. Ads in quirky and nostalgic places are a strange kind of makeover rehab—a way to inject tech with a pulse. Placing ads in coffee cups and fortune cookies is tech throwing on an old band tee: desperately trying to look “authentic” when everything about it is, satirically, calculated.

Consumer brands can turn comical stunts into cult status, but should tech even bother?

For tech startups scribbling notes on context-shock marketing, will it help you build a phenomenon, or just a punchline that crumbles faster than a fortune cookie?

Copycatting Is Costly: Tech Can’t Afford Consumer Hype

The “context-shock” trick works for consumer brands because hype and impulse are their business model. In a space where buying decisions are made within seconds, the transitory is their longevity. Liquid Death’s orthodoxy isn’t thoughtful consideration, but primal reaction: see skull, buy water, feel badass. Buying a can of Liquid Death isn’t a decision; it’s a three-second hormonal hit in aisle nine.

They don’t need you to trust the brand; they need you to feel something edgy for half a second. Loyalty is an afterthought—their priority is getting your limbic system firing off dopamine like it’s 3 a.m. in a Las Vegas casino.

Consumer brands are hawking Band-Aids for today, while tech is promising tomorrow’s safety net on a silver platter.

Chocolate, cashmere, cologne—they’re the quick fixes for the now: your sweet tooth, your sartorial flair, your wish to smell like Hugh Jackman’s doppelgänger. But when we choose tech, we’re signing an unspoken pact that says, “I trust you to make my life smoother tomorrow, guard my data to eternity, and keep the glitches out of my future reality.” And any psychologist will tell you that trust isn’t built in one loud, splashy parade, but achieved through cumulative credibility, formed by slow-release interactions that reassure, confirm, and eventually seal the deal.

Consumer brands thrive on spectacle because they’re disposable. Drink the can, wear the shoe, throw it out. But tech has to promise something longer-lasting, more durable. Neuroscience shows that trust is built not on novelty, but on predictability—on proving, again and again, that you’ll be there. A single jolt of weird isn’t trust; it’s a fleeting thrill. And in tech turf, fleeting thrills don’t pay the rent.

If you think you can bake credibility into a cookie, then prepare to be nothing more than a novelty.

Consumer brands may have written the Bible of marketing, but tech is a different religion that demands a whole new testament.

Calculated Chaos: Designing Defiance that Works for Tech

I’m a card-carrying fan of the weird, the unexpected, the kind of marketing that takes risks without losing its point. But unlike consumer brands, tech needs to treat weird not as the whole show, but as the side door: an unexpected fast track to the stage of trust that sidesteps the long staircase of conventional advertising and PR schmooze.

If you can design weird around relevance, retargeting, and repeatability, then it’s no longer an inane stunt but an ignition switch to power your startup.

Robinhood: Relevancy Under The Radar

Robinhood’s move to plaster ATMs with “commission-free trading” stickers was a well-timed ambush on our cognitive autopilot. ATMs are where we confront the reality of our cash flow, and Robinhood saw that moment of financial clarity as the perfect place to drop their message. It’s contextual congruence: when an ad syncs so perfectly with our immediate surroundings, our brains lower their guard, accepting the message as a natural extension of our thoughts.

Robinhood hacked into the money mindset, adding a seamless “oh, maybe I should invest” to the subconscious playlist.

Antimental: Retargeting With A Slice Of Humanity

Instead of nagging lapsed clients with emails, data analytics startup Antimental sent out pizza, warm and unapologetically greasy, to former clients who’d gone radio silent. This tapped into reciprocity bias in full force—someone sends us a pizza, we’re disarmed, maybe even a little charmed, and our brains want to be kind. By ditching the inbox for the dinner table, Antimental was delivering an invitation, an “I miss you” in mozzarella. The result? A 22% uptick in client re-engagement.

This wasn’t weirdness for laughs; it was weirdness as trust-building, turning retargeting into a shared moment, a connection built over pepperoni and dough.

Spotify Wrapped: Repeatability As Ritual

And then there’s Spotify’s Wrapped, which is less a marketing campaign and more of an annual data pilgrimage splashed across everything from gamified billboards to park fountains. By making their listeners’ stats a public exhibition, they’ve turned annual summary into a year-end scoreboard, transformed preferences into prestige: weirdly personal and addictively shareable. This recurring campaign harnesses habit loops with a dose of vanity, taps into social proof and status signaling on a massive scale, and reconstructed user data into a badge of belonging, a yearly social performance that keeps users engaged and proudly loyal, all set to renew itself, bigger and bolder, each December.

Final Thoughts: What Is “Weird”?

There’s an irony here that shouldn’t be missed. For tech, “weird” doesn’t have to mean fortune cookies or public restroom mirrors—it might be doing the exact opposite: not putting on a performance.

Imagine a world where tech didn’t try to entertain us but actually trusted us with honesty. In an industry obsessed with mystique and manufactured intimacy, true transparency could be the most shocking thing of all—a kind of quiet rebellion against the predictable pageant of sparkle and shimmers.

Perhaps the weirdest place left to go is the truth.