Fortune Cookies For The Fortune 500? Waymo Thinks So — But Should You?

Waymo’s latest marketing stunt came inside a sugary piece of prophetic pastry: the fortune cookie. The tech giants are turning to context-shock marketing—aka jargon for putting ads in all the wrong places. But 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?

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 ...