Analog Marketing Platforms Appeal to Tech-Weary Consumers

Small business takeaway:

• As consumers grow more fatigued by digital noise, analog marketing—from OpenFortune’s fortune cookie ads to a hardcover romance book from dating app Hinge—is gaining strategic value. The strongest campaigns turn attention into a shared, physical experience; use familiar formats to make brand messages feel less disposable; and recognize that restraint can build trust when consumers feel overwhelmed by constant digital engagement. For business leaders, the opportunity lies in designing engagement that feels scarce, human, and worth keeping.

Brands that are seeking to break through the haze of digital noise might consider taking a playbook from the past, when consumers held physical marketing materials in their hands rather than scrolling past them on a screen.

Companies including ad platform OpenFortune, YouTuber MrBeast, and dating app Hinge have deployed some throwback tactics that point to consumer interest in old-school communications.

Their efforts to reach customers with tactile promotions dovetail with the digital detox trend that many consumers have embraced to divorce themselves to some degree from their smartphone screens. The trend has been especially prevalent among younger consumers, many of whom have been scrolling social media feeds for almost their entire lives and are now bombarded with “AI slop,” or low-quality, mass-produced artificial intelligence–driven content.

As a result, more than half (53%) of Americans said they want to reduce the amount of time they spend looking at screens, according to a recent YouGov survey. The survey also found that adults under 30 are more likely than older consumers to say they want to reduce the amount of time they spend engaged with digital content (69% vs. 48%).

Consumer interest in analog communications isn’t just a passing trend, according to a recent blog post by consulting firm Tunheim.

“It’s a coping mechanism for mental overload, a rebellion against algorithmic manipulation, and a reassertion of agency over attention,” Tunheim said.

OpenFortune taps into the in-person experience of fortune cookies

OpenFortune, co-founded by entrepreneur Shawn Porat, places advertising messages on the backs of the slips of paper found inside fortune cookies to promote a growing roster of brands, including Duolingo, Capital One, Hulu, and YouTube star MrBeast.

The tactile experience of opening a fortune cookie and reading the message inside helps differentiate advertisers in the midst of an attention economy in which consumers are overwhelmed with digital content, said Porat. He launched the business, which now distributes up to 135 million fortunes each month through 47,000 restaurants, after observing a group of people in a restaurant sharing the experience of reading their fortunes.

“They were reading them out loud, comparing their lives to them, taking pictures and putting them up on social media, putting them in their pocket, in their wallet,” he said. “It was very eye-opening to see the impact that this experience has on millions of American families every single day.”

Fortune cookies also happen to be an ideal vehicle for reaching consumers at home, when they may be enjoying Chinese takeout around the dinner table or in front of the TV. 

In fact, Hulu has deployed OpenFortune’s fortune cookie-wrapped advertisements to promote its TV programming and has also partnered with MrBeast, aka Jimmy Donaldson. The YouTube celebrity leveraged the fortune-cookie ads to promote the second season of his reality TV show, “Beast Games 2.”

These brands and others that have used OpenFortune, including ZipRecruiter, Chime, and Cars.com, appear to have found a memorable way to put their messages directly into the hands of consumers. The platform was named to the 2023 Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States.

[Read more: Fortune Cookie Firm OpenFortune Puts Branding —Literally—Into the Hands of Consumers]

Dating app Hinge leverages Substack to publish a real-life romance book

Hinge, the dating app that positions itself as platform for people seeking long-term relationships, wanted to create a piece of promotional content that would last longer than a tweet.

Last year, the company partnered with Dazed Studio to publish five stories about real-life relationships on content platform Substack and then printed the stories together in a limited-edition, hardcover book. The No Ordinary Love literary series was distributed to book clubs in New York and London, in keeping with the theme of the dating app’s No Ordinary Love campaign.

The campaign was extended through collaborations with content creators in TikTok’s BookTok community and through out-of-home ad campaigns.

The book publishing strategy broke through the crowded dating app category, according to business intelligence platform WARC, which said it generated “a measurable increase in brand consideration among the site’s target audiences.” The campaign capitalized on consumer interest both in storytelling and in physical books.

In fact, in a recent presentation for the American Booksellers Association, research from Circana highlighted books as one of the few discretionary general merchandise purchases to show positive sales in 2025.

“As consumers increasingly retreat from digital overload and prioritize meaningful analog experiences, books are uniquely positioned to capture both spending and attention across age groups in 2026 and beyond,” the Circana report concluded.

[Read more: How Businesses From The RealReal to Hinge are Leveraging Substack to Boost Brand Engagement and Growth]

CellarTracker forgoes AI bells and whistles for some users

Offering analog experiences doesn’t always mean abandoning digital tools completely, however. For some consumers, keeping things simple and familiar may be enough.

For example, CellarTracker, a digital platform for wine collectors to keep track of their stock, is straddling the line between leveraging the newfangled capabilities of AI and preserving the basic utility that attracted users in the first place.

While the company is ramping up its investment in AI to create new tools for all wine drinkers, from the occasional imbiber to the serious collector, it has set aside a legacy version of its app for those longtime users who don’t want any of the AI-driven extras. The earlier version of the app, called CT Legacy, retains the original features favored by older, very serious wine collectors favor as a tool to track their collections.

The AI-driven features include the ability to chat with the app about wines and food pairings. The app will automatically generate summaries of the comments that users have made about specific wines.

“We’re at the point where 70% of people are using the new app, but we’ve had to win them over because they’re so used to the way the old app works, and they really like it,” said Eric LeVine, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of CellarTracker.

“Historically it was a productivity tool for real wine geeks, wine collectors,” he said. “But we recognize we’re at a point now—and the technologies are at a point—where we can be for anyone who is interested in or curious about wine.”

[Read more: Wine-Collecting App CellarTracker Is Supercharging User Growth With (AI-Powered) Crowdsourced Recommendations]

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