Author’s Note: On November 1, I’ll be running the 2026 New York City Marathon in memory of my uncle Chris and in support of the Parkinson’s Foundation. As this newsletter lands in your inbox, I’m likely out on a hot, humid training run. If you’d like to learn more about Parkinson’s disease or support my fundraising efforts, you can visit my fundraising page here.
If I were to start a new company today, I’d follow this marketing playbook. To reach people online, I’d set up Meta and Google ads to show up across social media and search. Need to show up during someone’s daily doomscroll ritual.
Next, because it would be too expensive to acquire every customer through advertising, I’d make an organic content push. Next up, I’d like to start up a blog to generate some SEO goodness. Then tweak the webpages to better align with GEO best practices, so the company starts showing up in ChatGPT responses. Furthermore, since I have social media covered and the AI presence is starting to improve, what should I do next?
I’ll dump my entire marketing budget toward branding on a cold brew coffee can for some free coffee shop to hand out.
On September 23rd, Free Bean opened a coffee shop in Manhattan, which gives free coffee to customers. How does this work? The coffee shop is entirely funded by advertisers, so customers pay nothing.
Free coffee in NYC. Yes, you read that right. But it’s not really free.
How does this work? Companies line up to put their branding on a coffee can (cold brew, vanilla latte, or mocha latte). When you are handed a can, you’re given a company-wrapped coffee at random, meaning you don’t get to choose the sponsor of your cup of joe. Each can has sleek branding designed by the sponsor, with a corresponding QR code to learn more (which can help with engagement tracking).
Why am I excited by this? Because Free Bean isn’t really a new advertising channel. It’s an attempt to turn an existing consumer behavior into a new media channel.
Some view coffee as the event, but in New York, coffee is the transition point, going from point A to point B. Usually going from home to the office. Or maybe it’s a ritualized coffee run in between meetings. The point is, it’s typically embedded with another activity, like commuting. With coffee prices continuing to rise (it’s tough to find a small, black hot coffee for less than $4, my go-to order), why wouldn’t you check out the coffee shop that gives you free coffee? It saves you a few bucks, if not nearly the cost of lunch when you get a latte with bells and whistles. And for the advertiser? They aren’t really buying space on a coffee can. They’re buying a few minutes of someone’s morning.
There are plenty of coffee drinkers in the world. And it’s likely some of those coffee drinkers could buy your company’s software (especially if the coffee shop is in Midtown Manhattan). From what I experienced (I braved the Nor’easter storm to check out what all of the fuss was about), the current Free Bean sponsors are mostly tech companies. Many of these companies sell high-ticket B2B software, which can make unconventional customer acquisition experiments more economically viable.
So, you take a relatively universal product that is coffee (more than 1 billion people consume coffee globally). Can it. Then get a deep-pocketed tech unicorn to hand over a test budget for who knows how much money. And then the coffee shop becomes the distribution channel. It’s easier than ever to create a product thanks to AI. It’s harder than ever to build up a distribution moat due to all the competing sources of attention. As AI makes digital production and distribution increasingly abundant, marketers will increasingly compete for scarce moments of human attention. Free Bean is an example of turning an existing consumer routine into an advertising platform.
Free Bean is a case study in breaking into a new form of marketing. It’s as if the monetization potential of online attention is reaching diminishing returns and a new medium to grab attention has presented itself. Branding for coffee tends to be reserved for, wait for it, companies that sell primarily coffee. Not tech companies.
I’m curious about what point in a marketer’s journey makes sense to do an above-the-line campaign like a Free Bean partnership. Once you see diminishing returns on paid social and search, GEO taps out, and there are only so many commercial spots and conference sponsorships you can line up. Where in the marketer’s journey does it make sense to bankroll a coffee shop that puts your logo on its product?
In some ways, this type of marketing seems the closest to professional sports teams’ jersey sponsorships, but for corporate workers. It’s a (relatively) mass-market play, one that you hope carries on in other forms of media. For the Free Bean sponsors, they are likely using this in-store advertisement as content for social media campaigns (I can’t imagine the number of times Ramp has already posted on LinkedIn about their sponsored coffee).
The decision point becomes: if I have a product that can appeal to a broad audience, what are new, creative ways I can reach them in a format that is routine and natural to them.
The most effective companies in the world have a knack for capturing your time. You stare at your iPhone for hours each day. When you have a question, you turn to Google (or ChatGPT and Claude now). When you want entertainment, you go to Instagram or TikTok for a stream of personalized content (while staring through the glass of an Apple product). So much of people’s waking hours are already captured by Big Tech, so where do you go next?
You catch them at the smaller moments. Maybe someone likes to listen to music or a podcast when they cook dinner, so you advertise with Spotify or your target market’s favorite podcast. Maybe you will buy billboard space to capture someone’s attention on their commute home. Instead of thinking about which platforms to reach your target market, think more about which routines your audience repeats every day.
What Free Bean demonstrates is how saturated the digital marketing landscape is and how the incremental dollar may increasingly be spent on in-person experiences. These large tech companies that don their branding on Free Bean cans are spending plenty of money. Companies like Ramp, Vercel, and Warp sell relatively niche B2B products, making a traditional mass-market advertising channel like a sports arena less obviously efficient. So they target a different stadium: a coffee shop in an urban area, where plenty of their customers and prospects buy coffee every day.
The narrower the audience and the higher the customer value, the more unconventional the distribution can become.
It seems like Free Bean has early traction. They’ve previously distributed coffee in San Francisco and Los Angeles, among other cities. I’m curious about what sponsors view as an ideal outcome of partnering with Free Bean. Is it measured by meetings booked through the QR code on the can? Or prospects mentioning the coffee on a pre-sales call?
There is the broader brand awareness play, and maybe that’s what a B2B marketer must get comfortable with. My hunch is the tech companies partnering with Free Bean are treating the coffee shop concept as a “test budget” experiment, money meant to discover a meaningful incremental return above the tried-and-true acquisition channel. If you see repeat sponsors at Free Bean pop-ups, you know that this idea has legs.
Digital advertising is crowded, but the analytics tracking is top notch. When you move to sponsoring a “free” coffee shop, the attribution gets blurry. In 2026, marketing is as bizarre as ever, yet as creative as ever.