Mixed Signals: Does mass culture still matter? And how Snoop Dogg mastered commerce, with Frank Cooper

Ben Smith:
Hey, everyone, this is Ben. Before we get into today’s episode, I wanted to make a quick request for your help making this show better. To that end, Max and I are putting together a small, casual focus group. It’ll be a half-hour call. We’re interested to learn more about you, what you like, what you don’t like about the show. We’re aiming to do it sometime in the next few weeks and you can email me at ben.smith@semafor.com if you’re up for it, or if you just have any other feedback on the show. Now, on to Mixed Signals.

Max Tani:
Welcome to Mixed Signals from Semafor Media. I’m Max Tani, the media editor here at Semafor. With me as always is our Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith.
Hey, Ben.

Ben Smith:
Hey, Max.

Max Tani:
This week on the show, we’re joined by the legendary business and marketing executive Frank Cooper. Frank has been a major figure in American culture and commerce for literally three decades and counting. He was a key figure during the beginning of the commercialization of hiphop, serving as the vice president at Def Jam and Motown Records in the ’90s. Since then, he’s had a really storied and fascinating career as a marketer at some of the biggest consumer and media brands in America, and is now the CMO at Visa.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, I overlapped with Frank at Buzzfeed, and he’s just ridden these really deep currents in American culture for a long time.

Max Tani:
Well, we’ll ask him about how he’s advising Visa on navigating this precarious moment, why hiphop is as culturally relevant as ever, and how Snoop Dogg became the marketing world’s most valuable star. We’re going to do all that right after the break.
One of the challenges, I feel like, of thinking about media in 2025 is that a lot of the time, the people who are moving things are these individuals who are super, super important in their niches and just nobody else outside of those niches really knows them or has heard of them. I’m describing fragmentation back to you. This is one of the things that I feel like is both fun as a reporter, because you get to constantly introduce people to new characters who are minorly important, but also vexing. I feel like this is also something obviously that’s defining this moment, not just in media, and politics, and culture, but also in the business world.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, right. If you’re chasing influence in any space, you’re talking about a million creators, a million influencers. There is just this question of what’s big? Everything is medium-sized or small, the big stuff is getting smaller.

Max Tani:
Right. It really strikes me that there’s basically just this increasing gulf between a very, very small pool of people who everybody knows, and a growing and larger pool of people that are extremely important in niche communities. It’s like you’ve got Taylor Swift and you’ve got Kendrick, and then you’ve got just a million people who nobody has ever heard of.

Ben Smith:
Except their 1000 true fans who love them.

Max Tani:
Exactly. Well, one person who’s definitely thought about this and who was the mass culture understander and translator for the executive class for a lot of big brands for a long time is Frank Cooper who, Ben, you actually worked with for a little bit.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, Frank. I love talking to these people who have these long-running legendary and confusing media careers. Frank got out of Harvard Law School in the early ’90s, and as would be a normal thing to do, went to work for Def Jam. Which was then a very new, strange, edgy thing to work in hiphop. Also, I think ran business affairs for Motown at some point before hopping to the internet and AOL.
Then, as you say, getting hired by giant companies who needed to understand culture and to make advertising around it. He worked for PepsiCo. He then did a Buzzfeed, where he was CMO and COO when I was the editor-in-chief there. I really loved working with him, although I always got the sense he found the experience slightly puzzling. Because it was, it was sort of a hint of what you’re talking about now. Someone who is thinking about huge cultural figures and moments, like Beyonce, versus people who were thinking a lot about memes. From there, he went back into the corporate world. He’s now the CMO of Visa, which makes him one of the most powerful people in advertising.

Max Tani:
Well, we’ve got Frank on the other line, so why don’t we bring him in?

Ben Smith:
Frank, it’s nice to see you. Thank you so much for joining us.

Frank Cooper:
Ben, always good to see you. Really happy to be here.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. We were talking before you got on here about what an epic career you’ve had. You went from Harvard Law to Def Jam. You were at AOL in the bubbly early days. Pepsi.

Frank Cooper:
Yeah.

Ben Smith:
I met you when you were at Buzzfeed, which was a chapter I’m very curious what you thought of.

Frank Cooper:
Yeah, yeah.

Ben Smith:
Now you’re at the very, very top of the marketing world at Visa. But before we got on, you mentioned you just got off a flight from LA where you were reminiscing about the good old days with LL Cool J.

Frank Cooper:
Yeah.

Ben Smith:
Tell us about that.

Frank Cooper:
Well, yeah. Look, if you remember, LL was the first Def Jam artist, and certainly the first major Def Jam artist. He signed up, he was 17 or so. When I came to Def Jam, he was renewing his contract and he was launching Mr. Smith. But we’ve been close ever since.
Two things I asked him. I said, one, “What do you think makes a great rapper?” The answer shocked me. Because some people have asked me that question before, and I’ll got to the technical side. Oh, yeah, it’s flow. It’s the ability to create images with language. It’s also the rhythmic cadence. It’s the ability to pick the underlying track. He said none of those things mattered, Ben. He said only one thing mattered. He says, “What makes a great rapper is the extent to which they can actually extract from an audience a connection and emotion that makes them feel elevated. That’s it,” he said.
Some people will fish in a pond and then make people feel elevated. Some people will fish in the ocean and make people elevated. People want to compare success based on that. He says, “I don’t compare it.” He’s like, “I compare it in terms of they’re uncovering something that’s already in people. They unlock that, and that to me makes a great rapper.” You can’t unlock that, you may have a trendy song, you’re in and out. You’ll never sustain a career that way and people will never remember you, and your music will never become timeless unless you touch something that’s already within people and you unlock that.
That, for me, was profound because it changed my whole view on even this while Drake, Kendrick Lamar battle. Which I was like, “Oh my God, I’ve been looking at this the wrong way.” I’ve been thinking about that ever since.

Max Tani:
Can you talk a little bit about what was it like working in that environment at Def Jam in the ’90s? It feels like, to me, as somebody who I’m a little bit younger but obviously I’ve seen all the mythologizing. Part of my musical discovery was looking back and experiencing some of that. What was it like for you being in the room? What was your day-to-day like then?

Frank Cooper:
When you look back on these things, it always looks inevitable to people. It’s like, “Oh, Def Jam or hiphop rose to this level, and it became mainstream,” and it feels inevitable. I can tell you with 100% certainty, in the ’90s, it was not inevitable. Every single day ... You have to remember, in New York, you had politicians steamrolling CDs for hiphop music. Saying that, “This is going to be the death of youth culture.” You had people saying, “Hey, this is just a fad. It’s going to fade out.” All that was ruminating.
The money had not yet followed the hiphop genre in the ’90s. It was just starting to happen. When you got to the mid-‘90s, it took off. I think the most critical moment was in the mid-‘90s. It was a really fascinating time musically because remember, you had grunge happening up in Seattle. They were steeped in angst, woe is me about the life of suburbia.

Ben Smith:
I feel really seen here, Frank. Thank you.

Frank Cooper:
That’s Ben’s story. Then you had hiphop, which is basically saying, “How can you overcome struggle?” Here people who were basically saying, “You know what, we have nothing. Everything’s been stripped away, but we’re actually going to still figure out a way to move forward and thrive.”
If you look at what was happening in the ’90s, with the realization I think people starting coming to is that the traditional institutions, social institutions that would give you some level of protection were starting to fade. People were like, “I’m out here on my own. How do I move forward?” I feel much more empowered by this thing that they’re calling because they just figure out how to get through it all and to move forward, despite all the odds that may be against you.
I feel like that, to me, was the most remarkable pivot point. At the time, we were just hustling. No one knew exactly how it was going to happen, but you started to feel the momentum come. Even LL had his album, Mr. Smith. Public Enemy had a nice comeback album. We had the Month of the Man with Method Man and Redman. Jay-Z had the single with Foxy Brown, so Jay Z and Rockefeller Records were starting to rise up. DMX. You started to feel this momentum, both velocity and skill happening. This is something we always believed it was going to last, but this is something that now is going to be a dominant force within culture.

Max Tani:
Well, was there a moment in which you felt like ... You mentioned you felt like it was precarious and nothing was guaranteed. Was there a moment where you thought, “This might not work?”

Frank Cooper:
No. I never felt like that. There were moments where, “This is crazy.” You walk in any day, anything could happen. We were at 160 Varick Street, which is Soho. But at the time, Varick Street was still a little grimy. They moved from Elizabeth Street to Varick, and that was the upgrade. You would come into the office, the first thing you see when you come off the elevator, was three people elevated behind the bulletproof glass. Def Jam really didn’t have those issues like Death Row on the West Coast, but still, there was a layer of uncertainty about what would happen in the office any given day. Anything could happen.
On those days, I’m like, “Okay, this is crazy.” But I never felt like, “Hey, this is not going to happen.” Because what I saw, and I think what most of us saw who were there, was that it’s much deeper than a song or an artist, or even the music itself. If you were in it, you saw the deep cultural foundation upon which it was built. The music was feeding art. The music was feeding events. Graffiti was playing into it. At the same time, there was break dancing happening. It was all this broader cultural movement that was interconnected. For us, it felt like it was going to be a massive thing that would continue on, and on, and on.
I’ll tell you though, Max. The one thing that ... I was born in San Francisco and grew up in San Francisco and LA. The West Coast is my foundation. The one thing that threw a wrinkle in the whole thing to me was West Coast hiphop. When West Coast hiphop started to rise up, then the question was can Def Jam survive through that period of time where, sonically, things were changing? Sonically, West Coast hiphop was very, very different. We did okay. We had Montell Jordan This is How We Do It, and Domino came out, and we got Warren G with Regulate and Nate Dogg. We did okay, yeah.

Ben Smith:
It’s funny. You talk about it’s almost hard to remember now how scary hiphop was to politicians, to businesses. At some point, you became the bridge there yourself.

Frank Cooper:
Yeah.

Ben Smith:
My guess is that, as these companies turned to hiphop and realized they wanted to be in it, that they were looking for smart, capable business operators totally familiar with that world and found you, or vice versa. I’m curious, how did you ... It just seems like such a mind-bending move from Def Jam to PepsiCo, basically.

Frank Cooper:
Yeah, yeah, it is. In the end, this is where I just think I got lucky in terms of timing. The one thing I always knew is this. Is that every single musical genre when it first came out was offensive to the status quo, was dangerous to the status quo. Blues came out, people hated blues. They thought it was the most dangerous thing. They thought it was an offense to gospel music at the time. Jazz came out, they thought that jazz was absolutely ridiculous in sound. It was sonically a mess, and they thought the lifestyle surrounding it, go on, and on, and on. I knew that at some point, that hiphop would go mainstream.
But more important is what I said earlier. The thing that I knew that it was serving was a deep cultural need. It’s going back to what LL said, with the best artists, the best rappers, what they do is inspiring something that is already within people. It’s discovering that or uncovering that, and giving it some kind of outlet. I feel like hiphop was going to do that. When it hit that moment where you could see someone in Scarsdale, New York respond the same way that someone in Brownsville, New York, then you realize that this is not isolated to one group of people. It is speaking to something that’s really deep inside of people. Then I knew we were going to cross the threshold.
The leap for me was not that hard at that point, because what I believed. Now I think again, it’s become more obvious. I believe that culture and commerce were always interconnected. It’s just that the business side, the commerce side tends to lag way behind in terms of accepting the cultural side of it. It used to be you had to wait until it becomes pop culture. So mass, so mainstream that it’s almost meaningless. But as we start to move more and more into the internet age, in the social age, that lapse between a cultural movement and it coming into commerce I think started to converge. I felt like it was a great time to do it. That was my selling point to Pepsi. For me, I feel like I’m I don’t know if it’s the translator or the connector between those two things.

Ben Smith:
I’m curious about this moment because you arrived at AOL in ’01.

Frank Cooper:
Yeah.

Ben Smith:
When that company was blowing up, and when the internet was new and things felt really wide open. I’ve been thinking, because I was a young blogger around that time. I’ve been thinking a little bit about how this moment feels a little like that one, just things are so confusing, so fragmented, so wide open. I’m curious, I don’t know, what you make of this particular moment in light of all the other places you’ve been?

Frank Cooper:
The moment in terms of how technology’s reshaping?

Ben Smith:
Yeah.

Frank Cooper:
Yeah. When I went into AOL, honestly, I bought into initially that the revolution is here and it’s going to happen within AOL. And it’s going to supplant all the historical models that we saw before. I really bought into that. It’s like, “Okay, this is going to happen, and I’m part of that tectonic shift and that change.” The lesson I learned very, very quickly is that these entrenched institutions and models typically don’t just go away. You might have a company that goes away, but the models don’t really go away completely. They evolve, they get included in the change.
While I’m excited about what’s happening right now and I think it is going to be a dramatic shift. Anyone whose not incorporating AI, for example, it’s going to be highly problematic. But I’m less confident that it’s going to supplant entire industries. I think you’re going to see people adapt in ways that will surprise us. You’ll see some companies, very traditional companies survive in ways that we think is not possible.
Now my hope, Visa. Visa’s in the business over 60 years, in 1958. What I think Visa has done fairly well over the years is continue to adapt to the cultural epochs that were happening. Science in the ’50s and ‘60s. Upward mobility in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Experiential economy in the ’90s. Here we are today.

Ben Smith:
Where are we today? What is today?

Frank Cooper:
Yeah. Yeah, I know. The term I’m using right now, and if you ask me this two weeks from now I may change the term. But I think we’re in the era of self-development where people are now saying, “I have to fashion my own self, and I’m looking for things that actually help me feel more alive and give me the ability to move forward in life.” It’s that highly individualistic development of self, I think that’s where we are.
Yeah, they still want experiences. Yes, they still want to have upper mobility. Yeah, they still believe that science is going to help them. But the things that actually make a difference today is what are the things? It’s a network of people. It could be a brand. It could be a job that will help me actually advance in life and move forward in life. I think that’s where we are.

Ben Smith:
I think one of the things in probably both of our businesses that you hear a lot is that we’re living an influencer age. A lot of marketing is devoted to chasing the new influencer. In some sense, you were doing influencer marketing at a very, very large scale before we called it that, doing deals with celebrities. Beyonce, Eminem, Forest Whitaker.

Frank Cooper:
Yeah.

Ben Smith:
Some Mountain Dew-related Forest Whitaker project that I was reading about.

Frank Cooper:
Yeah, yeah.

Ben Smith:
I’m curious if you see this shift to influencer marketing as different from what you’ve been doing all along, or as a continuation of it?

Frank Cooper:
I think it’s different because ... Well, there’s some things that are the same and some things that are very different. What’s the same is that there are individual people who are able to move large groups of people to help shape their perceptions, shift their emotions, shift their behavior. But what’s different is that you can scale up and down on the influence. You can find influencers who have campfire communities, which may seem small, but if you add them all up together, you can get to massive scale. Then you still have a few influencers who actually can speak to large groups and move large groups. Very, very few, though. In most cases, I’m skeptical of the big celebrity having the ability to shift people’s behaviors, even if they have massive followings.

Max Tani:
Why? Is that new? Is that different?

Frank Cooper:
I do think it’s different. I do think it’s different because I think, if you go back in time, we had fewer channels and fewer opportunities, and the gatekeepers can make someone a massive star. If you can dominate the radio airwaves, if you can dominate the MTV, if you could dominate the live performance venues, your options to look at who do I actually want to celebrate were fairly limited. You couldn’t necessarily make everybody a star. The term we used to use, we’re going to throw the whole building after somebody. We’re going to put the whole building behind that artist. The odds are pretty good that that person will have a good shot at being a celebrity with influence for a certain period of time. It may not last, but for a certain period of time, because you’re going to be flooded. People are like, “I want to be a part of that. I don’t want to be left out of something that looks like it’s really happening at scale.”
Today no one can actually dominate that. Now, to me, it comes down to, as an artist, do you have the kind of relationship with your fans that they feel this deep connection to you, a deep loyalty to you beyond the individual items that you’re serving to them. When I look at Taylor Swift and I look at Beyonce, they’ve done it really, really well. Taylor Swift has probably done it the best, in terms of just being able to have that kind of relationship, allowing people to participate, but also giving back. Showing up at places where celebrities would never have done before.
The idea behind it, and Snoop Dogg’s actually said this time, which is a long time ago. I was asking him a long time, “How did you survive all this craziness and adapt to all the change?” Because he also came into the game really, really young, and he just rode through changes and rode through madness. Real madness. He said, “You know, Frank, a lot of these stars, a lot of these celebrities, they want to get up on a pedestal and they want people to idolize them.” He said, “I get up on the pedestal and I start pulling everybody up with me. I want everyone up on the pedestal elevated with me.” He said, “That’s all I do, over, and over, and over.”
I thought about it, “Is that real, what he said?” And I think it’s exactly what Snoop does. I think that is the logic of an influencer and a celebrity today really having sustainable impact with large audiences. It’s that you are elevating other people and not really focused on their celebrating you as an individual.

Max Tani:
Is Snoop Dogg actually more famous today than he was even in the ’90s, or something like that? To me, I think that something shifted maybe around the time that he did the Martha Stewart collaboration, or something like that. His image has really changed and he’s become this big ... He was cool for a long time, but he’s become this bankable, marketable star. He’s in every commercial. He’s introducing the Olympics. He’s a national figure in a way that is somewhat different, it feels like. Do you think that that’s true? Does he think that’s true?

Frank Cooper:
Oh, I know he thinks it’s true. He was the ultimate gold medalist at the Paris Olympics.

Max Tani:
Yeah, I know.

Frank Cooper:
He was everywhere. He was supposed to go there for three days, they kept him there for the entire two weeks. Paid him a lot of money.
It’s funny because Snoop’s always had two sides. Number one, in my opinion, he’s always been a great human being. If you know him personally, he’s just a kind human being. Those who know him see that. But you have to remember, he did Lee Iacocca, remember on the golf course back at Chrysler, way back in the day. There’s always flirting with the mainstream culture.
But I do think, Max, you’re right, the Martha Stewart thing was a big shift for him. But even with that, I never would have predicted that.

Ben Smith:
He’s totally brand safe now. I don’t know if you’ve done stuff with him at Visa, but he seems like he’s come along way in that sense?

Frank Cooper:
That’s the shocking thing. I never would have predicted that, honestly. I worked with him directly. He’s like, “Hey, Coop, you’re missing the boat. I’ve got a lot more to go, you want to come back.” I’m like, “No, I’m good. I’m good right here.” But I never would have predicted that he would be totally brand safe and he is.
The one thing about Snoop that I think ... There’s probably two things that play into it. One is he’s one of the most reliable, predictable partners you could ever find and people may not think that. But you’re like, “Hey, we’re going to start here at 10:00,” he’s going to be there at 9:45. He’ll be there, ready to go, and he will deliver exactly what you want to be delivered. I think a lot of people underestimate that part of it. Particularly in music, when you can find people like that, it’s really important.
Then I think at the end, I think he just mellowed out over the years. Yeah. As time went on, Snoop started doing things that actually made him feel like he was mainstream, and didn’t do the things that historically had marginalized. Again, if I could have predicted it, I would have probably made different plays and different investments along the way, but I could not have predicted it. But he’s now fully mainstream and I’m happy for him. I honestly believe it could not happen to be a better human being. He’s a great human being.

Max Tani:
Well, we have to take a break, but we’ll be back with more from Frank Cooper.

Ben Smith:
This week on our branded segment from Think With Google, I spoke with Google’s VP of Marketing Josh Spanier about what marketers are calling the full funnel promise.
The marketing world is famous for its buzzwords and the new one is apparently full funnel marketing. Do I need to understand what this is?

Josh Spanier:
If you care about marketing, you’re going to hear a lot of about full funnel marketing. Full funnel marketing is really solving for two problems. The first is that, back in the day, brand marketing and performance marketing, so brand marketing, the thing that makes you love a product, and performance marketing, the thing that makes you buy right now, separated. Full funnel marketing is recognizing that separation was somewhat artificial and we need to bring it together.
But it’s also capturing another thing which has been going on in our industry, which is the non-linear storytelling and journeys that we all go through as we consume different media at different moments, at different times of day on different screens all over the place. Full funnel marketing is really all about how do we actually bring marketing together as one coherent strategy, and then how do we actually do so in a way which is true to people’s lives and how they discover products.

Ben Smith:
Can you give me an example of a non-linear journey somebody’s gone through?

Josh Spanier:
Sure. I’ll speak to some of the stuff we’ve done with Google Pixel. Just this first half of 2025, we have had a partnership with the movie Wicked. At the same time, or happening concurrently, we dropped the price for a three-week price promotion on one of the older models that was going to drive people in-store. Then, we actually had a film in the UK featuring soccer player Sol Campbell which went viral in the UK. It went so viral that it actually reached out into the US. My job and our job is how do we connect all these disparate things that are going on, all these different activities, and then apply measurement across all of them so we know what’s the contribution to actual Pixel sales?
The non-linear journey there is you went to the movie to see Wicked, you came across an Arsenal meme, and you saw the phone was on sale. You didn’t see all those things in sequence, one after the other. You saw them in roundabout ways and they all informed upon each other.

Ben Smith:
We’re all living in extremely confusing situations these days. Where can people find out more about this?

Josh Spanier:
If you head on over to thinkwithgoogle.com, you can find insights on the future of marketing. We recently published a joint study with BCG, it’s a great read. Head on over to thinkwithgoogle.com.

Ben Smith:
Thanks, Josh.
One of the things that comes up here I think is that it feels like you’re still reaching for and sometimes finding these big mass cultural figures at this very fragmented moment. I don’t know if you remember this, but I remember a meeting we had at Buzzfeed where you were suggesting we do something with Beyonce. I think the sentiment from the other Buzzfeed executives was like, “Well, the internet’s bigger than Beyonce. Who needs Beyonce?”

Frank Cooper:
Yeah, yeah.

Ben Smith:
I remember this slightly puzzled look on your face.

Frank Cooper:
Yeah.

Ben Smith:
Does that ring a bell?

Frank Cooper:
Oh, no, it rings a bell. It rings a bell because it hurts my heart to this moment. Let me put it in this way. There are times in which I think brands are so obsessed with making sure that they protect the brand from anyone else taking it over or having greater visibility or momentum, that they miss the cultural moment. There’s a moment in which Beyonce was a voice and symbol for a new generation of women. If you recognized that piece of it, you could leverage that in a way that allows her to remain true to herself, but also to connect it to a brand. If the fear is, “Well, what if Beyonce becomes bigger than the brand?” My view on it is so be it.

Ben Smith:
Yeah.

Frank Cooper:
Because you can’t stop the momentum that happens in culture. You can only ride it, and hopefully participate in it, and hopefully give back to it. But you’re not going to stop it from happening, so you can watch it go by. I feel like we watched that one go by.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, that’s on my list of mistakes we made.

Frank Cooper:
Yeah.

Max Tani:
You were mentioning before that there’s this limited pool of folks now who can really move the needle celebrity-wise. At Visa, you guys did a concert series at the Louvre with Post Malone. I’m curious, is he one of those figures? Also, is your job more complicated now? Do you have to keep track in your mind of dozens and dozens of micro-influencer type of people? Tease that out a little bit for me.

Frank Cooper:
Yeah, yeah. The concert, these are live at the Louvre.

Max Tani:
Yeah.

Frank Cooper:
We did a Post Malone. We also had Ayra Starr, an Afrobeats artist. The idea of it was not so much about is Post Malone the influencer or is Ayra Starr the rising star. It was more about can we do something around music that is interesting, engaging, and fulfilling to the artist, but also to the fan base.
What’s happening in music right now? Big festivals were still happening. Everyone wants to do a stadium tour. But the intimate place is what’s differentiated and special. When I looked at something like, say NPR Tiny Desk. We’re like, “Why do we all love that Tiny Desk thing?” It’s because it’s so different from what we’re seeing in terms of the super polished, highly choreographed. It’s just you, the talent sitting right behind, their mic dropped from the ceiling. You’re delivering or you don’t deliver.
I said, “Can we create other environments that are unique experiences like that, and that the artist would appreciate and the fans would appreciate?” The Louvre, which never had a live concert like that before, we felt like that would be one of those places. The way I think about it is rather than have total dependency on one artist, and they’re rolling the dice on whether that artist has that influence or not, or looking at the data and saying, “I think the data supports it,” I’d rather build the platforms that allow multiple artists to come on there.
But yeah, we’re still looking at influencers. For me, I’ve changed my view on this over time. I used to look at the data and say, “Who has influence?” And then look below the data and see whose getting really engaged, a really engaged audience. Then let’s see who can actually move people down the chain, and maybe even get them to actually buy something. I still do that, to a certain extent. But the big shift for me is it’s not so much about the influencer first, it’s about Visa first, it’s about us first. Do we know who we are? Do we know the audiences that we’re trying to get?
If you’re thinking about it in the traditional media way, which drives me crazy by the way. Because traditional media would say buy in 18 to 34-year-old audience, still to this day, drives me crazy. I have no idea who is an 18 to 34-year-old audience. I don’t know what that is. I do know that, if you can identify a cultural group that’s important to you, that I can move that. And I can think about the symbols, and the rituals, and the evangelists, and the stories, and the history that make up that group. That, I can tap into, and I can figure out who are the influencers of that group. As opposed to these fake proxies that prance around as scientific groupings of people.

Ben Smith:
We talked to some of your peers and there’s definitely a sense that some influencer will blow up on a Tuesday, and there’s a scramble among companies over the next few days to be like, “How do we get on her feed? What could we pay her to promote our product?” Do you think that’s a mistake?

Frank Cooper:
I think it’s a huge mistake. Now, it’s a standard reflect reaction that you see a lot of large companies and large marketers pursue. Which is what’s hot, let’s fast follow and see if we can get that and compete against it. I’m not saying I won’t ever do that. If you see me do it, don’t send me a note saying, “Frank, I thought you’d never do that.”
But I’d rather know who we are. I’ll take someone who has a smaller audience, but everyone would say, “Yeah, that makes sense.” What they’re doing over there, that particular influencer will want to work with Visa because they have shared values, a shared vision of how to move an audience, and they’re helping each other move forward. I’d rather have that.

Ben Smith:
I think one of the things that has always been interesting to watch you is you do think of these deep cultural currents and follow them. In this particular moment in American culture is so divided, so politically divided. Do you make differently to red America, to blue America? Do you find common ground? Do you look for channels within those things? How do you navigate that incredibly dicey moment as a marketer?

Frank Cooper:
Yeah. Yeah, we could spend an hour on that piece because I think it’s one of the most precarious moments, and I don’t think this is a shock, the most precarious moments in history for the United States in particular. In terms of the body politic and how we find some kind of commonality across the geographies of the United States. I think it’s there, by the way. I think that we’re in that moment where it’s hard to see it.
Fortunately for me, I don’t have to dip into that. I find the things that transcend these divisions. Someone would says, “Hey, country music, Frank, is a red state thing.” Is it? I’m not sure. Shaboozey and Beyonce, and others have shifted that. But even more than that, even if you take a deep country, Luke Holmes, a deeply embedded country artist, they’re now starting to change people’s perception of what that music is. I think it’s one of the most dynamic music genres out there today. I can tap into that in ways that don’t even begin to force us to confront the political divisions that happen in the world.
If I’m in video gaming, if you are a video game creator, or if you’re just a hardcore video gamer, you’re not really doing a whole lot of talking about who did you vote for for the local city council. You’re going to be in that world. There are things that we can do in that world that add value. I’d rather play in that space.
To me, it’s a little bit of a beacon of light that there are things that bind us all together, where we get beyond this massive division that’s happening in politics. There’s a reminder that there are things that bind us together and I just try to find those things as much as possible, and stay away from anything that actually speaks to the deep divisions that are happening in the political landscape.

Max Tani:
What are they? What are the things that you think that are uniting for people that you see?

Frank Cooper:
Well, fundamentally, everybody wants to figure out how do I have the opportunity to move forward in this crazy world that we’re living in now, where nothing seems as certain as it used to be. Everyone’s trying to figure that out. If you speak on that level, that foundational level, I think you have a good chance of winning.
When you get into these passionate spaces, these passionate spaces and lifestyle spaces, including sports, well, they’re both divided and gather. But you’ll find groupings that are not based on political leanings. Whether that’s American football, or whether that’s global football, soccer.
When I first came in onto Visa, I was like, “Wow, we have a lot of investments in these sports.” I’m like, “Are you guys sure?” Then the thing you start to see, the fan base connected to it. You start to realize that in live sports, there’s no more engaging activity. The one thing that tends to work on linear TV still is live sports. It’s this communal affair that happens in connection with it. Put the Olympics aside, the Olympics is another thing which has a lot more complications to it. But when you look at soccer, you look at the NFL, I see community gathering around and they’re based on teams, cities, players. That to me is another form of gathering and transcending these political divisions.

Ben Smith:
All right. Well, we can end on a surprisingly optimistic note. Thank you so much for taking the time, Frank. It’s great to see you.

Frank Cooper:
Ben, Max, I appreciate it. It was a lot of fun. Let’s do it again.

Ben Smith:
Max, I’ve known Frank a long time, so I’ll let you kick this off. What did you learn from that conversation?

Max Tani:
I am so happy. This is actually one of our first full-circle moments on the podcast, which is I believe we talked about Snoop Dogg with one of the other previous marketers. I think I expressed my theory that, at some moment, he went from a musical icon to a true commercial, marketable icon, and Frank confirmed it. And confirmed that he knows it. And confirmed that it really started with the Martha Stewart collaboration. That actually opened up all of these opportunities for big brands and marketers to capitalize on his charisma.

Ben Smith:
His charisma and also the eternal lesson, show up at 9:45 for the 10:00 AM shoot.

Max Tani:
That is true. Yes, being a person who’s easy to work with.

Ben Smith:
Yeah.

Max Tani:
Also, it’s very interesting to me how plugged in he really still is to the cultural part. I assumed that, at some point, you do as an executive, you outsource your cultural knowledge to other people. But it is clear to me at least that, from talking to both him and Leslie Berland, the CMO of Verizon, we talked to her earlier this season. It’s clear to me that a big part of their jobs is literally just still churning through culture, and trying to understand the artists, and the musicians, and the creators who are connecting with large groups of people and why.

Ben Smith:
But honestly, from them, two really different philosophies of how you go after it. I didn’t mention Leslie earlier, but I think she’s very much of the you got to stay totally on top of TikTok, know what’s happening in the moment, and dive in really opportunistically. Frank, and this was my experience with him at Buzzfeed, and it was in some sense a culture clash there. He said it “hurt his heart.” But he’s really thinking there are these deep currents and huge figures, and that the value you get out of a collaboration with Beyonce, which might be incredibly complicated and expensive to execute, might take an enormous amount of time, that’s where most of the value is. These very, very carefully staged, thoughtful things that the Louvre. You’re doing these big, slow projects in a way. In a moment where I think a lot of the culture that is chasing things that are happening and changing very, very, very fast. Those are two different ways I think of looking at media.

Max Tani:
It’s true. Of course, I think Frank had a little bit more of a laid back view of what can these people do for us, versus how do we tap into some of their success. I think that it’s very interesting that he basically has flipped it and thought, “Okay, who of these individuals align with our values?” Not, “Can we align ourselves with some of these individuals?” Not that that was something that Leslie was saying necessarily, I think that she was talking about something that was more complicated.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, we can have them both on to debate it later.

Max Tani:
Yeah. No, no, I think she actually was saying the same thing in different ways as well. She felt like there was an alignment so she had to capitalize on it.

Ben Smith:
Yeah.

Max Tani:
The other thing that I thought was interesting, and this is another recurring theme in all of our conversations, is just how important sports are to propping up the media industry. And also, continuing to serve as the one through line that is binding Americans, and even people in the world together. Frank mentioned the Olympics, but also football being a huge part of that.
It just occurs to me, hearing from Frank and thinking about some of the other folks that we’ve talked to this season, how much sports are both one of the only remaining unifying cultural forces in the country, and also one of the only things that seem to be a place where businesses feel safe operating and feel like they can make a lot of money.

Ben Smith:
Oh, for sure. A big part of Frank’s job, and you heard him say that, is frantically scanning the horizon for safe places to put money. Parts of the music industry are that, and sports are just absolutely the top of it. I think that’s where you see these huge investments in all sorts of now livestreaming on places like Amazon and Netflix that never did it before. It’s the last thing anybody’s watching on television.
I do think interest has been relatively resistant to politicization. I think there was around Black Lives Matter, there was a ripple of, “Oh, our more conservative sports fans are going to be alienated from the NFL.” That is truly a thing that did not happen.

Max Tani:
Yeah. What’s clear too is just that the majority fans truly hate it. They don’t like sports being politicized at all and they recoil at that.

Ben Smith:
No. That’s why any politicians who attempts to throw out the first pitch at a Yankees game will get booed. It doesn’t matter who. Actually, I think George W. Bush right after 9/11 didn’t get booed. Then I remember in the Obama Administration, they were going to have Michelle throw out the first pitch. They were just like, “She’s obviously going to get booed because they just boo everyone.”

Max Tani:
Yeah.

Ben Smith:
No one wants a politician out there. One of the cleverest tricks I’ve ever seen was they had an aging Yogi Berra escort Michelle Obama to the mound because nobody’s going to boo Yogi Berra.

Max Tani:
That is totally brilliant.

Ben Smith:
It’s a heat shield for politics.

Max Tani:
That’s it for us this week. Thank you for listening to Mixed Signals from Semafor Media. Our show is produced by Sheena Ozaki, with special thanks to Max Tani, Britta Galanis, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pizzino, Garett Wiley, Jules Zirn, and Tori Kuhr. Our engineer is Rick Kwan. Our theme music is by Billy Levy.
Our public editor this week is Snoop Dogg. He’s bankable, he’s marketable, people want to know what he thinks about things and brands, and they’ll buy his stuff.

Ben Smith:
Yes. Please, please tell us what you think about this podcast, Snoop Dogg, if you’re listening. Even if you’re not Snoop Dogg, but you like Mixed Signals, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts and feel free to review us.

Max Tani:
If you still want more, you can always sign up for Semafor’s media newsletter, out every Sunday night.