VISA CMO Frank Cooper

0:00The 90s, you had grunge and you had hip hop. and the thing that hip-hop gave people that no other genre gave was the sense of, I can not only make it in music, I can make it in life and make it in business. What's up, everybody? Today, I am sitting here with a very dear friend of mine, as well as the CMO of Visa. Please welcome to the show, Mr. Frank Cooper. Thank you, Rich. Good to see you, man. Good to see you. I'm happy we're having this conversation. It's a long time coming. It is a long time coming. I was reading up on you. It's always fun to read up on someone that I'm friends with because I get to learn certain things that I didn't know.

0:37And I, true to form, learned a lot about you. And it was interesting to me to hear a little bit about your childhood and then think about where you are today. I know how my childhood shaped where I am today. But talk to me a little bit about looking at your role today in life and where you were growing up, how your parents and how where you grew up shaped who you are. Yeah, man. You know, it's always hard for me to explain it because, you know, I grew up in California. I was born in San Francisco. But my coming of age years were really in L.A. It was in Carson. As Kendrick Lamar would call it, Compton Adjacent.

1:10So like right over the hill. And those were my coming of age years. And so if you had asked me then, could I see myself in this position, running some of the largest brands in the world, now at the 11th largest company,$500 billion company, I would never have imagined it. It was not even in the scope of what I thought was even possible. And so at the time, I played ball through high school and all city, all state, all that. So I could see that path. But fortunately, my mom had went to UC Berkeley. And she didn't graduate. She spent two years there, got married. And it at least opened up that idea that I actually want to go to Berkeley.

1:58and there's some other choices but so but I went to Berkeley and that really changed the course for me you know once I went to Berkeley I started to see kind of new possibilities but growing up um this was never ever first of all I didn't know what marketing was had no idea what marketing was um my idea of business um was more around technology because that's what my dad did so anything more entrepreneurial and technological is kind of where my head was but that wasn't really kind of my core passion even though I do a lot of that um so it took me a while just to figure out what is even possible out in the world so first of all let me not just like jump over all city all state which I didn't know when I was reading so you played basketball or football basketball and you you were a real guy so so I played I played basketball um but uh I was at Banning High School and um coach Ferragamo we uh they were six-time football champions like in a row we had a big line you know at the time we had the Samoan line uh front line so we were open They were up to a wide hole.

2:54So he constantly tried to get me to play football. I didn't like that kind of contact. So I stayed with basketball. And, you know, did well. I did well. I played with Daryl Strawberry, who's known more as a baseball player. But he was at Crenshaw playing basketball. Yeah. He was a serious basketball player. Serious basketball player. Lefty, you know, strong. He was very strong. Yeah. So you mentioned your mom went to school for two years. So were you the first person to graduate college in your family? I'm the first one to graduate college from my family. Yeah. That's amazing. And, you know, more of now, I have some nephews and nieces that have graduated, but first in my immediate family.

3:30That's amazing. Then my brother followed after that. And you went to college with the goal of graduating, or were you already kind of imagining what post-college for you would be like? Or at the beginning, was it just like, let me get this education that's been instilled in me, let me be the first in my family? no well i i always i always enjoyed learning so um ever since i was really very little i i enjoy reading learning talking to people just just absorbing things i've always enjoyed music you know i played music professionally it was in you know bands and all recorded in studios so that kind of stuck with me those are the two things that stuck with me um but when i first went i I thought I might even play basketball at Berkeley until I went out to practice.

4:18And then there was some guy who transferred in from City College. And I think first play, he kind of had a bit crossed over. And the next time I was looking back, he was up at the top of the square. I had never seen that before. Second one, step back, three-pointer. It was Kevin Johnson. Oh, wow. And what triggered it for me is I thought I was good to a certain extent. But that was like another level. And I was like, that is what professional probably looks like. And it's just a, it was a different level, different, like kind of leap off the ground, different speed, different, you know, it was just different.

4:52And I was like, it became clear to me. And because I, because I love learning, say that, let me focus on that side of it. And, and, and for me, the more I learned, the more enthusiastic I got about it, the more energy I got, I got great feedback, you know, from, from teachers and professors along the way. And it became my obsession and passion. That's cool. It's amazing to hear the story about Kevin Johnson. I have a similar one. It's an interesting story to tell later on in life, but at the moment, it is very eye-opening. And I had the same thing with Stephon Marbury. It was like the speed in which I saw him go by me on a court made me realize I was done playing basketball forever.

5:29Yeah, yeah. It's a messed up feeling at first, though, isn't it? When you first see it, like, wait a minute. We used to be able to blow past people, and it's just a different level. Yeah. You know, growing up and being like alive and young and curious in the 90s, I've realized other people like envy. I talked to young people. I went to dinner last week and two people said to me, man, I wish I was a teenager in the 90s. I wish I grew up in the 90s. And I realized that it really is like a badge of honor in some ways, because we saw this like emergence of hip hop culture. We saw the globalization of sport, Michael Jordan becoming this icon around the world.

6:06But I also think it it made certain people start to think that things were possible that were impossible. I didn't have the knack for learning. I didn't find myself focused in school. But that era and seeing some of those personalities like rise to such fame and success so quickly made me think like, man, I can follow this path a bit. But for you, you grew up in California during this era, too. How much of an impact at this time when you were playing ball, giving ball up, getting educated, starting your journey, were you also looking at, like, hip-hop culture exploding and seeing these stars around the world that you just didn't know before?

6:45100%. I mean, look, I had the good fortune of working at Def Jam. Like, you know, and Def Jam was actually right down the street here at 160 Varick. Right after school? After college? No, no. So after college, I worked for a law firm for a year. Okay. And then I went into Motown Records out in Los Angeles. Earthquake hit in Northridge. We were about a mile from the epicenter. My wife Nina was like, you know, we get the hell out of here. So I thought I was going to come to New York for just a couple of years because Russell Simmons and Lior Cohen have been calling me about coming out. And so I said, I'm going to come out now.

7:16So I came out for a couple of years. I thought I'd come out for a couple of years and stayed. And I just happened to hit it at the right moment. Now, we had, at that time, it was Montel Jordan. It was Domino. We had Month of the Man with Method Man and Red Man, signed up Jay-Z. Jay-Z and Foxy Brown did the single together, got DMX over from Sony. Kanye West came on board. It was a crazy time. Crazy, crazy run. So this is mid-90s in New York? Yes, exactly. And it was insane. And you've got to realize in the early part, there's still all the questions about will it last. But one thing that it did for me was it just reinforced my own entrepreneurial spirit.

7:55Because what I saw is that unlike the other, I think, great period in time was 70s when you had great music and a mixture of things. 80s was to me a kind of a dead period in that regard. But the 90s, you had grunge and alternative rock and Nirvana and the flannel shirts happening and you had hip hop. And the thing that hip hop gave people that that no other genre gave was the sense of I can not only make it in music, I can make it in life and make it in business. And I'm going to put it all together. and and there were no there were no stigmas uh around that and and so so we lived in in that in that world and for me that was really inspiring i saw it from russell's perspective in and what he was doing as a kind of business owner i saw it from uh the run dmc perspective you know from the management side but i also saw it from the everyday artists within def jam those who had that mindset of um hey this is all kind of one thing i'm performing i'm creating value but i'm trying to capture some of that value myself and it was it was unique because you i mean used to be if an artist if an artist would um you know try to be commercial sell something is always considered like the sellout yeah no one says that word anymore never you're talking about sellout it's like you know it's like you know we are here to entertain fulfill your passion but to get paid yep straight up yeah and that the sky's the limit and the sky's the limit there's no there are no barriers yeah yeah it almost became a bit for for a lot of people like the a new american dream in some ways as a kid growing up in the 90s was that like the idea of making money building business and then doing something you love at the same time it was like infectious because you're seeing puff daddy and and jay-z and damon dash and death row and no limit and these were these brands that were building these followings like a sports team had yeah isn't yeah i think that's a perfect phrase new american dream because what everyone got the joke the old american dream had died yep like what you're gonna do you're gonna get one job stay there for whatever 30 years four years whatever at the end get a watch and a pension yeah well first of all pensions were over you know like they went pensions that moved to 401k plans you're on your own people got that joke the job forever no there's mergers acquisitions takeovers no one's giving you any promises so So the first people to get that joke was hip hop culture.

10:17They're like, we're already on the outside of it. You guys are already not building any structures for us. Not getting any pathways. So I guess we're going to make our own pathway and do it in a way where we can sustain ourselves long term. Yep. I'm not saying it's perfect, by the way, because there's some other underlying things that actually, I think, prevent hip hop overall from being even more successful. But at least gave people a pathway. Tell me about that. But one, I think we have a hard time collaborating with each other. It's not enough trust across lines. I agree with that. There are opportunities to partner across lines and build things that are even bigger.

10:56And so that doesn't happen enough. I think we don't share enough information. There's always this feeling that, I mean, I believe information is power. But most cases, people don't do much with information you give them unless they already got the hustle in them, right? And so if you can share information with each other, it opens up new possibilities. Like if you don't know a deal is about to go down or you don't know a merge is about to happen or you don't know that NFTs is on the rise or you don't know that Wall Street now is putting together large funds to buy music catalog and what that actually means, you've got to figure it out yourself.

11:30And we can, I think, short circuit a lot of the trauma that happens along the way if we share more information. That's a really, you know, it's interesting. I interviewed Terrence Bud Crawford right here, this exact table about maybe five, six months ago. And we were talking about, you know, he was building his own business, his promotion business, and he wants to change it. And he talked about how he's hesitant to make certain changes because even though Floyd knows that he was screwed over at times, when he went and built his business, he had to play into the same rules in order for him to make money, right?

12:03Yeah. And a lot of that is because I feel like these athletes and these entertainers, when they go on to build businesses, are coming from a world in which it's always about ranking who's better. It's always about competition. Then you're asked to have them all of a sudden share secrets and partner and align. It feels against everything that they came up like ingrained in their mind. But I think it can shift because of people like Jay-Z, for instance, right? Because he's separated himself so much from the competition that for him, you know, if you're building a company and you're in basketball or hip hop, you're honored if if he wants to take you in and partner with you.

12:37But I think as people continue to grow in and you see the Rich Pauls becoming these big brands and Maverick and all these companies being built as I go into the world now and I meet with young agents and they say, well, who you know, who should I talk to? I said, you should talk to Rich. You should talk to Mav. Like it shouldn't be. Now, that's them. How do I chase that? There's no more chasing. It's like, how does everybody in some ways find ways to collaborate and grow the whole pot? Grow the whole pie. And the pie is big enough already. And no one actually even give up any secrets. You know, you're not giving up secrets like, hey, let me tell you about a specific deal.

13:12But if you can get, you can. There are no secrets. There are no secrets. We all know. We all know, one. But what you can share is like, what's the mindset, you know, that actually allows you to be successful? You know, one thing, and athletes know this very well, excellence requires help. That's the bottom line. You're never going to do it on your own. So if excellence requires help, you need information. You need someone to give you guidance. You know, if you show up, the trick in Hollywood, and this is true for a lot of, I'm going to say, black actors in particular. The trick in Hollywood is people will respect and reward predictability over talent.

13:50So you get someone like Ludacris. little Chris will be at the meeting an hour early. He will be sitting in the lobby waiting, ready to go, fully prepared, and everyone's going to work with Luda. There's some others that may show up, may not show up, may be prepared, may not be prepared. And the predictability is worth a lot. But someone's got to tell you that. Hey, guess what? You can be the most talented individual. You could be genius, in fact. but um Hollywood is not going to weigh that very heavily if you don't do some of the basic stuff there's an etiquette to these to this thing yeah it's a good point and it's a shame because it's a lot of times the people that know early are the ones that could have given you the break because they know they spot the talent right like your peers know the people within the same conversation know but because of the competition they wait exactly they wait till they see you there and then you think it's not the time to go partner with them you did all this because you're now supposed to go partner with the big bank that's right as opposed to how much power you can get from partnering with each other that's right yeah um let's go to ubo right and i don't know how many people ask you about ubo but the reason why not a lot anymore the reason why i'm so interested in that time is because ubo was the model amongst this like five or six hip-hop startups and i had one at the same exact time in 1998 and 99 raised a little bit of money to start this company one level.com and there was volume you remember and ubo and you know we ran out of all our money in two years i always joke that i sadly spent the majority of it on our launch party which um was incredibly irresponsible but looking back on it the lack of education i had i made up for in those two years running that business it was like i had just gotten my business degree and my law degree yeah um it was a gift of an opportunity and i look at that time and realize that at that point on I started to understand that business, like you said in a quote I read, was meant to improve your life.

15:48And I always looked at it as something different. Like the education was to go get the job and the job was going to be a pain in the ass. And I just wanted to live my life. When in reality, now that all these opportunities were open to us and you saw this through hip hop and through sport and through that time in the 90s, it dawned on me when I did this company, businesses who improved my life is to make me feel better about myself. to have regard, to have resource, to live a better life. And it started my journey, a long one. For you, you did get an education. You did go and work for two incredible companies.

16:20But what did you learn in that startup time in your life with UBO? That was probably the most critical moment in my entire career. Painful, by the way. Painful because you know the experience. On paper, for a while there, we looked really good, actually, on paper. Like, how much am I worth it? Okay. You know, it was actually a good moment. And it was a good moment in the sense that what we were proposing at the time at UBO is that there's this kind of cultural connection among people that transcends traditional demographics. It's not based on age or gender or income or ethnicity. It's based on these kind of shared values and shared heroes and shared stories and shared history.

17:01But they were disaggregated. And so having this online presence would allow us to bring people together. That was the concept. and I learned so much about myself through it. We didn't get to the finish line. We even had our ticker symbol ready to go and all that, but we didn't get to the finish line. We sold off pieces of it. We had a crazy launch party too at Ellis Island. Crazy. It was ridiculous. Those are the times, but I learned a lot about myself and that's when I actually discovered that what I actually am really good at is seeing how to shape people's behaviors and how to shape their perceptions and I realized that's what marketing really is.

17:37You know, I realized that I could think strategically and creatively. And none of that really came out fully until I went through the UBO experience. Because you know this, when you're in that complete startup mode, you're doing every single thing. And you'll find out who you are through that. Because it's going to be difficult, painful. You're going to push through. And you're going to find things that give you energy and things that actually sap your energy. And the things that give you energy, you perk up for that. You know that's kind of where you're, that's not only where your passion is, but probably where your talent is.

18:12And that's what I learned. So, you know, it's interesting because after that, you know, I still felt like I was an entrepreneur. And what an entrepreneur meant was that I had to go and build my own thing or I had to do my own thing. And I think that's a major misconception. And young people fall into that now more than ever. But when I think about your entrepreneurial journey from that point on, from company to company, and I even interviewed David Solomon once, and it was within Goldman Sachs. And I said, to me, that's as entrepreneurial of a journey as one could take, navigating the corporate ladder, the politics that are involved.

18:47And for you, different headwinds than he had to deal with in your career. I think about the decision to go from being the guy. You raised all this money. You had the ticker. Then you went into the corporate world. How was that for you mentally? And do you see that in young people today too, this feeling that like working for a company may not be the entrepreneurial journey that they had set for themselves? Yeah, look, I mean, I feel like you can create anywhere. And I mean, there are going to be some environments where it's much more difficult. The culture inside of a certain company may not allow you to kind of be truly innovative.

19:23But I've always taken the perspective that wherever I am, I'm going to create. I'm going to innovate. I'm going to try to expand what's possible. And I've been fortunate in that I've gone to companies that have given me that opportunity. But I also learned something. There's two things I learned. Number one is you don't have to build everything from scratch. Probably, you know, that's the hardest thing to do. And we come out of a world where that's kind of what we felt like we had to do. Right? Because no one's going to give us anything. So you're like, okay, I'm going to build it from scratch and build it up.

19:55Hardest thing to do. But you can buy things that exist. You can buy things that are undervalued and use that as a foundation to give you momentum and build your idea right on top of that. It's a much easier play, much less risk. I'm seeing more of it now, but I think we can do much more than that. Inside of a company, and some people call it entrepreneurship, there's one thing most companies that are successful now realize is that they no longer can rely on their size. their dominance their current market position they better grow they better evolve and they better innovate that's been the realization it took a while right but when people saw blockbuster you know just like get taken out yeah so tower records get to take get get taken out see these large companies their stock price dropped 80 because the environment around them has changed so much most companies that are surviving and thriving today realize you have to keep evolving and keep innovating.

20:52And so for someone like me, that's a blessing because that means that's what entrepreneurs do. You think of what is possible and how can you build it within this environment. But most importantly, who can I get to come along with me? Because you have to get a group of people, a critical mass of people to say like, I see what you see or I believe in what you see. And then they help support you to get there. But how was a young person at a company without a voice of that magnitude who sees some of those deficiencies, how do they speak up within a corporate environment? Yeah, it's tough. I mean, if you need help again, and so what I've tried to do throughout my entire career is find someone who would augment my voice.

21:42And so that's number one. Number two, I realized that in many cases, the decisions weren't being made in the room where the decisions were supposed to be made. They were getting made far before that. And it was like a kabuki play. By the time you got into the room, people went through the motions, but it was already decided. So I realized that the conversations you have outside the room in trying to persuade people and putting them in a position where they're much more comfortable to have the interaction, debate, exchange, collaboration. is a much more successful path. But I was also lucky. Clarence Avant was a very, very close friend and mentor to me.

22:26And so in many cases, I could go to someone like Clarence, and the beautiful thing about Clarence was that he would never give you a euphemism, he would never give you kind of a soft angle in. He would just tell you right between the eyes, this is what it is. And for me, that was very helpful because then I had no confusion about like, okay, how do I actually convince this leadership team that this is the right way to go? And he would say, hey, it's a person that you need to do or you need a group of people to kind of align with you or you need to go to the CFO because that's where the money is or you need to build it outside and show them as possible and bring it back inside.

23:03He was very clear and it was very helpful to me. Isn't it amazing how incredibly successful and confident people can be so simple and practical and they know they're right that they don't have to give you all the color? I've had similar interactions at my time at Roc Nation. I remember talking to Jay about Kevin's free agency. Yeah. And he was like, Warriors are the best team and Silicon Valley is where all the money is. And it's like, yeah, I know that. But I thought there was going to be more. And it's like there's never more. Sometimes it really is just what you think. The simplicity is so like, it's so, I mean, it clears the clouds, right?

23:35Yeah. But it seems too simple, right? Yeah. But it's the best path usually. Because you feel like the simple way can only hold real weight sometimes when you feel like you've like earned the ability to like state the simplicity of it, you know? But it's that that frees you a bit because the answer is a lot of times right there in front of you. Exactly. I think, at least for me, I think we get used to the struggle. And you think that the struggle is part of the process. And when someone presents something that's really simple and straightforward, it doesn't feel like the struggle at all. And you're like, that can't be it.

24:13That's exactly it, man. That's exactly it. You're right. So I think about using that word struggle, the role of a CMO. you know for me there's there's amazing things that I get to learn from building boardroom and it was one of the reasons why I did it I'm full of curiosity you know and I and there's so many blind spots from my my early childhood because I didn't go to school and I always felt like I was trying to get through a struggle trying to get through the next struggle that I didn't have much time to consume and and retain certain things so like when I read up on your CMO journey It's like I'm reading up on this for the first time, and it's powerful even in my age to learn this information.

24:55So I learned about your roles, you know, going from AOL to, let me see if I get this right without looking, AOL, Pepsi. Then you went to BuzzFeed. Yeah. Then BlackRock. Yeah. Boom. Look at that memory. You got it. But the role of a CMO is one that historically is for these terms, right, where you don't stay at these companies for 20, 30, 40 years, or that's how it had been. Why is that? And then for you on this journey, what was your kind of clock or what was the thing that you said to yourself, hey, I've done my time here and now I look somewhere else? Well, look, I mean, so the role of the CMO, I think, has been a really difficult role in most companies because there's not alignment, particularly in the C-suite, about what should the CMO do?

25:45What is even marketing and what should marketing do? And so historically, you could get away with running great TV ads, great out-of-home, some cool events, and your job is done, right? because you've probably had some control over manufacturing and some control over distribution, so there are a few players in the marketplace, and all you have to do is remind people who you are, so top of mind awareness, and then you have these marketing channels and distribution channels that allow you to dominate their mind share. So like, hey, everyone's watching these three channels. Great, we're going to dominate our ads on that.

26:24So your job was done. I won't say it's easy because that was still, you know anyone's watched the whole madman thing it's still complicated you gotta tell a story and all that um but there's alignment but then everything changed it's like you know what people don't really want to watch tv ads in the same way they feel like it's a tax on their experience hey hasn't everything moved to social and digital so what are you doing in social and digital and by the way i can't measure all the stuff that you're talking about like now i'm in the world of you know cfos where they're like hey you know i want to metrics like tell me tell me tell me how oh, this is actually driving my business.

26:58So I think that's the fundamental flaw is that there is a lack of alignment between really the CEO and CFO and the CMO. My view on it is simple, that the role of the chief marketing officer and marketing in general is to drive profitable growth for the firm by changing people's perceptions and their behaviors. That's what we do. Wait, say that line again. I like that. So drive profitable growth for the firm. So we're a commercial engine. It's about making money, driving transactions, growing things. But you do it by changing the way people perceive things and the way they behave, tapping into that.

27:34That's what we do. And if you look at it in that broad sense, then you're agnostic. You'll say, okay, can I change someone's perception and behavior by spending all my money on a 30-second TV spot? I can tell you the answer to that is 100 % no. Not going to happen on any level. Can I actually generate awareness? Maybe. If I'm in live sports, because people are engaged in that, and so I may spend some money on live sports. But if I look at where people are, where they're interacting, where commerce is increasingly happening, where relationships are being built, you better be in social. But when you're in social, every single social platform is like a different country.

28:10Different language, different symbols, different evangelists, different algorithms. It's a different country, and so it's a new way of actually connecting with people. And I think we're in this transition period where you have some marketers who grew up in that old world and they reminisce about that time and want to be a part of it. You have some who grew up in the new space, but they actually don't have necessarily deep knowledge about how do you build ongoing relationships that drive commercial value. And so we're in that transition period. And the best marketers are hybrid, great storytellers who love data, people who know how to build relationships, but also know how to create excitement and energy.