From Cultural Roots to Creative Futures: Lessons with Daniel Cherry

0:00Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olenski. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist. I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to, of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. My guest this week is an award-winning marketer, business executive, strategist, and brand innovator. Daniel Cherry has extensive experience across sports, CPG, lifestyle, music and entertainment, and luxury consumer categories.

0:40with a storied career working with some of the world's most famous brands, such as The Odyssey, Comics, Activision, The New Jersey Devil, The New York Cosmos, and now Adidas. His work has been recognized with numerous awards and recognition, including a Grammy nomination, gotta get into that, a Can't-Go-Lion, a Sports Business Journal's Top 40 Under 40, an Adweek Vanguard Award, several Emmy Awards for advertising effectiveness. Daniel was also a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, is the husband and proud father of two amazing daughters, Daniel Cherry. Welcome to the show. And as I said to you off the air, I don't know how you and I have never spoken before.

1:20Agreed. Agreed. The circle is small, but the energy is a track. So we're here. We're here. We're meant to meet now. So be sure you have me on. Thank you. Oh, my God. It's totally my pleasure. I think we have like four or 500 mutual LinkedIn connections. We've definitely been in the same conferences and breathe the same air or whatever. That level of connections happen over time, right? So we've been doing this for a long time. So kudos to you for still going at it. We're not saying old. No, no, no, no. Experience. Wisdom. Yes. And don't ever say mature. Right. Correct. Because at one point, I guess we were just immature.

1:55So I will fight to my death. I will never be mature. Anyway. Well, listen, it's so great to chat. We have a ton of things I want to get into. And I want to start with what you call your passion project right now. And it's your co-founder of Fros. I hope I'm saying that right. F-R-A-S. Yes. Okay. F-R-A-S. Fros. Yes. Jamaican pathway. My Frosmon. Yes. Organic iced tea. You were gracious enough to send me some samples. They are amazing. But start there. Start wherever you want. How it came about. What's it all about? Where do you want to take it? Everything you want to talk about. I appreciate you helping plug Fros.

2:27Yes. Fros is a passion project of me and some friends, including my wife, who is Jamaican. And the phrase, mafrostman, is Jamaican patois. And frost is essentially an organic iced tea that we call peace in a can, right? When you want that little moment of peace, that refreshment, we believe we want to give you the most delicious, healthy, you know, flavorful experience possible. And we believe that that's frost. I grew up on the other side of tracks as a kid and we used to have quarter waters, right? High sugar, sweet tea, all these things that tasted good initially, but weren't great for us. And so for me and my friends that built Frost, we want to give the world an accessible alternative.

3:06We believe in accessible wellness. So the product won't be a$10 green juice. We actually will make sure that's affordable. So under$4, so$3.50 or so at your convenience stores. us. We will also be doing some Frost Sunset sessions because we're cool. We love lifestyle. So we'll be doing some beach sessions in Venice Beach, which is where we're based. And we'll be donating percentage of proceeds to Frost sales to health and wellness initiatives in local communities, including the Venice Family Clinic, which is right down the street from our hub in Venice Beach and other local communities around the world.

3:36Our tagline is Refresh the Peace. And all products are, again, 100 % organic, non-GMO, vegan, and infused with adaptogens. So we have peach, hibiscus, raspberry, and we're about to launch mango. Oh, I definitely want to taste the mango because the first two are amazing. Thank you. Are they online only? Can people find them in retailers? Where can they get them? Yes, we are launching in Southern California this year. So you'll see us about 500 to 1 ,000 doors in Southern California first. Yes, we are online, D2C and Amazon. So you can buy us nationally for that level internationally wherever Amazon ships.

4:08And we will be rolling out across the country, North America, this summer. So, you know, more tea is drunk kind of June to July than any other season. It's a summer drink. So clearly we're going to be launching kind of Memorial Day doing activations in and around South Bay, which is a kind of SoCal vibe, Hermosa, Venice Beach, Manhattan Beach, but also Redondo Beach, which is where I reside. And all the way down to La Jolla to the skate and surf and beach, right, communities. And then we'll go across the country from there. So you'll see us all around Southern California this summer and then nationally coming up on the fall and spring 26.

4:42I highly recommend go to Amazon. He said F-R-A-S and look it up. Drinkfrost.com. Yes. Drinkfrost.com. It's so good. It's refreshing. It's just different. And that's what I like about it. And it's organic. Well, the flavor profile came from, I'll give a shout out to Eric Ribeiro. Eric's our head of product innovation. Eric is an amazing four or five star chef and bartender. So he actually makes food with drink. So he's actually made some amazing mocktail recipes, but he also has taught a lot of the best mixologists and bartenders in the country, having worked at Diageo as our head bartender when I was there.

5:16So you think about the amazing flavors we've had in some more high-end products, he's taken that same level of kind of sommelier expertise and brought it to the tea category. So the flavor notes and the discussions we have about taste profile is what you would have on a high-end wine, but we're providing it to you at a$3.50,$3.99 product, which we think is important because when you look at the competition, the level of carries just isn't there in this space, but it's the oldest drink ever drunk next to water in the world. So, right. You think about tea and water, the two oldest drinks, most drunk in the world.

5:47And we, there's still opportunity to give somebody something better. That's delicious. And I know I'm preaching the choir, but what a great story to tell. Yeah, that is the goal. That's why we're here, Steve. You're helping me tell the story. And then, you know, we'll tell the story, you know, in our own terms, you know, in the coming months. Absolutely. Totally. And I will do everything I can to help because I just, I love the cause. And you know what I love the most, Daniel, is listening to you for the past 30 seconds to two minutes is your passion. And that's beautiful. I love that. Appreciate it.

6:14It is a passion project for sure. Okay. Now, I'm going to go complete 180. I'm at your disposal, Steve. Whatever you think I can match Poetic on and help the listeners enjoy and educate them, I'm all for it. Well, I want to pull back the curtain a little bit first on something that was personal with you. And that was the whole Kanye West. Yes. So for those not familiar, I don't, you know, you never want to assume, right? But this is going back, I don't know, three, four, five years. Is that about right? About three now. Okay. I saw this headline in Newsweek, and I'm going to read it verbatim, and obviously you know it.

6:46Daniel Cherry, question mark, Kanye West takes aim at Adidas executive. So someone just coming, falling off the turnip truck, knows nothing about this. What happened? What happened? Well, honestly, it was in many ways a mental health story as much as it was a marketing story. It was a personal safety story in many ways for me and my family. when you think about what went on during that time, it was pretty intense. So what ended up happening, and I'll summarize here because it gets too detailed. And there has been a lot of, as you can imagine, legal implications attached to this as well, but everything that you've seen on social media and then some, but he took aim at me and our executive board and supervisory board for perceived lack of control, even though he signed an agreement well before I got there in the partnership.

7:30And when people are going through their sicknesses and their issues, they lash out at people that either they support or that they care about or that are in their inner circle, happen to be in the inner circle. And I took aim. And one of the things I told my team is that, you know, whenever we do things, I'm going to take, as I said to them, all the hits. So I'll be the Kevlar in the sunlight, right? I'll shine a light on you when things are going great. If things are not going great, I'll take the, you know, I'll be the Kevlar standing in front of it. That's the job of a leader. And that's what I did for all the people behind the scenes that were working incredibly hard, but have been, right, disrespected, potentially, you know, kind of in their minds abused or right, emotionally right scarred over all this relationship ebbs and flows that have happened even before I got there.

8:09My job was to put an end to it because there's certain things I wasn't going to tolerate, certain things that our team shouldn't tolerate in that our consumers shouldn't have to, right, deal with. And I think the company made the right decision. Everything you saw that happened publicly, we couldn't stand on the wrong side of this conversation. It just took a big toll on me personally, my family. We had to have security for quite some time. Those who know me saw me travel with security everywhere for about six or seven months. I didn't drive my own car for six or seven months. I had a driver and a security officer.

8:37My daughters had to go to school with security officers who had to stay off campus because these people were concealed carry security and they couldn't enter a school zone. As you can imagine, my wife had to get driven to her university job. We ended up moving to a new home because we got doxxed and people kind of were engaging. And it is, if anyone wants to hear a deeper story, probably help me write this story. It's a great cautionary tale for how you engage in influencer marketing and deal with celebrity, because when the control is lost, you can't find the steering wheel. You've got to have the eject button and you can't have in any business or brand the tail wag the dog, meaning the cultural kind of conversation drive the brand conversation.

9:18One has to create the ripple for the other and the brand has to own that story and create the ripple for the consumer and the culture. And we get that, I think, a little upside down. and many people inside the organization as well as myself had to bear the brunt of it. But we course corrected. New CEO, we ended up creating a foundation out of this as well. So the first foundation that the brand's ever had, adidasfoundation.org. Everyone can go there. It's a grant-based program for people, right? Plan it and play. Something that the brand's never done before. And the proceeds that we are using to provide grants come out of the revenue generated from a lot of these shoes that were sold.

9:51So making something good out of a tough situation. But we turn the page and I think everyone's better for it. And hopefully those who didn't go through it can learn from it because many people are dealing with celebrity at various levels in their brand. So if you have issues and you're engaging in it and you're a marketer, please hit me on LinkedIn, reach out. I can give you some advice because I definitely have written literally bullet points, almost a buckle and approach this from my worries. Yeah. And anybody can just Google your name and Kanye West and a whole bunch of stories come up. But there's always a story behind the story.

10:23If you use cautionary tale, that's so appropriate. Right. And not to go down this rabbit hole, but I will for just a little because knowing as many CMOs and C-levels as I know, and I've been blessed to engage a lot of celebrities myself. I think there's this perception glamour. Right. And, oh, you got to meet X, Y, Z and you got to meet this star and everything. You just go to parties and everything's great. This is kind of the darker side. Yeah, for sure. It starts inside out. If you don't know who you are, what you stand for, then you will attract opportunists and you will make opportunistic partnerships.

10:57And those things are transactional. They're not at the level of depth that you need. I mean, I love having worked with a bunch of Japanese brands and even upstarts in my day. And one of the things they told me about the Western system, right, our American system is that, hey, you know, you guys litigate a lot. You sue each other a lot. You don't know who you're doing business with. And as you know, historically, doing business in Korea or Japan takes a long time. There needs to be a level of trust there so that the litigation is not something that is the first thing you do. The first thing you do is a conversation.

11:29mutual, right? You know, values and morals. And I don't believe that a lot of these entertainment based partnerships are based on something deeper than the popularity and some level of affinity, whether it be organic or transactional affinity. You pay me, I'll wear it. I like it. And I think you need to build a deeper, deeper level of trust and respect. And I jokingly said, you know, internally, like, Hey, show me a picture of them wearing the product when they were a kid, right? Did you do this before you were famous? Is there a story there? Because we want to be able to, to your point, tell that story.

12:00But we also want to make sure that it's authentic and you respect us for who we are at our core, not what we can offer you in the moment. Big difference. Big difference. Big difference. Just because you can does not mean you should. That's my advice to all marketers. Just because you can does not mean you should. If you and I can climb the Heist Mountain and just scream that. Oh my gosh. That is a life lesson, right? Anyway, I won't go down that rabbit hole. Okay, we're talking off air, and you shared this two-word phrase. I've never heard it put this way. You called it cultural currency, and it was marketing.

12:31That's cultural currency. First of all, this is the phrase cultural currency. I love. I want to just expand on that, but then you're infusing our world of marketing. Yes. As cultural currency. For sure. Go with that. As a Whartonite, I studied economics. I studied finance, all the things you do as a student in Wharton. And what you love coming out of that is you love that you have an appreciation for compound interest. What you pay in, you receive tenfold, ideally, in years to come. Now, in our hyper frenetic PE-backed world of acquisitions, the marketing department almost feels like it has to be microwaved.

13:12And therefore, you don't get the compound interest you get over time. If the average 10-year VCMO is three to four years, that's not the kind of compound interest that you want. You want five and 10 year terms on compound interest. And I believe marketing works the same way. You have to pay in. Sometimes you're course correcting as well. So you're actually taking on debt, cultural debt that you got to pay into before you actually see the dividends and the rewards. And so what we're doing is we're actually just like the stock market. We're putting an investment in a mutual fund. That marketing budget, I believe, is an investment in the brand's top line.

13:42Hopefully the company can help manage the bottom line, but marketing has to drive the top line. And so for me, the cultural currency is very much the compound interest of consumer desire beyond reason that you receive based on the investment you put in over time. And you see that in five, 10 year cycles, generational cycles for some brands. And that to me is really important. And that is how you weather the storm. When the consumer and the trend crashes and the market crashes, if you've paid enough into that, that compound interest can help you weather the storm. Otherwise, right, you microwave your brand and you implode.

14:14And we've seen a lot of brands implode over time without having that true cultural currency built from the street up. Yeah. Up down. And again, microwave currency means you get a celebrity, you get a macro. Yeah. Pay them and you hope that it rains. Right. Engagement. But you got to build roots. And so does your brand have cultural roots or not? Fab Five Freddy and a bunch of lifestyle connoisseurs in New York, which is kind of my pedigree and background right in the streetwear space. They have a phrase that many people at Adi know me for saying, and we actually had it on a cake that the team gave me once.

14:44And it's everything cool starts from somewhere by someone and some friends. That's what I mean by the cultural roots. Everything cool starts from somewhere by someone and some friends. That's an origin story. That's the founder spirit. Every major thing we love that has any cultural currency comes from somewhere. Whether it be cognac, that's a region. Champagne, that's a region. American whiskey, that's a region. Japanese denim, that's a region. Silicon Valley, that's a region. That's a place, a space, and you have a world around it. Skate culture, hip hop, the Bronx. Everything comes from somewhere and it has a bunch of codes connected to that.

15:17And if you understand those codes, then you can actually begin to pull on them and play some good music culturally. And for those who don't get it, you're dead in the water. You are. Be your way into it. Also, not only the ones who don't get it, but also don't have the support of your CEO and your sweet sweet. Yes, very much so. They have to believe in it, to your point. I mean, imagine investing if you are a financial analyst in the market and your boss doesn't believe in compound interest. Yeah. How are you going to get the returns? You're going to start creating a very tricky slope if you are doing that in the financial world.

15:48And they have a word for that. That's called a Ponzi scheme. Yeah. Returns beyond. Right. The work you put in in marketing, same way. I mean, there's a lot of Ponzi schemes in marketing. There's a lot of kind of microwave ideas that expect high return, but they will not sustain you long term. I love that term, microwave marketing. I think you're going to inspire me to write something. And if I do, I'm going to give you total props because it's great because everybody gets what that means, right? You know, you microwave something. What's the reason anybody microwaves anything? Speed. Right. And taste is almost secondary.

16:21Exactly. What nutritional value are you going to get out of it? You literally buy a microwave and take it all out. Exactly. Exactly. So you get that short-term benefit, if you will. But in the long run, they keep the analogy going. In an hour, your stomach feels like. Exactly. Right. And so what is it worth? But again, based on the tenure that you have, do you want to see microwave hits? Because that can help you. Right. Get your next job. Because, again, the term of a CMO, as you know, is basically an NFL running back or less. Good analogy there, too. Exactly. Exactly. That's a whole nother story.

16:54Don't get me started on why. Don't. I'm in a good mood, Daniel. Don't get. all right i want to jump this up you mentioned pe and private equity yes you have i know you have some thoughts on how advertising and pe play together i do i do you know pe is a lot of obviously um categories in pe from tech to consumer products i'll focus on the consumer products industry right for the most part because that's what a lot of cmos uh that listen to your podcast and many of us that come from the advertising session marketing world work on and pe can be a great benefit to both advertisers and marketers i jokingly said that you know PE firms come into an organization, see the value, suck the value, reestablish the value, then hire a CMO or executive team.

17:36And then somewhere down the line, that person hires an agency they worked with in the past or has a pitch. The reality is that the creative folk that have helped build brands for other companies for so long can be a great benefit to PE earlier in the process. I would be encouraged to see more PE firms bring marketers and advertisers in when they're assessing the value of a company because marketers and advertisers can see beyond the endemic category they're in or beyond the traditional consultant's perspective. The traditional consultant has demographics, MPD data, your monitor data, and all they say is cost structure is too high, margin is too low, you can expand.

18:15And that's pretty much the play. Strip it, rebuild it, expand it, and or flip it. It's kind of the model. But when you have creatives like ourselves, you will be able to see whole other categories of growth. They're outside the categories that are traditional Bain and McKinsey would be able to see because they don't build brands. They audit them. They audit companies. They do not build brands. We build brands. And brands, I mean, if you were to look at, let's say, a P firm came in and wanted to buy Amazon, would Amazon be what it is today? It'd be Barnes and Nobles. That's not the category that they're in.

18:43But I think that if you look at the values and the benefits of any brand, marketers and advertisers see that and they see how they build that connection to consumer and they candidly see white space in the world that PE doesn't. And I think that PE will then change their valuation of those companies potentially by seeing the opportunity beyond the endemic category they're in. And I think that would be a great partnership of left brain, right brain, marketers, advertisers with a Bain and McKinsey or a Deloitte walking into these companies and helping audit and assess them with PE. Now, PE is buying a lot of advertising agencies these days.

19:14So hopefully that becomes the use for these agencies if they have the right skillset. Yeah. Because if they have the right skill set, then they can see the true consumer. They can see the opportunity and they can actually help build that opportunity because none of these right consultant companies can actually build brand demand. They can only audit based on the demand that's already been built. But we can actually create new demand for them if we are brought into the conversation early enough and given the right level of, I think, respect for the way we see value than the way maybe the street sees value.

19:42Which is completely different, right? and way different right that's why brands are sold on multiple is because of things we see exactly right and you you kind of hit on a bit of a nerve of mine and i'm not knocking them but like the baines and the mckinsey's of the world they don't build brands and somehow along the way the perception was that they either do or know how to do it and they don't and again i'm not knocking them because what they do we don't correct right we stay in our lane right but the The brands, I mean, Poppy, look, Poppy just got to, right? So what, 1.8, 1.5 billion, somewhere around there.

20:18But who was behind that? And I'll give a shout out to Rohan Oza. Rohan was a brand manager at Sprite. He's gone on to do amazing things in the venture world. And he, I think his company is Kavu, C-A-V-U, right? Yeah. Ventures. But he brought us as a young marketer and kind of, you know, ground floor of Glossal Vitamin Water way back in the day when he left Coke as a Sprite brand manager to help launch Vitamin Water. And now you think someone that was already at Coke, they might listen to. Why can't Coke build Vitamin Water internally? Why can't these brands build these companies internally? Well, there's a whole reason behind that.

20:55And those same companies used to appoint a lot of consultants. They couldn't have built a poppy or Vitamin Water or Liquid death because that's not what these companies do. They assess the value based on the structure of the business today. We can create value and a new model for the future. That's why, again, what we create creates multiples when the company is sold. What Bain and the others create are hopefully the right top line price point on that multiple. Yeah. Yeah. Completely. No, it makes so much sense. I'm such a keep it simple guy anyway and everything in life. Yeah. And that's just anyway, that we'll save that for part two, because that is so right there.

21:33Yes. Let me table it for now, because we'll continue the conversation. We'll continue. I love I love this. You describe AI. I love this. You're a writer, man. I know you are because you're using great words. Creative accelerants. Yes. AI is an amazing creative accelerator. And not a replacement for creative. No. And I think there's I cannot wait for you to just espouse. And I want to give you the plot because so many people that I talk to either who are writers and creators think they're going to lose their jobs or who were in the C-suite go, I can get rid of all my staff. No, they're both wrong.

22:05Yes, they are. It can be an accelerant. So that's not to say that they're not inefficiencies in the current model because in advertising and a lot of marketing organizations, a lot of people who make stuff up, but don't actually make stuff. Now remember that make stuff up, don't make stuff. Make stuff is what a consumer receives, feels, touches, purchases, right? Emotionally or, right? Monetarily transacts with like that's, that's the stuff that you make things that you make up again, in advertising, I write a brief. That's great. Consumers don't see that. We do pitches. Great. Consumers don't see that unless we do AP testing on the idea.