3 Kings

by Zack O'Malley Greenburg

  “They treated us like we were literally heads of state,” Fab recalls. “They had this whole beautiful itinerary… this thing by this amazing river. They had these indigenous Moroccan people making bread with big tents with all the rugs and pillows scattered—like, traditional shit. Camel rides and ATV rides… Perhaps the best party I’ve ever taken part in.”18

  Diddy returned to the States reinvigorated. Spurred by the success of Making the Band, he turned his focus to film and television. He went on to executive produce reality shows like Run’s House and I Want to Work for Diddy, as well as the Biggie biopic Notorious, which grossed $44 million on a $20 million budget. As an actor, he landed roles in films like Get Him to the Greek and A Raisin in the Sun (he starred in the latter on Broadway as well). Making the Band would continue through 2009, spawning acts like Da Band and Danity Kane, which Diddy then signed to Bad Boy. He thrived in these new roles. In most of them, he really only needed to play himself.

  “I’m sorry ’bout the cheesecake thing,” he told me in 2014. “I really would go to Brooklyn to get cheesecake if somebody told me to—that’s just the truth.”19

  Both Diddy and 50 Cent owe much of their wealth to the beverage business—and to fully understand how and why that happened, it’s important to know hip-hop’s historical impact on this particular industry, starting with soft drinks. There’s perhaps nobody better equipped to illuminate that connection than longtime Coca-Cola exec Darryl Cobbin.

  During his early adulthood in the 1980s, Cobbin watched his heroes like Kurtis Blow and, later, Heavy D appear in Sprite commercials on BET. While attending business school at Clark Atlanta University, he became obsessed with the idea of landing a gig at Coca-Cola and using hip-hop to turn Sprite into an international powerhouse brand. Cobbin managed to get a job offer from the beverage giant in 1991. The only problem was that Coca-Cola had a system: new employees showed up, proved themselves, and were then sent to work on specific brands, not the other way around. Cobbin told his recruiter he wanted to change that—and that he had eight other job offers.20

  “If I don’t get on Sprite, I’m not coming,” Cobbin said.

  “Well, you know what?” came the reply. “If you do that, you will be viewed as a troublemaker before you even walk through the doors. You don’t want to do that, Darryl.”

  “I do.”

  A few days later, the recruiter called back with some news: Cobbin could work on Sprite right away if he joined Coca-Cola.

  “As far as I know, this is the only time anyone has said, ‘I want that brand, and I’m out if I don’t get that brand,’” he recalls. “This gives you some indication of how much I believed what was possible on Sprite with hip-hop.”

  Cobbin arrived to find a brand that had lost its way. Sprite’s business had been in decline for nearly a decade, pinning its turnaround hopes on new commercials featuring Macaulay Culkin—fresh off a starring turn in Home Alone 2—and the tagline “I Like the Sprite in You.” The spots were aimed at what Sprite thought were its key customers: young kids and their parents, who were willing to buy the clear lemon-lime soda for their offspring because it was caffeine-free and didn’t stain clothes when spilled.

  As Cobbin started leafing through Sprite’s sales numbers, however, he discovered that there were pockets of adults throughout the country, mostly black and Latino, with whom Sprite performed well. “You have to dig into the data to get beyond the averages,” he says. “If you put a man on a table, and you put his head in an oven and his feet in a freezer, he might have an average temperature. But he’d be uncomfortable as hell.”

  Cobbin concluded that Sprite had made a mistake by aiming its marketing almost exclusively at white suburban grade school kids and their parents. Instead, he asked a question: what if the brand repositioned itself, using its hip-hop heritage to grow its share of the black and Latino market and the white market at the same time? Cobbin began by doing some focus group research on the brand. He found that the customers who appreciated Sprite tended to like it for what he calls the five c’s: crisp, clean, clear, cool, and caffeine-free.

  To him, those were all attributes that resonated especially well with members of the hip-hop generation. “Crisp” and “clean” could be tied to the notion of dressing sharply. “Clear” could reference a what-you-see-is-what-you-get sort of attitude. “Cool” could mean refreshing in a physical and stylistic sense. “Caffeine-free” could imply that someone has his or her own unique energy. Cobbin linked this notion with three words—“Trust Your Instincts”—which Sprite’s ad agency then turned into the iconic slogan “Obey Your Thirst.”

  Cobbin appealed to Coca-Cola’s executives to fund the campaign. Typically, the beverage giant’s flagship product got 80 to 90 percent of the company’s advertising budget, leaving the employees representing the rest of its brands to fight for scraps by presenting seventy-five-page strategy outlines. Cobbin took a different tack, printing up business cards that simply explained what hip-hop was and how it would help Sprite on a quarter-by-quarter basis. His message: he would sell the brand by leveraging the burgeoning cultural movement—and make its executives a lot of cash. Says Cobbin: “I got big boy–big girl money in that meeting.”

  That meant spending on talent. For the first time, Sprite brought on black voice actors to do its commercials, along with venerable hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest. Though the company briefly continued to run two sets of ads—one targeted at white consumers, one targeted at black consumers—the latter version quickly became its primary mode of marketing.

  Just as Cobbin had suspected, the hip-hop-based approach resonated across demographic groups: “Obey Your Thirst” kicked off in March 1994, and by the end of the year, the brand had grown 8.9 percent. The following year, it grew 18 percent; in 1996, 23 percent. Throughout the mid-1990s, Sprite nearly tripled its volume, revenue, and profits over a five-year period. Much of that occurred in the midst of the Bad Boy–Death Row conflagration that made Interscope’s corporate overlords sell the company. But the soft drink industry wasn’t so closely tied to gangsta rap, and executives decided not to abandon hip-hop.

  “Were the people nervous? Yes,” says Cobbin. “When you’re en route to tripling a business that wasn’t growing, nervousness gets dismissed quickly… Sprite would not be what it became and what it is today without hip-hop.”

  Sprite continued to grow through the turn of the new millennium, at which point Cobbin moved to a global strategy role. He replicated his U.S. plan in places from South Africa—where the brand keyed on Kwaito, a local genre that included elements of hip-hop and house music—to Norway. That’s where Sprite brought on Tommy Tee, an Oslo native who’d grown up on graffiti art and Melle Mel en route to becoming the godfather of Scandinavian hip-hop, to lecture its European marketing teams about the genre’s international presence. “I remember them being totally surprised [about] the traditions we already had established,” says Tee. “That we already had generations of different performers in every part of the culture over here.”21

  Along the way, Cobbin inspired a young Coca-Cola executive named Rohan Oza, a marketer of Indian descent who was born and raised in Africa and then educated in the United Kingdom and the United States. Oza started working on the Sprite brand in the late 1990s, under Cobbin’s wing. (“He was my Jedi master on Sprite,” Oza says of Cobbin.) Like his mentor, Oza quickly recognized the marketing power of hip-hop, and he put together a series of popular anime-inspired commercials in 1998.22

  In the spots, the evil King Zarkon declares war on the rap world: “This hip-hop culture of yours is making a big buzz around the universe,” he says. “And I’m not feeling it. The break dancing, the graffiti art, the rhyming, the DJing—it all has to go!” The only way to save hip-hop is by getting its disparate forces—Common from the Midwest, Goodie Mob from the South, Fat Joe from the East, Mack 10 from the West—to unite as the super-robot Voltron. With the help of spiritual leader Afrika Bambaataa, this happens in the spot: Voltron d
efeats Zarkon’s robot, and hip-hop wins. The message is clear: in the wake of the violence of the mid-1990s, different factions needed to put aside their differences (and drink some Sprite).

  As time went on, Oza became a crucial conduit for one of those unifying goals: deal-making.

  As 50 Cent set about building an empire of his own, he got significant assistance from his manager, the late Chris Lighty. He grew up in the Bronx River Houses, like Bambaataa, and later went to work for Russell Simmons’s management company. Lighty helped forge the connection between hip-hop and big brands: he put LL Cool J in a 1997 Gap commercial and linked A Tribe Called Quest with Sprite.23 He also served as Diddy’s music manager for a spell, though nobody has ever managed the mogul’s career in its entirety. (“Managers have existed, but really only for Puff Daddy the artist and really not in the traditional sense of… a manager being somebody who kind of tells an artist what to do,” says Meiselas. “More of kind of like a right hand, who would help him execute on the artist side.”)24

  Lighty recognized 50 as a kindred spirit—a chameleon who could ramp up the tough-guy act or the smooth-talking boardroom diplomacy as the situation demanded. “There’s a deeper side to 50 Cent, a deeper business side that people don’t normally see,” Lighty told me in 2009. “It was done his way, and not the way that people [expected].”25

  The rapper’s rise may have been rooted in his experiences in the streets, but his interests and influences soon grew much wider. For example, he became a devoted watcher of the History Channel. He was particularly struck by a special on six-man guerrilla units; the image stuck with 50 and inspired his G-Unit empire. He used the same name for his clothing line, which soon ended up on store shelves next to Jay-Z’s Rocawear and Diddy’s Sean John, and for a sneaker that followed the former’s S. Carter edition. Both shoe lines were created by Reebok in an apparent attempt to make up for losing the LeBron James sneaker sweepstakes to Nike when he went pro in 2003.26

  Jay-Z’s shoe came first. His understated white low-top, inspired by a vintage Gucci sneaker, made him the first nonathlete to strike such a deal with the brand. Rather than sign a traditional endorsement deal, he structured the agreement as a fifty-fifty joint venture with Reebok, with the rights to the logo and trademark eventually reverting to him. For the sneaker’s debut, Reebok wrapped a private jet in S. Carter imagery and sent the rapper across the Atlantic to give press conferences on tarmacs across Europe in order to create buzz.27

  The shoe became the fastest-selling model in Reebok’s history, only to be eclipsed shortly thereafter by 50’s sneaker; both were promoted in a minute-long commercial. (“I rock Reeboks, man / If it ain’t the G-Unit, it’s the S Dot, man,” raps 50 before Jay-Z adds, “See how we cross-brand? We boss about it, man.”28) The verses may have been corny, but the deals were huge wins for Reebok, which was purchased by Adidas-Salomon for more than $3 billion in 2005. Fittingly, the company behind the original hip-hop sneaker deal had now gobbled up the latest shoemaker to be boosted by the genre.

  Meanwhile, Rohan Oza had moved on from Coca-Cola’s Sprite to its Powerade brand, spending a lot of time in New York in order to visit NFL and NBA executives. On his trips, Oza kept seeing Vitaminwater in shops; intrigued, he started drinking it, and quickly got hooked. He loved that the different flavors were tasty but had only half the amount of sugar as other beverages he consumed. So when the founder of Glacéau, Vitaminwater’s parent company, offered him a job as CMO—complete with equity in the company, then based in Queens—Oza accepted. “If I didn’t, I’d probably get fired from Coke anyway,” he says. “My makeup is much more suited to an entrepreneurial world than it is to corporate America. I intimidated too many people.”29

  Upon Oza’s arrival at Glacéau in 2002, he decided that he wanted to bring on someone with a similar reputation: 50 Cent. A friend of Oza’s introduced him to Lighty, who set up a meeting with 50 in 2004. Oza hoped to convince either the Queens-born rapper or Jay-Z to become a part of the brand, but his first meeting with the former went so well that he never asked the latter. A fitness enthusiast from the same borough as Glacéau, 50 immediately took to the product.

  “I can’t pay you that much,” Oza warned.

  “No problem,” replied 50. “I’m going to bet on myself.”

  The rapper became the face of Vitaminwater, receiving $5 million and 5 percent of the company for his troubles.30 Oza wouldn’t confirm the numbers but said that the payment was “predominantly equity.” “[If] I don’t give the exact numbers out, 50 doesn’t beat me up, which I think is a pretty fair deal,” Oza says. He notes that the rapper invested additional cash in the company beyond the equity he received; Lighty, who negotiated the deal, also got a piece.31

  Very quickly, 50 became the straw that stirred Glacéau’s drink. He created his own flavor, Formula 50, and appeared in commercials. In one, a pair of tuxedoed commentators introduce 50 as the conductor of a televised performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. “Since he began drinking Vitaminwater Formula 50, he feels he’s up to the task,” says one of the announcers. The rapper takes a sip of the concoction and leads the orchestra in a mash-up of Beethoven and “In da Club.” Even in spots for other brands like Reebok, 50 insisted in holding bottles of Vitaminwater.

  It’s hard to quantify how much 50’s involvement boosted Glacéau, but the company’s numbers certainly exploded in the years after he came on board. In 2005, Vitaminwater sold just over thirty million 192-ounce cases; the following year, that number doubled. The company clocked revenues of $355 million in 2006 and projected a $700 million haul in 2007. That sort of performance convinced Coca-Cola to buy Glacéau for just over $4 billion that May.32

  The rapper’s reported 5 percent stake left him in excellent shape: sources close to the deal confirmed that 50 took home roughly $100 million after taxes. But 50 wasn’t satisfied. “People were talking about how much money I made, but I was focused on the fact that $4.1 billion was made,” he later told me. “I think I can do a bigger deal in the future.”33

  Jay-Z had his own guerrilla inspiration at around the same time. In the waning days of 2001, he released his first live album, Jay-Z: Unplugged, recorded with the Roots as part of MTV’s series Unplugged. On the cover, he sits on a drum in front of Questlove, whose ’fro pokes out above Jay-Z’s left shoulder, just enough to be recognizable but not so much as to take away any of the spotlight. A more surprising face in the photo: Che Guevara, whose image appears on Jay-Z’s shirt. The late Marxist likely wouldn’t have been thrilled to be associated with the gaudy chain dangling from the neck of the arch capitalist, but no matter.

  “The spirit of struggle and insurgency was woven into the lives of the people I grew up with in Bed-Stuy, even if in sometimes fucked up and corrupted ways,” Jay-Z later wrote. “Che’s failures were bloody and his contradictions frustrating. But to have contradictions—especially when you’re fighting for your life—is human, and to wear the Che shirt and the platinum and diamonds together is honest.”34 As Jay-Z would put it on his song “Public Service Announcement” two years later: “I’m like Che Guevara with bling on: I’m complex.”

  Jay-Z increasingly embodied those contradictions, both in his personal life and his business life. In the former, his old friends were being replaced by glitterati; the likes of Foxy Brown and Jaz-O had given way to Gwyneth Paltrow and Bono. At around this time, Fab 5 Freddy ran into Jay-Z at a Robin Hood Foundation gala, where the rapper had just gotten a tour of a Basquiat retrospective; the guide had mentioned that Fab had been close with the painter.

  “I saw Jay at this benefit, he came over and was like, ‘Man, oh my God… Basquiat, I didn’t know that was your man… You need to break this shit down for me!’” Fab remembers him saying. “That would lead to seeing him develop this passion and love for fine art.”35 Jay-Z has since been growing his collection, which includes works by Warhol and Basquiat; he dished out $4.5 million to buy a painting by the latter in 2013.36

  When it cam
e to business, there seemed to be a growing divide between Jay-Z and Damon Dash. The latter’s confrontational approach had been an asset in the early days but became an impediment as Jay-Z soared higher up the A-list. In 2002, while Jay-Z was vacationing in the Mediterranean, Dash fired several Roc-A-Fella employees and gave rapper Cameron “Cam’ron” Giles the title of vice president without consulting Jay-Z; upon his return, Jay-Z reversed the move, escalating tension with Dash.

  In 2003, Jay-Z made another move sure to upset Dash: he decided to retire from his career as a performer. It seemed that he’d gotten tired of rap after putting out an album every year since his 1996 debut, and perhaps grown a bit jaded. “I dumbed down for my audience to double my dollars,” he rapped on “Moment of Clarity,” from his supposed swan song, The Black Album. “They criticize me for it, yet they all yell ‘Holler!’” Dash may have found some solace in the fact that Jay-Z put together a plan to milk his farewell for all he could, driving buzz for the album and padding Roc-A-Fella’s coffers in the process.

  There was more to the scheme than just music. Jay-Z planned the launch of his S. Carter sneaker to coincide with the album’s release and opened his 40/40 Club in Manhattan’s Flatiron district at around the same time. That summer, he gathered some of his newfound NBA friends—including Kenyon Martin, Tracy McGrady, Lamar Odom, John Wallace, and Jamal Crawford—to form a team to play in the Entertainers’ Basketball Classic, a Harlem street ball tournament that stretched through the dog days. He also started negotiations with Doug Morris, then chief of Def Jam parent Universal, to become a full-fledged record executive at the end of the year.