Zack O'Malley Greenburg ,
FORBES STAFF
I cover the business of music, media & entertainment.
This story appears in the October 4, 2016 issue of Forbes. Subscribe
Busy Swizzy: In addition to his usual slate of beatmaking and live gigs–as well as a nine-week Harvard Business School program–the superproducer has taken a job as Bacardi’s global creative director. (Photo: Jamel Toppin)
Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean is strolling down a hallway adorned with paintings by Warhol, Hirst and Basquiat in his New Jersey mansion—which he and wife Alicia Keys bought from Eddie Murphy for $15 million in 2012—when a call comes in from “Mike Bacardi.” At least, that’s what it says on the screen of Swizz’s iPhone as he greets the caller and puts him on speaker.
“This is the president,” says the voice. “Who would you like to declare war on?”
“Diageo !” replies Swizz, without hesitation. Both of them immediately erupt into the sort of deep, guttural laughter shared only by old friends. They’re well on their way to that sort of relationship: “Mike Bacardi” is Mike Dolan, the CEO of Bacardi who recently hired Swizz as the company’s global creative director, a role in which he’ll manage a portfolio of some 200 brands, including Dewar’s Scotch, Grey Goose vodka and the flagship Bacardi rum.
A Grammy-winner once dubbed “the best rap producer of all time” by Kanye West, Swizz has penned beats for Whitney Houston and Jay Z, developed partnerships with brands including Reebok and Lotus, and regularly gets six-figure checks to perform as a rapper or DJ—part of the reason he raked in $10.5 million this year, good for the No. 19 spot on our Hip-Hop Cash Kings list
But the Bacardi gig could be his most lucrative yet. The multi-year, multimillion-dollar, incentive-laden pact includes a share of Bacardi’s profits (the privately-held company boasts annual revenue in excess of $5 billion). In exchange, Bacardi gets to bring Swizz’s cultural clout into its fold—along with his unorthodox approach to marketing.
"We’re challenging all of our brands to get creative and get disruptive,” he says, now settling onto a graffiti-covered Eames chair beneath the pride and joy of his Dean Collection: a 40-foot-tall wood sculpture by the artist Kaws. “Let’s not just pay people to hold drinks in their hands. Let’s not just pay people to just stand in the poster with the drink.”
Instead, Swizz believes in doing activations as part of “immersive experiences” like his No Commission art fair or, say, Beijing Fashion Week. He and Dolan traveled to Asia to lay the groundwork for such a venture during his first week on the job this July, visiting the China National Art Fund, among other groups. They quickly bonded over a shared vision for the future of Bacardi.
“We have got to rip up the old game plan,” says Dolan. “It’s changing so rapidly that you really have to have your finger on the pulse of what’s going on in culture. Really, that’s where the partnership with Swizz comes in… This is [a] guy who spans across a number of different platforms and verticals, so not only music, but fashion and art, culinary and all of these are verticals that are very, very important to the consumers that we are trying to reach and talk to.”
Swizz, now 37 years old, has been talking to those consumers for more than two decades. He grew up in the Bronx, the son of a black Muslim father and a Christian mother of Puerto Rican descent. He got his start producing for artists at his uncles’ Yonkers-based record label, quickly scoring a smash with DMX’s “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem WLP +%.” The bombastic ballad propelled the rapper’s debut album, It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, to quadruple-platinum status within a year and a half of its release.
“He’s always got some crazy knocking beat,” DMX told me in 2008, when I first profiled Swizz for FORBES. “You know it’s Swizzy when it’s bouncing.”
Swizz soon started producing for other acts from Beyoncé to 50 Cent and launched his own record label. In 2007, he released his solo debut, One Man Band Man, with guest appearances from fellow Cash Kings Snoop Dogg and Lil Wayne. He has yet to release a formal follow-up, likely because he found so many other ways to occupy his time. In addition to continuing his production work, the last several years have seen Swizz land deals with Lotus, Reebok and headphone company Monster (he married Keys in 2010 and the couple now have two children; Swizz has two other children from his previous marriage and a fifth from a different liaison).
Most recently, Swizz was accepted into Harvard Business School’s OPM extension program (Owners, Presidents, Management). The nine-week on-campus course is only open to executives at companies with annual sales of at least $10 million, and all candidates must hold “a significant equity stake in their firms” (Swizz qualified through his deal with Monster). Graduates are granted HBS alumni status.
“They all, you know, fly their planes to class—they’re all people that own oil companies,” says Swizz of his classmates. “Most of the people already have an MBA and they’re already billionaires and hundred-millionaires. They’re very successful businessmen. What this class does is it allows you to continue the growth of that business.”
Swizz first linked up with Bacardi during his last “winter break” from OPM, which is taught in three chunks of three weeks each. He was putting together the first edition of No Commission—in his art fair, creators keep 100% of the proceeds of sales of their work—when he got a call from someone at Bacardi offering to sponsor the event.
After a few rounds of negotiation, which included Swizz pushing back on the use of Bacardi logos at the event, the liquor giant came on as a sponsor for No Commission’s debut at Miami’s Art Basel extravaganza. Swizz brought his disparate worlds together, with DMX and Kehinde Wiley mingling under the same roof.
Shortly thereafter, Swizz received a call from Dolan, who’d been immensely impressed with No Commission—and its founder.
“This is the type of way that we want to move the company,” Dolan told him. “We’re not sponsoring something just for logos. We actually [want to be] contributing to culture.”
“He started talking to me in that way,” Swizz recalls, “And I was like, ‘Wow.’ I said, ‘I wasn’t thinking about doing another corporate situation like that.’ He was like, ‘Hey, I think it’d be great that we team up, and activate not only No Commission, but whatever you want to do on the creative front on the global scale … and see how we can insert this type of creativity that you have, in the overall company.”
Swizz’s deal marks the latest step in the evolution of the monetization of fame. The celebrities of yesteryear were paid to put their names on products. Then 50 Cent changed the game in the early 2000s by taking equity in Vitaminwater as an endorsement fee for creating his Formula 50 drink—and netted some $100 million when the company’s parent sold to Coca-Cola for $4.1 billion in 2007. Dr. Dre, Diddy and Jay Z followed, earning nearly $2 billion together over the past decade.
Now Swizz is leveraging his creativity and credibility as a tastemaker to influence a privately-held beverage giant to contribute to the culture he loves. In August, Bacardi and Swizz partnered to launch another No Commission event, this time in the Bronx.
“We did almost a half a billion [social media] impressions,” he says. “We didn’t tell anybody to hold up no drinks, but everybody was hashtagging Bacardi because they knew it was a part of the discovery. We didn’t have to force anything.”
That’s music to Dolan’s ears—and ammunition against naysayers.
“It’s not some sort of celebrity arrangement,” says Dolan. “The fact that he is [a] celebrity is really almost irrelevant. We’ve done this because of him and who he is. As I said to him at the very beginning of this, ‘I really want your brain.’”
Diageo, you’re on notice.
One Man Brand Man: Inside Swizz Beatz's Bacardi Bonanza
FORBES STAFF
I cover the business of music, media & entertainment.
This story appears in the October 4, 2016 issue of Forbes. Subscribe
Busy Swizzy: In addition to his usual slate of beatmaking and live gigs–as well as a nine-week Harvard Business School program–the superproducer has taken a job as Bacardi’s global creative director. (Photo: Jamel Toppin)
Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean is strolling down a hallway adorned with paintings by Warhol, Hirst and Basquiat in his New Jersey mansion—which he and wife Alicia Keys bought from Eddie Murphy for $15 million in 2012—when a call comes in from “Mike Bacardi.” At least, that’s what it says on the screen of Swizz’s iPhone as he greets the caller and puts him on speaker.
“This is the president,” says the voice. “Who would you like to declare war on?”
“Diageo !” replies Swizz, without hesitation. Both of them immediately erupt into the sort of deep, guttural laughter shared only by old friends. They’re well on their way to that sort of relationship: “Mike Bacardi” is Mike Dolan, the CEO of Bacardi who recently hired Swizz as the company’s global creative director, a role in which he’ll manage a portfolio of some 200 brands, including Dewar’s Scotch, Grey Goose vodka and the flagship Bacardi rum.
A Grammy-winner once dubbed “the best rap producer of all time” by Kanye West, Swizz has penned beats for Whitney Houston and Jay Z, developed partnerships with brands including Reebok and Lotus, and regularly gets six-figure checks to perform as a rapper or DJ—part of the reason he raked in $10.5 million this year, good for the No. 19 spot on our Hip-Hop Cash Kings list
But the Bacardi gig could be his most lucrative yet. The multi-year, multimillion-dollar, incentive-laden pact includes a share of Bacardi’s profits (the privately-held company boasts annual revenue in excess of $5 billion). In exchange, Bacardi gets to bring Swizz’s cultural clout into its fold—along with his unorthodox approach to marketing.
"We’re challenging all of our brands to get creative and get disruptive,” he says, now settling onto a graffiti-covered Eames chair beneath the pride and joy of his Dean Collection: a 40-foot-tall wood sculpture by the artist Kaws. “Let’s not just pay people to hold drinks in their hands. Let’s not just pay people to just stand in the poster with the drink.”
Instead, Swizz believes in doing activations as part of “immersive experiences” like his No Commission art fair or, say, Beijing Fashion Week. He and Dolan traveled to Asia to lay the groundwork for such a venture during his first week on the job this July, visiting the China National Art Fund, among other groups. They quickly bonded over a shared vision for the future of Bacardi.
“We have got to rip up the old game plan,” says Dolan. “It’s changing so rapidly that you really have to have your finger on the pulse of what’s going on in culture. Really, that’s where the partnership with Swizz comes in… This is [a] guy who spans across a number of different platforms and verticals, so not only music, but fashion and art, culinary and all of these are verticals that are very, very important to the consumers that we are trying to reach and talk to.”
Swizz, now 37 years old, has been talking to those consumers for more than two decades. He grew up in the Bronx, the son of a black Muslim father and a Christian mother of Puerto Rican descent. He got his start producing for artists at his uncles’ Yonkers-based record label, quickly scoring a smash with DMX’s “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem WLP +%.” The bombastic ballad propelled the rapper’s debut album, It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, to quadruple-platinum status within a year and a half of its release.
“He’s always got some crazy knocking beat,” DMX told me in 2008, when I first profiled Swizz for FORBES. “You know it’s Swizzy when it’s bouncing.”
Swizz soon started producing for other acts from Beyoncé to 50 Cent and launched his own record label. In 2007, he released his solo debut, One Man Band Man, with guest appearances from fellow Cash Kings Snoop Dogg and Lil Wayne. He has yet to release a formal follow-up, likely because he found so many other ways to occupy his time. In addition to continuing his production work, the last several years have seen Swizz land deals with Lotus, Reebok and headphone company Monster (he married Keys in 2010 and the couple now have two children; Swizz has two other children from his previous marriage and a fifth from a different liaison).
Most recently, Swizz was accepted into Harvard Business School’s OPM extension program (Owners, Presidents, Management). The nine-week on-campus course is only open to executives at companies with annual sales of at least $10 million, and all candidates must hold “a significant equity stake in their firms” (Swizz qualified through his deal with Monster). Graduates are granted HBS alumni status.
“They all, you know, fly their planes to class—they’re all people that own oil companies,” says Swizz of his classmates. “Most of the people already have an MBA and they’re already billionaires and hundred-millionaires. They’re very successful businessmen. What this class does is it allows you to continue the growth of that business.”
Swizz first linked up with Bacardi during his last “winter break” from OPM, which is taught in three chunks of three weeks each. He was putting together the first edition of No Commission—in his art fair, creators keep 100% of the proceeds of sales of their work—when he got a call from someone at Bacardi offering to sponsor the event.
After a few rounds of negotiation, which included Swizz pushing back on the use of Bacardi logos at the event, the liquor giant came on as a sponsor for No Commission’s debut at Miami’s Art Basel extravaganza. Swizz brought his disparate worlds together, with DMX and Kehinde Wiley mingling under the same roof.
Shortly thereafter, Swizz received a call from Dolan, who’d been immensely impressed with No Commission—and its founder.
“This is the type of way that we want to move the company,” Dolan told him. “We’re not sponsoring something just for logos. We actually [want to be] contributing to culture.”
“He started talking to me in that way,” Swizz recalls, “And I was like, ‘Wow.’ I said, ‘I wasn’t thinking about doing another corporate situation like that.’ He was like, ‘Hey, I think it’d be great that we team up, and activate not only No Commission, but whatever you want to do on the creative front on the global scale … and see how we can insert this type of creativity that you have, in the overall company.”
Swizz’s deal marks the latest step in the evolution of the monetization of fame. The celebrities of yesteryear were paid to put their names on products. Then 50 Cent changed the game in the early 2000s by taking equity in Vitaminwater as an endorsement fee for creating his Formula 50 drink—and netted some $100 million when the company’s parent sold to Coca-Cola for $4.1 billion in 2007. Dr. Dre, Diddy and Jay Z followed, earning nearly $2 billion together over the past decade.
Now Swizz is leveraging his creativity and credibility as a tastemaker to influence a privately-held beverage giant to contribute to the culture he loves. In August, Bacardi and Swizz partnered to launch another No Commission event, this time in the Bronx.
“We did almost a half a billion [social media] impressions,” he says. “We didn’t tell anybody to hold up no drinks, but everybody was hashtagging Bacardi because they knew it was a part of the discovery. We didn’t have to force anything.”
That’s music to Dolan’s ears—and ammunition against naysayers.
“It’s not some sort of celebrity arrangement,” says Dolan. “The fact that he is [a] celebrity is really almost irrelevant. We’ve done this because of him and who he is. As I said to him at the very beginning of this, ‘I really want your brain.’”
Diageo, you’re on notice.
One Man Brand Man: Inside Swizz Beatz's Bacardi Bonanza
