How Hip-Hop Superstar Travis Scott Has Become Corporate America’s Brand Whisperer
Three years ago, Scott made the 30 Under 30 based on his music credentials. Now he’s helping major companies rethink their brands—and changing how celebrities and corporations interact.
The afternoon after Election Day, Travis Scott pilots his Lamborghini SUV, a rolling hotbox, down Melrose Avenue, the thudding beats of his friend, fellow rapper Don Toliver, keeping him awake and aware.
Like the rest of America, he’s been following the vote totals (“Looks like Biden, right?”), and political discord seems everywhere, his Los Angeles streetscape largely boarded up. Hip-hop’s lyrical currency is metaphor, and Scott can’t help but notice the sight. “They’ve got to have understanding,” he says of those anticipating civil unrest that never came. “It’s bigger than these stores.”
Arriving at a recording studio, Scott seeks to clear his mind before getting to work. He grabs a basketball to avail himself of the hoop in the parking lot, sparks yet another blunt (a regular activity for him) and eventually pulls out a glass beer bottle filled with a clear liquid.
“Tell me what you think,” he says, handing it over. According to the plain white label affixed to the bottle, it’s a preliminary batch of Cacti, a forthcoming—and until now, top-secret—hard seltzer he’s been working on with AB InBev, the world’s largest brewer. This one’s purportedly strawberry; it tastes generally crisp and fruity. “We’ve got other flavors,” Scott says. “Like lime. I was actually just trying it. I kinda like it.”
Hey, what’s not to like when you’re Travis Scott? At 28, he’s arguably the most vital rapper in the world. Since making the Forbes 30 Under 30 three years ago, he has made us look smart, earning more than $100 million through chart-topping singles (“Sicko Mode”), a multiplatinum album (Astroworld) and the top-grossing rap tour in 2019. The latter is key: Scott is a famously raucous MC. Once he takes the stage, fans are “ragers” (his term), and he is “La Flame” (ditto), the spark that sets it all off.
What’s far more interesting, though, is how La Flame lights up the business world. For decades, celebrities have translated their renown into remunerative gigs as corporate shills. Then, for much of this century, fame instead yielded entrepreneurial opportunities far more lucrative than typical endorsements. Scott, to successful effect, has pursued a hybrid model in which he’s working with and within big brands, but in ways where he’s telling them what to do or say, rather than the reverse. “Those guys are allowing us to really dive in and create our own world,” he says.
TRAVIS SCOTT BY JAMEL TOPPIN FOR FORBES
Scott’s endorsement roster is formidable, ranging from brands that revel in their appeal to youth (PlayStation, Epic Games) to staid old brands that need to recapture it (General Mills, McDonald’s). Either way, he’s not interested solely in spiffed-up TV ads. For Epic, he conceived a new type of performance art, playing a live concert within Fortnite that drew 12 million viewers. For McDonald’s, he developed a Scott-branded menu item, one so popular the restaurant giant suffered a rare calamity: supply shortages. Not that the company minded much. “Travis is a cultural icon,” says Jennifer Healan, vice president of U.S. marketing for McDonald’s.
“The larger story here is that brands historically have told celebrities how to say their message. I think it’s very clear that Travis Scott and his team have gotten through to these brands that they have a very clear aesthetic, messaging and strategy,” says Blake Robbins, a partner at Ludlow Ventures, a Detroit venture capital firm that focuses on the overlap of consumer goods, media and gaming. “If he can make McDonald’s cool—the thing of pop culture right now—that’s the ultimate sign he’s made it.”
Before he was Travis Scott, the guy who could turn flash-frozen beef patties into zeitgeist fodder, he was Jacques Webster II, who usually went by “Jack” or “Junior.” He grew up near one of America’s most dynamic cities—in Missouri City, Texas, just outside Houston—but spent most of his childhood trying to escape to the bright lights of Los Angeles. To accomplish this, he decided, he needed “to use [my] imagination to the max. Like, the max.” His father, an amateur musician, taught him to play drums. (His Uncle Travis, a musician, served as the source of his eventual stage name.) Scott first put those lessons to work in high school, performing in a string of rap groups with friends. While his dad tried to pursue music full time, his mother kept things together with a job at an AT&T store. Scott’s smarts got him to the University of Texas at San Antonio, but his ambition, to his mom’s chagrin, drove him to drop out. L.A. would become home at last.
On StockX, a site for reselling luxury clothes, Scott’s kicks now sell for up to $22,500. “For the next generation of consumer, he has tremendous influence,” says StockX CEO Scott Cutler.
Scott’s big break came via a cold email to music manager Anthony Kilhoffer. “I can usually tell an artist just from the way they write,” Kilhoffer says. “[Scott’s] intelligence level is super-high.” After listening to a few of his sample tracks, Kilhoffer arranged a production gig for Scott at Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music. Scott learned by working on West’s Yeezus and Jay-Z’s Magna Carta . . . Holy Grail, focusing all the while on one thing: his own solo career.
In 2015, he released his first record, Rodeo, which peaked at No. 2 on Billboard’s top-albums chart and eventually went platinum. At the time, Scott didn’t have the clout to release Rodeo as he had envisioned: in the toy aisle, on a USB drive, packaged with a Travis Scott action figure. “I had to settle for a jewel case,” he says, still apparently sulking. A year later, he pumped out another LP, Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight. It too rose to the top of the Billboard chart and went platinum.
TRAVIS SCOTT BY JAMEL TOPPIN FOR FORBES
As he toured to promote these albums, his performances garnered a reputation for their manic mosh pits, a febrile atmosphere Scott stoked from the stage. One night at a show in Arkansas, this won him the attention of the cops, who arrested him and charged him with inciting a riot (he later pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct). More consequently, his antics brought him into the Kardashian omniverse, which mints fame and money nearly in lockstep. According to Rolling Stone, Scott’s performance at Coachella in 2017 commanded the attention and affection of Kylie Jenner, who at the time was leveraging her derivative fame into a marketing-driven cosmetics empire. She and Scott already had plenty of connections—among them the fact that Jenner’s sister, Kim Kardashian, had married Scott’s mentor, Kayne West, three years earlier. Within days of their first meeting, Jenner reportedly joined Scott on the road. The following February, their daughter, Stormi, was born. And Scott’s star wattage increased exponentially with his move under the Kylie-Kim-Kanye big top.
Scott won’t talk about Jenner or her extended clan. (He hasn’t always been shy about the subject. In “Sicko Mode,” he rhapsodizes about Jenner’s success—and a profile we wrote about her: “Baby mama cover Forbes, got these other bytches shook.”) The couple’s status is a mystery, though Jenner has posted pictures of herself, Scott and Stormi on Instagram over the past few months. No matter: The Kardashian fame machine had bestowed on him enough juice to permit him to enact his creative vision. In 2018, that meant bundling concert tickets, merchandise and a new album. Astroworld hit No. 1 upon its debut, with Scott’s marketing strategy turning heads. Its success gave him the confidence, with regard to corporate partnerships, to attempt an even more radical extension of his brand.
Scott’s first major move was a traditional go-to for both rap superstars and Kardashian family paramours: shoes. Kanye West was well on his way to a billion-dollar score, not from music but his Yeezy sneaker collaboration with Adidas. Scott, in turn, began working with Nike and its Air Jordan line on Cactus Jack, a sub-brand he created. Like West, Scott does much of the design work himself. Not so much as an eyelet gets altered without his approval.
Scott’s shoes have quickly become grails—quest-worthy must-haves for sneakerheads. On StockX, a site for reselling luxury clothes, Scott’s kicks now outperform even Yeezys, albeit at a far smaller volume. A pair of Travis Scott Nikes there regularly move for 400% of retail compared to the 60% markup Yeezys typically fetch. (Both cost around $200 a pair at retail.) One recent afternoon, StockX had a listing for a bright-blue pair of Travis Scott x Air Jordan 4 Retros for $10,000. A purple pair carried a $22,500 price tag. “For the next generation of consumer, he has tremendous influence,” says StockX CEO Scott Cutler. “He’s advanced into the stratosphere within a few short years.”
Travis Scott performed a concert within "Fornite" last April. The online video game hosted another such event with rapper J Balvin on Halloween, while rival Roblox held one with Lil Nas X in November.
TRAVIS SCOTT FORTNITE BY EPIC GAMES
Scott probably earns about $10 million a year or so from his Nike deal, but that figure belies its true worth. His shoes’ popularity has granted him tastemaker status. That, in turn, has led to more deals—and, most significantly, the standing to change the rules of celebrity sponsorships.
Take his partnership with Epic’s Fortnite. Haven’t ever led an assault on the Agency or razed storefronts on Retail Row? Then think of Fortnite as akin to the world of The Matrix. In the immersive online experience, Fortnite players customize their appearance and do battle across an island as competitors zap in and out of the game. Buoyed by his success as a live act, Scott pushed for a partnership in which he’d perform inside Epic’s virtual world.
He and Epic spent months going back and forth, the company sending emissaries to consult Scott at his Hollywood studio. (He did not visit Epic’s headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina.) By the end, they’d worked out a four-song, nine-minute set and chose an attention-grabbing moment to stage it: in April, just as the coronavirus was making clear that any sort of live event was out of the question for the foreseeable future.
In the performance, a digitally rendered Scott avatar stands 1,000 times taller than the players in the game, his bare-chested body shaped to Scott’s exacting specifications, down to the Cactus Jack x Nikes on its parking garage-size feet. At the beginning, the colossus falls from the sky, bringing play to a halt—much as an immense extraterrestrial visitor dropping to Earth might briefly pause normal activity here. The performance ends with the debut of “The Scotts,” a new single recorded with Kid Cudi. “It was an opportunity to go to the max, to create a world that permits won’t let you do, fire marshals won’t let you do, building codes won’t let you do,” Scott says. “To have unlimited fun.”
Scott met McDonald’s supersize requirements for pursuing a celebrity partnership: He had an enormous cultural following and an authentic love for the fast-food restaurant’s grub.
The implications of his Fortnite concert quickly became evident. For Epic, it proved that the company was well on track to becoming more than just a maker of video games. For Scott and, really, the entire music industry, it laid a path to a new revenue stream. Scott grossed roughly $20 million for it including merchandise sales, according to a source, much more than what his concerts typically gross. It showed that a virtual performance, once dismissed as a gimmick, could be as much an act of artistry as an old-fashioned live show. And it drove home the benefit of a closer relationship between brand and celebrity. “The landscape is changing,” says Epic’s Phil Rampulla, its head of brand. “You’ve got to bring something that’s awesome. Otherwise it’s ‘That’s just an ad.’ And those things are just getting glossed over.”
Three years ago, Scott made the 30 Under 30 based on his music credentials. Now he’s helping major companies rethink their brands—and changing how celebrities and corporations interact.
The afternoon after Election Day, Travis Scott pilots his Lamborghini SUV, a rolling hotbox, down Melrose Avenue, the thudding beats of his friend, fellow rapper Don Toliver, keeping him awake and aware.
Like the rest of America, he’s been following the vote totals (“Looks like Biden, right?”), and political discord seems everywhere, his Los Angeles streetscape largely boarded up. Hip-hop’s lyrical currency is metaphor, and Scott can’t help but notice the sight. “They’ve got to have understanding,” he says of those anticipating civil unrest that never came. “It’s bigger than these stores.”
Arriving at a recording studio, Scott seeks to clear his mind before getting to work. He grabs a basketball to avail himself of the hoop in the parking lot, sparks yet another blunt (a regular activity for him) and eventually pulls out a glass beer bottle filled with a clear liquid.
“Tell me what you think,” he says, handing it over. According to the plain white label affixed to the bottle, it’s a preliminary batch of Cacti, a forthcoming—and until now, top-secret—hard seltzer he’s been working on with AB InBev, the world’s largest brewer. This one’s purportedly strawberry; it tastes generally crisp and fruity. “We’ve got other flavors,” Scott says. “Like lime. I was actually just trying it. I kinda like it.”
Hey, what’s not to like when you’re Travis Scott? At 28, he’s arguably the most vital rapper in the world. Since making the Forbes 30 Under 30 three years ago, he has made us look smart, earning more than $100 million through chart-topping singles (“Sicko Mode”), a multiplatinum album (Astroworld) and the top-grossing rap tour in 2019. The latter is key: Scott is a famously raucous MC. Once he takes the stage, fans are “ragers” (his term), and he is “La Flame” (ditto), the spark that sets it all off.
What’s far more interesting, though, is how La Flame lights up the business world. For decades, celebrities have translated their renown into remunerative gigs as corporate shills. Then, for much of this century, fame instead yielded entrepreneurial opportunities far more lucrative than typical endorsements. Scott, to successful effect, has pursued a hybrid model in which he’s working with and within big brands, but in ways where he’s telling them what to do or say, rather than the reverse. “Those guys are allowing us to really dive in and create our own world,” he says.
TRAVIS SCOTT BY JAMEL TOPPIN FOR FORBES
Scott’s endorsement roster is formidable, ranging from brands that revel in their appeal to youth (PlayStation, Epic Games) to staid old brands that need to recapture it (General Mills, McDonald’s). Either way, he’s not interested solely in spiffed-up TV ads. For Epic, he conceived a new type of performance art, playing a live concert within Fortnite that drew 12 million viewers. For McDonald’s, he developed a Scott-branded menu item, one so popular the restaurant giant suffered a rare calamity: supply shortages. Not that the company minded much. “Travis is a cultural icon,” says Jennifer Healan, vice president of U.S. marketing for McDonald’s.
“The larger story here is that brands historically have told celebrities how to say their message. I think it’s very clear that Travis Scott and his team have gotten through to these brands that they have a very clear aesthetic, messaging and strategy,” says Blake Robbins, a partner at Ludlow Ventures, a Detroit venture capital firm that focuses on the overlap of consumer goods, media and gaming. “If he can make McDonald’s cool—the thing of pop culture right now—that’s the ultimate sign he’s made it.”
Before he was Travis Scott, the guy who could turn flash-frozen beef patties into zeitgeist fodder, he was Jacques Webster II, who usually went by “Jack” or “Junior.” He grew up near one of America’s most dynamic cities—in Missouri City, Texas, just outside Houston—but spent most of his childhood trying to escape to the bright lights of Los Angeles. To accomplish this, he decided, he needed “to use [my] imagination to the max. Like, the max.” His father, an amateur musician, taught him to play drums. (His Uncle Travis, a musician, served as the source of his eventual stage name.) Scott first put those lessons to work in high school, performing in a string of rap groups with friends. While his dad tried to pursue music full time, his mother kept things together with a job at an AT&T store. Scott’s smarts got him to the University of Texas at San Antonio, but his ambition, to his mom’s chagrin, drove him to drop out. L.A. would become home at last.
On StockX, a site for reselling luxury clothes, Scott’s kicks now sell for up to $22,500. “For the next generation of consumer, he has tremendous influence,” says StockX CEO Scott Cutler.
Scott’s big break came via a cold email to music manager Anthony Kilhoffer. “I can usually tell an artist just from the way they write,” Kilhoffer says. “[Scott’s] intelligence level is super-high.” After listening to a few of his sample tracks, Kilhoffer arranged a production gig for Scott at Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music. Scott learned by working on West’s Yeezus and Jay-Z’s Magna Carta . . . Holy Grail, focusing all the while on one thing: his own solo career.
In 2015, he released his first record, Rodeo, which peaked at No. 2 on Billboard’s top-albums chart and eventually went platinum. At the time, Scott didn’t have the clout to release Rodeo as he had envisioned: in the toy aisle, on a USB drive, packaged with a Travis Scott action figure. “I had to settle for a jewel case,” he says, still apparently sulking. A year later, he pumped out another LP, Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight. It too rose to the top of the Billboard chart and went platinum.
TRAVIS SCOTT BY JAMEL TOPPIN FOR FORBES
As he toured to promote these albums, his performances garnered a reputation for their manic mosh pits, a febrile atmosphere Scott stoked from the stage. One night at a show in Arkansas, this won him the attention of the cops, who arrested him and charged him with inciting a riot (he later pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct). More consequently, his antics brought him into the Kardashian omniverse, which mints fame and money nearly in lockstep. According to Rolling Stone, Scott’s performance at Coachella in 2017 commanded the attention and affection of Kylie Jenner, who at the time was leveraging her derivative fame into a marketing-driven cosmetics empire. She and Scott already had plenty of connections—among them the fact that Jenner’s sister, Kim Kardashian, had married Scott’s mentor, Kayne West, three years earlier. Within days of their first meeting, Jenner reportedly joined Scott on the road. The following February, their daughter, Stormi, was born. And Scott’s star wattage increased exponentially with his move under the Kylie-Kim-Kanye big top.
Scott won’t talk about Jenner or her extended clan. (He hasn’t always been shy about the subject. In “Sicko Mode,” he rhapsodizes about Jenner’s success—and a profile we wrote about her: “Baby mama cover Forbes, got these other bytches shook.”) The couple’s status is a mystery, though Jenner has posted pictures of herself, Scott and Stormi on Instagram over the past few months. No matter: The Kardashian fame machine had bestowed on him enough juice to permit him to enact his creative vision. In 2018, that meant bundling concert tickets, merchandise and a new album. Astroworld hit No. 1 upon its debut, with Scott’s marketing strategy turning heads. Its success gave him the confidence, with regard to corporate partnerships, to attempt an even more radical extension of his brand.
Scott’s first major move was a traditional go-to for both rap superstars and Kardashian family paramours: shoes. Kanye West was well on his way to a billion-dollar score, not from music but his Yeezy sneaker collaboration with Adidas. Scott, in turn, began working with Nike and its Air Jordan line on Cactus Jack, a sub-brand he created. Like West, Scott does much of the design work himself. Not so much as an eyelet gets altered without his approval.
Scott’s shoes have quickly become grails—quest-worthy must-haves for sneakerheads. On StockX, a site for reselling luxury clothes, Scott’s kicks now outperform even Yeezys, albeit at a far smaller volume. A pair of Travis Scott Nikes there regularly move for 400% of retail compared to the 60% markup Yeezys typically fetch. (Both cost around $200 a pair at retail.) One recent afternoon, StockX had a listing for a bright-blue pair of Travis Scott x Air Jordan 4 Retros for $10,000. A purple pair carried a $22,500 price tag. “For the next generation of consumer, he has tremendous influence,” says StockX CEO Scott Cutler. “He’s advanced into the stratosphere within a few short years.”
Travis Scott performed a concert within "Fornite" last April. The online video game hosted another such event with rapper J Balvin on Halloween, while rival Roblox held one with Lil Nas X in November.
TRAVIS SCOTT FORTNITE BY EPIC GAMES
Scott probably earns about $10 million a year or so from his Nike deal, but that figure belies its true worth. His shoes’ popularity has granted him tastemaker status. That, in turn, has led to more deals—and, most significantly, the standing to change the rules of celebrity sponsorships.
Take his partnership with Epic’s Fortnite. Haven’t ever led an assault on the Agency or razed storefronts on Retail Row? Then think of Fortnite as akin to the world of The Matrix. In the immersive online experience, Fortnite players customize their appearance and do battle across an island as competitors zap in and out of the game. Buoyed by his success as a live act, Scott pushed for a partnership in which he’d perform inside Epic’s virtual world.
He and Epic spent months going back and forth, the company sending emissaries to consult Scott at his Hollywood studio. (He did not visit Epic’s headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina.) By the end, they’d worked out a four-song, nine-minute set and chose an attention-grabbing moment to stage it: in April, just as the coronavirus was making clear that any sort of live event was out of the question for the foreseeable future.
In the performance, a digitally rendered Scott avatar stands 1,000 times taller than the players in the game, his bare-chested body shaped to Scott’s exacting specifications, down to the Cactus Jack x Nikes on its parking garage-size feet. At the beginning, the colossus falls from the sky, bringing play to a halt—much as an immense extraterrestrial visitor dropping to Earth might briefly pause normal activity here. The performance ends with the debut of “The Scotts,” a new single recorded with Kid Cudi. “It was an opportunity to go to the max, to create a world that permits won’t let you do, fire marshals won’t let you do, building codes won’t let you do,” Scott says. “To have unlimited fun.”
Scott met McDonald’s supersize requirements for pursuing a celebrity partnership: He had an enormous cultural following and an authentic love for the fast-food restaurant’s grub.
The implications of his Fortnite concert quickly became evident. For Epic, it proved that the company was well on track to becoming more than just a maker of video games. For Scott and, really, the entire music industry, it laid a path to a new revenue stream. Scott grossed roughly $20 million for it including merchandise sales, according to a source, much more than what his concerts typically gross. It showed that a virtual performance, once dismissed as a gimmick, could be as much an act of artistry as an old-fashioned live show. And it drove home the benefit of a closer relationship between brand and celebrity. “The landscape is changing,” says Epic’s Phil Rampulla, its head of brand. “You’ve got to bring something that’s awesome. Otherwise it’s ‘That’s just an ad.’ And those things are just getting glossed over.”
