flâneur

David Senra: Steve Stoute, UnitedMasters

davidsenra.com · 17,291 words · saved by 1 readers

Steve Stoute is the founder of Translation, the marketing company behind some of the most iconic brand work of the past 25 years, and UnitedMasters, the independent music distribution platform he launched in 2017. Stoute grew up in Queens in the 1980s, where hip-hop was his entire world. He worked his way into the music business, eventually managing Nas and becoming an executive at Sony and then Interscope under Jimmy Iovine. In 1999, at 29, he walked away from a $2 million salary to take a $150,000 job at the Arnell Group — trading income for education. He was there to learn the advertising business from the inside out. What he saw clearly was that Madison Avenue was using an old playbook, failing to see that artists were shaping fashion and other cultural trends. Stoute brokered Jay-Z's S. Carter shoe deal with Reebok — the first sneaker deal for a non-athlete — helped launch McDonald's "I'm Lovin' It" campaign, and came within one meeting of signing LeBron James. He watched an 18-year-old LeBron walk away from a $10 million signing bonus to bet on himself. It confirmed everything Stoute believed: the world had already changed, and the old gatekeepers just hadn't caught up yet

David Senra: Dude, I've been a fan of you for over 20 years, because I grew up listening to hip-hop, and everybody in hip-hop knows who you are, so I'm very excited to have a conversation with you. Steve Stoute: Mm-hmm. Steve Stoute: Yeah. David Senra: One of the fascinating things that Jimmy Iovine told me about you was you made a very unusual decision coming out of a record label. Like, you could've started your own record label, and you said, "No, I'm not going to start a record label. I'm going to go full-on into advertising and marketing." Can you tell me about that? Steve Stoute: It…

related reading