50 Cent Scored Half a Billion Dollars – How 50 Made a Killing Off Water

Posted On Jul 21, 2019 By admin With Comments Off

In” The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop ,” generator Dan Charnas marks how rap ripened from its obscure seeds in the ghettos of 1970 s New York to its pinnacle as the world’s predominant youth pop culture and a multibillion-dollar industry.

The event that epitomized just how far hip-hop had come was the headline-grabbing partnership between the rapper 50 Cent and the upstart liquor fellowship Glaceau, the maker of VitaminWater. It may well have been the biggest deal in hip-hop history, propelling 50 Cent’s personal net worth toward a half-billion dollars.

In this excerpt, Charnas outlines how it happened.

By the summer of 2003, 50 Cent’s debut recording,” Get Rich or Die Tryin ‘,” had sold more than 5 million copies, and he was easily on his acces to becoming a multimillionaire on these sales alone.

Nonetheless, the rapper from Queens, who was born Curtis Jackson and have commenced his career on the honour of being fire nine durations( a bullet was still lodged in his tongue ), wasn’t material to remain a recording artist.

His young manager, Chris Lighty, himself a Bronx street teenager turned financier, was well-positioned to exploit 50′ s stardom by creating multiple income streams. Lighty had come out of the Def Jam fold and overseen such aces as Missy Elliott and LL Cool J.

With Lighty, 50 Cent appointed the “G-Unit” brand, including a record company, a attire busines, and a sneaker deal with Reebok’s RBK line. The G-Unit Clothing Company was a joint-venture deal, with hip-hop-influenced decorator Marc Ecko fronting the money, handling the manufacturing and distribution, and separating the profits fifty-fifty with 50.

At his Violator management company( mentioned after a bumpy gang that Lighty moved with as a kid ), Lighty facilitated explorer the implementation of its 900 lists for his artists.

Over a decade last-minute, he negotiated a different kind of phone deal: 50 Cent cellular ringtones to be sold for up to $ 2.99 per download. Lighty inked other agreements, very: a video game and a biopic with MTV Films and Paramount Image. When the agency that represented Lighty, CAA, balked at representing a rapper so closely associated with violence, Lighty locked a deal with an enthusiastic William Morris.

One of Lighty’s business relationships was Rohan Oza, a marketing executive who has just moved from Coca-Cola to a small Queens, N.Y ., refreshment companionship announced Glaceau. Oza considered himself not a symbol administrator, but a symbol messiah. He believes that passionate propagandizing of his products could transcend costly corporate ad campaigns.

Oza’s Vitamin Water brand was doing well at more than $ 100 million in marketings, second only to Pepsi’s Propel brand in the $245 million “enhanced-water” marketplace. He known how take them out.

Stealing a sheet from the hip-hop street-team and word-of-mouth ethos, Oza created a sail of 10″ Glaceau Vitamin Water Tasting Vehicles ,” staffed by 200 “hydrologists,” to cross the country and spread the gospel of Vitamin Water’s growing thread. But hydrologists working one-on-one with buyers wouldn’t break Vitamin Water out of the gourmet-deli and new-age-health-food market.

Oza needed more than brand messiahs to convert individuals. He needed brand representatives to influence millions. That’s when Oza received a commercial for RBK sneakers in which Lighty, preferably sneakily, had his artist, 50 Cent, chug a bottle of Vitamin Water.

In a phone call soon thereafter, Lighty told Oza that he wanted to find a way to work together to do Vitamin Water gigantic. It turned out that 50 Cent had a true love of the product. He had grown up around alcoholics, so he didn’t drink. Instead, he spent hours a day working out and feed healthy. Like Oza who got tolerated with imbibe the recommended eight glasses of grassland ocean a date, 50 had determined Vitamin Water a more delightful practice to hydrate.

On Oza’s desk in his New York office, at that unusually moment, was a test bottle of a new Vitamin Water spice, recently formulated by Glaceau’s head of product development, Carol Dollard, who had worked hard to get more vitamins and nutrients into their sips- much more than the 2 to three percent of the recommended daily allotment in other ” enhanced” waters.

Recently, Oza had asked Dollard for a concoction that would make it easy to foreground such differences. She had returned with a flavor that contained 50 percent of the RDA of seven different vitamins and minerals. Oza’s marketing team responded with a great name for the brand-new selection: Formula 50.

What better road to collaborate, Oza indicated, than to have 50 Cent endorse this new product? But Lighty didn’t want an endorsement administer. He didn’t want currency.” We want to invest ,” Lighty said.

By 2004, 50 Cent was undoubtedly one of the world’s biggest popping adepts. But it made some amount of convincing on Oza’s part to overcome the trepidation of Glaceau CEO Darius Bikoff and director Mike Repole. 50 Cent’s association with gunplay presented a problem: What if their bos spokesperson ended up dead in a hip-hop beef?

But the 50 Cent who showed up for his first meeting with Bikoff was surprisingly different from the rapper’s public image: tranquilize, respectful and deliberate, without too many flamboyant flourishes. Lighty was the rapper’s perfect business complement.

In the weeks and months thereafter, Lighty and Oza hammered out the terms of a distribute. 50 Cent would take a stake in the privately owned company, one that would graduate over go and escalate if the company hit certain numbers.

The two entities- 50 Cent on one handwriting and Glaceau on the other- ratified an arrangement of mutual confidentiality. Still, term got around that Lighty had negotiated something closely connected to, but not more than, 10 percentage of the value of the company. During these discussions, Lighty and 50 deliberated the characteristics of their new concoction. Oza presented the pair with several flavor options for Formula 50. For Chris Lighty, the choice was simple.

Despite the high-minded science of Glaceau, their product was basically a smarter, more upscale, more aspirational copy of the ultimate ghetto beverage on which Lighty and 50 had grown up: the “quarter-waters” sold under every bodega, deli and convenience store from Queens to Compton.

The quarter-waters( so worded because they once expenditure 25 cents) were just like the Kool-Aid everybody drank at home. However , nobody drink wild spices like strawberry and kiwi in the’ bonnet, because they drank grape. Formula 50 had to be grape. Oza disliked the comparison to such basi liquids, but he had to admire the thought process of his new partners.

vitamin water 50 cent The 50 Cent-Vitamin Water distribute was announced in October 2004. Behind the representations, the relationship between the two parties wasn’t always smooth. When Lighty, in one of his first interviews about the bargain, spoke of building the symbol with the ultimate goal of selling it, Darius Bikoff phoned Lighty, screaming at him for disclosing the strategy. Within a few hours, Bikoff looked up to find a pallid Lighty in its term of office, glowering at him. Lighty had driven from Manhattan to Queens to tell Bikoff one thing.” Don’t affliction at me ,” Lighty said, a heartbeat away from becoming a Violator once more.

Once they understood one another, Bikoff and Lighty, Vitamin Water and 50 Cent built a strong alliance. Soon posters and bus stops across the country associated the pictures and connected the demises of two upstarts from Queens- one a scrappy, new-age beverage company; the other a scrappy, racy rapper with an heart for possibility and a autobiography of hitching himself to winners.

In March 2007, Chris Lighty and his friend Sean Combs were journeying together from Heathrow airport to a London hotel in the back of a Maybach when Combs got some news over the phone. Fellow rap superstar Jay-Z and his two fashion-entrepreneur spouses, Alex Bize and Norton Cher, had just sold the rights to their Rocawear trademark to a public busines, the Iconix Brand Group.

Lighty could not stop echo the number he heard, as he looked at Combs in mistrust.” Two hundred million? Two hundred million ?” Actually, at $219 million, the sale of the Rocawear brand name was, at the time, the biggest deal in hip-hop history. Combs responded in the only way he knew how.” I need a billion for mine ,” he huffed. But of those two men, it would be Lighty who contacted that symbolic symbol first.

Just two month later, in May 2007, the Coca-Cola Company purchased Glaceau for $4.1 billion. In the media, initial reports introduced 50 Cent’s cashout at $ 400 million, calculated by dividing the purchase quantity by 50 Cent’s reputed 10 percent share. But in reality, 50 Cent’s take was much less. Another stakeholder needed to be paid off firstly- the diversified Indian conglomerate Tata had endowed $677 million for 30 percentage of Glaceau in 2006, and get $1.2 billion when Coca-Cola bought them out.

When all the other payments had been subtracted, 50 Cent was thought to have walked away with a figure somewhere between $60 million and $100 million, putting his net worth at nearly a half billion dollars.

On his next album, 50 Cent could just contain his own skepticism at the ability of the dollar.” I made quarter-water, sold it in bottles for two bucks ,” he rapped.” Coca-Cola came and bought it for billions. What the[ f #! k ]?” But Lighty quietly pocketed his 15 percentage and deterred it moving.