Kerel Cooper is the CMO at LiveIntent, a marketing technology company, and founder and host at the Minority Report Podcast. The podcast highlights people of color, women, LGBTQ plus community, and other underrepresented groups within business media and technology.
Learn more about LiveIntent, the Minority Report, Kerel’s podcast, and how to fuel video and podcast series with live events.
Listen to the Podcast version of this episode:
Name: Kerel Cooper
What He Does: Chief Marketing Officer
Find Kerel on the Web: LiveIntent | LinkedIn
LiveIntent is a twelve year old company that started out as a way of solving dynamic ad delivery and email newsletters for publishers.
“Our technology allowed publishers to be much more flexible in terms of the way they monetize their email inventory by using our platform and dynamically delivering campaigns based on impressions and not based on sense, but actually based on opens, and when you base a campaign on opens, especially in the inbox, your performance is going to be much better for those campaigns because you’re actually targeting a user that’s actually engaged in their email newsletters, reading the content, and actually seeing the ads.”
LiveIntent has now become a company that works with over 2,500 publishers and brands to help them monetize, retain, and acquire their audiences and develop their first party strategy.
Kerel’s co-founder and co-host on the podcast, Eric was the driving force behind the creation of the podcast.
“Eric called me up one evening and said, “You and I have both discussed this in the past, discussed our frustrations with going to conferences and maybe being the only two men of color there, or very few men of color,” Kerel said. “And we wanted to change that.”
“The idea was: let’s create a platform where we can start to highlight people from underrepresented groups,” Kerel said. “We felt at the time and still believe to this today that podcasting is the best way to get this content out there and distribute it. We just recorded our 85th episode earlier this week and it’s been an awesome journey.”
LiveIntent had the same issue that a lot of businesses had when the Covid pandemic hit: the inability to do in-person events which begged the question, how are we going to replace them? They came up with a weekly webinar series called RTB or Real-Time Banter.
“It started about a year ago, with just having some lighthearted conversations about topics that publishers, marketers, and brands really care about,” Kerel said. “Once we got through 2020, we sat down and looked back at all the episodes and knew that going into 2021, things were not going to be in person. So we asked ourselves, where does Real Time Banter fit in?”
“What we decided to do was change from a weekly series to a monthly schedule and do pre-recorded episodes instead of live episodes. This gave us the ability to really plan out the topics more with the guests and go deeper in the conversations,” Kerel said. “It’s still helping us accomplish the brand awareness that we want as well as allowing us to produce additional pieces of content.”
[4:16]
“I think regardless of whether you have 30 years of experience in marketing or four years of experience in marketing, you should always be a student and looking to learn.”
[13:34]
“At the end of the day, our end goal is to try to create one of the largest catalogs of content of underrepresented leaders in the business, media, and technology industries.”
[29:43]
“Make sure your messaging is consistent over the long haul, because if you are constantly pivoting or changing, you’re going to do more damage than good.”
Check out these resources from the episode.
Check out Minority Report Podcast
Check out Dr. Janice Gassam and the Dirty Diversity Podcast
Check out the CMO Moves Podcast