Alex Cooper was driving a hot pink Jeep through the desert with former Saturday Night Live cast member Aidy Bryant and Italian actress Sabrina Impacciatore, of White Lotus fame. Suddenly, their cell service dropped to zero, just as Bryant was trying to send an important contract and Impacciatore was in a heated text exchange with her boyfriend, Jared. But Cooper had their backs. Thanks to the satellite service on Cooper’s phone, Bryant was able to send her document and close the deal. Impacciatore, meanwhile, got through the text-dot purgatory (“DOT DOT DOT WHAT?”) to find out that Jared wanted to move in together. “Time to move on,” Impacciatore declared, upon receiving the news. “It’s a little too much,” Cooper agreed. @fathercooper #sponsored big al doesn’t crash out when the signal drops and neither should you 😉 the new @googlepixel 10 is now available at @tmobile. and with T-Satellite you can navigate, message, share your location, and more #googlepixel #pixel10 ♬ original sound – Alexandra Cooper The clever and stylish ad, which debuted in October 2025, was for the Google Pixel 10 phone and Google’s partner on the release, T-Satellite from T-Mobile. And it was written, codirected, edited, and starred in by Cooper, host of the wildly popular podcast Call Her Daddy and founder and CEO of the millennial- and Gen Z–focused media company Unwell. Unwell , which has roughly 100 employees, already comprises 11 different podcasts, a film and TV production arm (a reality show called the Unwell Winter Games will launch on YouTube on April 6), live events (multiday 2025 extravaganzas in Vegas and Miami), clothing (a l imited apparel line hit Target in January), and a beverage brand. But in October 2025, Cooper, 31, extended her reach even further by launching the Unwell Creative Agency to help brands connect with her massive, mostly female audience. Shortly thereafter, the agency struck a multiyear partnership with Google. Adding a creative agency on top of a sprawling media company may appear like just another celebrity boondoggle, one in which an A-lister leverages their name recognition to score corporate clients. But unlike others who’ve been successful in this space, such as Ryan Reynolds , Idris Elba, and Kristen Bell, Cooper isn’t capitalizing on fame achieved from film and TV roles to build an agency business. She’s drawing on an audience and brand she has built from scratch, around her actual self. And that audience is devoted. Over the past seven years, Cooper has grown Call Her Daddy ’s weekly listenership to about 10 million people—expanding the show’s content from its early focus on sex and dating advice to female empowerment, mental health, and relationships. Her ability to land A-list guests such as Michelle Obama, Hailey Bieber, and Kamala Harris—and get them to open up about their personal and professional challenges—helped her ink a three-year, $125 million deal with SiriusXM in late 2024. As her audience has grown, so has her vision for what Unwell can be. “I remember being blown away by Alex’s insights on connecting with millennial and Gen Z audiences, and how we might rethink some of the approaches that we had been taking,” says Nick Drake, Google’s vice president of global marketing , who met Cooper and her husband, Ace Entertainment CEO Matt Kaplan, at a party during Cannes Lions in 2023 and became Unwell’s first agency brand client. [Photo: Dana Trippe ; hair: Cherilyn Farris at Highlight Artists; makeup: Loftjet at Forward Artists] The nascent agency is still lining up clients: It’s in talks with several prominent brands across various product categories and works with Nestlé through its partnership on Unwell Beverages. But Unwell’s first spot, Google’s “Get Lost,” was a breakout hit and a clear sign of the agency’s ability to capture attention for the world’s biggest brands. It has more than 39 million views alone on Cooper’s personal TikTok feed, with another 2 million for her post about making the ad. Drake says the two-minute commercial delivered more than double the brand’s social benchmark goals. He considers it one of the company’s strongest pieces of advertising in 2025. “We always say Unwell moves at the speed of a group chat,” Cooper says. “Our competitive advantage over traditional media is that it’s never been able to have a two-way conversation. [We can], and that is something that I take pride in.” As Cooper brings her millennial charisma-as-a-service to brands, finding the right tone for that dialogue is key. That’s why she wants to work with her team on every step of the process, from recruiting the talent in the agency’s campaigns to sweating even the smallest details in the editing room, a skill she originally honed as an aspiring vlogger. (Her father, a former TV sports producer, introduced her to media production at an early age.) Today, as one of the most social-media-savvy podcasters around (with nearly 9.5 million followers across Instagram and TikTok ), she has an uncanny ability to find conversational hooks that draw people in. The Unwell Creative Agency represents a needle-thread of a challenge for Cooper, however. She must prove to brands that they can get as close to audiences as she can without losing her authenticity with her fans. If ever there was a time to take her own advice and “Be a Daddy”—someone confident in their abilities and beliefs—it’s now. The early installments of Call Her Daddy , which debuted in October 2018, are decidedly brand-unfriendly. In the first episode, “ Sext Me So I Know It’s Real, ” Cooper introduces herself as “a stay-at-home try-hard vlogger by day and an insta-ho by night.” It’s crass, sexually graphic, and completely unfiltered, giving listeners a peek into how young women talk to each other when men aren’t around. It skyrocketed to the top of the podcast charts, going from 12,000 downloads to 2 million in two months. Barstool Sports acquired the podcast just four weeks after it debuted. Three years later, Cooper brought the show to Spotify, signing a $60 million, three-year deal and gradually shifting the focus to broader issues. By the time SiriusXM swooped in, there were several podcasts in the Unwell Network from other hosts, and Cooper was overseeing Unwell Beverages —all efforts geared toward the audience she has cultivated over the years, largely through her unvarnished persona. “Unwell is a testament to the idea that it’s okay if you are not perfect,” she says. “You don’t need to feel like there’s a standard you need to meet. You don’t leave feeling less-than. Because there are some brands right now that are still creating unattainable expectations.” With the agency, she says she knows better than to try to sell her audience on something she knows they don’t want. “Gen Z sniffs bullshit when it feels like, ‘Oh, you just took a brand deal because you got a lot of money for it,’” she says. “We don’t do that. We have turned down millions of dollars for [advertising and brand deals on] Call Her Daddy because it did not align with who our audience is.” Companies like Google come to the agency because of that ethos, says TJ Marchetti, Unwell’s chief brand officer since 2023. “They recognize that this demographic of Gen Z and young millennial women is essential to their business,” he says. “And they recognize that we engage that demographic in ways that build long-term trust.” Which is how Cooper ended up in the driver’s seat of a hot pink Jeep for her Google commercial. Cooper and Drake had stayed in contact after that Cannes Lions meeting, and when she started planning the new agency, he was her first call. “I said, ‘I know I can talk about Google better than Google can talk to my audience,’ so give me the keys and let me drive,” she says. In Call Her Alex , a 2025 doc series produced by Unwell Productions that streamed on Hulu, Cooper includes reams of footage showing her writing, directing, recording, and editing video skits in her parents’ suburban Philadelphia basement as a young girl in the early 2000s. “That was training,” she says. Today, especially when working on brand campaigns, “I’m constantly going between marketer brain, consumer brain, and creator brain.” She says that when she was in the edit room on “Get Lost,” she was analyzing it frame by frame, like she would her own social feed. “If someone is [likely to] click out of this in the first five seconds, what is our opening shot? How are we going to make people engage?” she says. As she takes on this brand work, in addition to running the podcast network and her own twice-weekly podcast, Cooper knows that Unwell’s future success can’t rely on just her. It was especially clear at the company’s Unwell Vegas fan event, a two-day festival of stage talks, interviews, and parties held for about 2,800 fans at the Cosmopolitan in October. @fathercooper How much time do you have? Cause we could go all night😉 UNWELL VEGAS BABY!!! Such an insane lineup thank you to everyone who came through this weekend!!! Our largest event yet and we’re just getting started. Where should we go next?!!! ♬ original sound – lochie The gathering, which featured an assortment of musicians, reality stars, and rising Unwell-ebrities, connected all the dots of Cooper’s business. Attendees sipped bottled Unwell energy and hydration drinks, Paris Hilton and the Chainsmokers deejayed at parties, and Cooper herself served as a host and emcee. But Harry Jowsey, host of Unwell’s Boyfriend Material podcast and star of Unwell Productions’ forthcoming Netflix dating show Let’s Marry Harry , got his own main-stage event. Jowsey spoke onstage with reality star and entrepreneur Bethenny Frankel, replicating the vulnerability he shows on his podcast when talking about relationships. His appearance signaled that Cooper is beginning to widen the spotlight at Unwell beyond herself—something she knows will be necessary for her business to grow. There isn’t a lot of precedent when it comes to a popular podcaster building a broader brand around themselves. For Cooper, it helps that there is already a stable of people with whom her fans are happy to engage, even outside of her podcast. “I enjoy being a CEO and a host of Call Her Daddy , but there is enough room to help other people rise,” she says. “We have 50 million people engaging with Unwell on a daily basis. And the fact is that Alex Cooper is not driving all 50 million of those views.” Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies , 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising , applied AI , biotech , retail , sustainability , and more.
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