After rising to the top of the audio charts and building her own media company, Alex Cooper is now looking to gobble up some ad dollars. The host of the Call Her Daddy podcast has announced The Unwell Creative Agency, a unit that will bring advertising partnerships into the fold of Cooper’s Unwell Network.
Call Her Daddy‘s ascension established Cooper as a leading voice in the Gen Z media landscape, and the podcaster has that cohort in mind as she kicks off her new venture. She told the Wall Street Journal that she sees Gen Z as a group that is tired of cringey, pandering ads. To bring about a change of pace, The Unwell Creative Agency will connect brands to Zoomers across multiple avenues, including sponsored content, live events, and podcasting partnerships.
“Gen Z has grown up scrolling their feeds, but the reality is, they’re just being bombarded by sometimes tone-deaf brands,” Cooper told the Journal. “We have picture-perfect influencers selling endless products, and the honest truth is, I think most of that generation has tuned them out.”
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Unwell arrived in 2023 to provide “a platform for this generation’s unique voices that embrace social challenges and personal insecurities through honest conversation,” as Cooper put it. Early partners included Alix Earle and Madeleine Argy, though the Unwell roster has shifted since launch. Notably, Earle split from the network earlier this year.
The ongoing diversification of the Unwell business has included the launch of a hydration drink and a subsequent partnership between that beverage line and the NWSL. Unwell’s business dealings have set Cooper up for her push into a podcast advertising business that topped $2.4 million in sales in the U.S. alone in 2024.
Cooper started to push the Unwell Creative Agency at the Cannes Lions festival in June. It was as that point, according to the Wall Street Journal report, that the newest Unwell division started negotiating with its first partner: Google. Thanks to a multi-year agreement, Google will put the Unwell Creative Agency to work across several facets of its business while also teaming with Cooper’s media company in a more general capacity.
Up first from that collab: An ad for the Google Pixel 10 device featuring Cooper herself. While the Unwell founder doesn’t plan to appear in all of the media that emerges out of her creative agency, she is the star here.
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With podcaster partnerships on the rise, overall market saturation growing, and providers like YouTube adding new tools, the podcast ad industry continues to mature. Cooper was already a familiar face in that world, and her creative agency will keep her at the forefront of the digital media landscape for years to come.
