She spent the first act of her career explaining the news on camera. She has spent the second explaining a 115-year-old insurance company to the people who buy from it.
Most people who write about insurance have never had to sell it, and most people who sell it were never trained to explain anything. Sharon Cooper is one of the few who has done both, in that order. She started her career in front of a camera, as a reporter, anchor and producer, in the business of making the day's events understandable to strangers. Then she walked into one of the least glamorous industries in the country and never really left. Today she is Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of EMC Insurance Companies, the property-casualty carrier that has operated out of Des Moines since 1911.
The résumé reads like a dare. Allstate. Selective Insurance Group. Munich Re. A consultancy of her own. And, since the summer of 2021, EMC. Along the way she picked up a credential that most marketing executives never touch: the Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter designation, the same technical qualification that underwriters spend years earning. It is an odd thing for a marketer to own, and it is also the whole point.
Cooper studied broadcast journalism at the University of Illinois in Urbana. Her first jobs were the ones you would expect from that degree - reporting, anchoring, producing. The work teaches a specific discipline that has nothing to do with charisma. A story only survives if a stranger can repeat it. You learn to strip a complicated situation down to the part that matters, get it right, and hand it over in language a person can carry home. Reporters who can't do that don't last a season.
She carried that habit out of the newsroom and into corporate life, and it turns out to be exactly the skill the insurance industry is short on. Insurance is a business built on documents that almost nobody reads and promises that only matter on the worst day of a customer's life. Between the policyholder and the payout sits a wall of jargon. Someone has to translate. Cooper spent two decades becoming that translator.
Her move into insurance came through the door most journalists use: media relations. She served as Director of Media Relations at Allstate, the job of standing between a large company and the reporters asking hard questions - a role that suits someone who has sat on the other side of that exchange. In 2000 she joined Selective Insurance Group as Vice President and Director of Corporate Communication. By early 2003 she had been promoted to Senior Vice President, with responsibility for the company's communication strategy, marketing and advertising.
The pattern of her career starts to show here. She kept being handed the parts of a company that face outward - communications, brand, marketing, the voice - and kept being trusted with more of them. At Selective she eventually held the title of Chief Communications and Marketing Officer. Then she went global, running business communications for Munich Re, one of the largest reinsurers on the planet, where the audience is not a nervous homeowner but the professional risk market itself.
Each of those jobs pointed the same lesson at her from a different angle. At Allstate the audience was journalists, who punish vagueness for a living. At Selective it was agents and policyholders, who need to be reassured without being condescended to. At Munich Re it was the risk market itself, the audience that already knows the math and has no patience for spin. Very few people get to practice their craft on all three of those rooms. Cooper did, and the common denominator was always the same demand: say the true thing, say it clearly, and do not waste anyone's time.
Somewhere in that stretch Cooper became a specialist in crisis communication, and she built a consultancy around it - CCA Communications - designing business and crisis strategy for organizations that needed a steady voice when things went wrong. It is a strange line of work. Your best output is the disaster the public never hears about, the panic that got handled before it spread. There is no trophy for the fire that didn't start.
But it is close to a perfect apprenticeship for marketing an insurance company. Strip away the ad campaigns and the sponsorships and the brand guidelines, and what a property-casualty insurer actually sells is a feeling: that someone competent will be on the other end of the phone when your roof comes off or your delivery truck is totaled. Cooper spent years learning how to be that voice for companies in their worst moments. Selling the promise of it is the same instinct, aimed a little earlier in the story.
An insurer doesn't sell paper. It sells the belief that a competent stranger will answer when the worst thing happens. Marketing that belief is Cooper's whole assignment.
Here is the detail that separates Cooper from most people in her chair. She holds the CPCU designation. In the insurance world that credential is a serious undertaking, a sequence of exams on the mechanics of risk, coverage, and the law behind them. It is the sort of thing underwriters and claims professionals pursue to prove they understand the machine from the inside. Marketers, as a rule, do not. Marketers hire someone who has it and ask them to explain.
Cooper chose to learn the machine herself. The decision says something about how she works: she will not try to simplify a product she does not understand cold. It is the reporter's discipline again, promoted to a matter of principle. You do the reading first. You earn the right to make something sound simple by first proving you know why it is complicated. In an industry drifting toward automated quotes and cloud-based everything, a marketing leader who can actually read a policy is not a nostalgia act. It is an edge.
EMC hired Cooper as Chief Marketing Officer in July 2021, handing her marketing, advertising, branding and public relations, and asking her to knit them into a single strategy that drives growth. The company she joined is not a startup. It traces back to 1911, runs on an independent agent network, employs roughly 2,400 people, and turns over on the order of $1.2 billion a year. Its headquarters sit at 717 Mulberry Street in downtown Des Moines, in a city that quietly functions as one of America's insurance capitals.
Des Moines matters to this story more than it might seem. The city carries an outsized share of the American insurance industry, a cluster of carriers and their agents and the data infrastructure that feeds them. Joining EMC put Cooper at the center of that world rather than at its edge, marketing not a niche product but a full property-casualty book - business insurance, workers' compensation, commercial auto, the coverage that keeps ordinary companies running. It is a wide canvas, and it rewards someone who can hold the technical detail and the plain-language pitch in the same head.
The challenge in a company that old is holding two things at once. The pitch is stability - a carrier that has paid claims through world wars, depressions and every catastrophe in between, the kind of financial strength you want in the fine print. But stability told badly just sounds like age. The task Cooper took on is making a 115-year-old promise land in 2026, across data analytics, cloud systems, and whatever channel a small-business owner happens to be looking at, without letting the voice curdle into either stuffy or trying-too-hard. That is a translation problem. She has been solving translation problems since the anchor desk.
Look at the whole arc and the industry almost seems incidental. Newsroom, media relations, corporate communications, crisis strategy, reinsurance, marketing - the titles keep changing, but the assignment underneath them has been the same one every time. Take something complicated, technical, and often frightening, and make a normal person trust it. Get the facts right. Then get out of the way of the message.
Cooper's education points the same direction as her jobs. A bachelor's in broadcast journalism from Illinois, then a master's in Strategic Communications and Leadership from Seton Hall - the reporter's craft on one end, the strategist's frame on the other, with twenty-odd years of insurance in between to make both of them mean something. It is not the standard path to a chief marketing office. It might be a better one. The people best at explaining an industry are often the ones who had to learn it from outside, because they still remember what it felt like not to understand.
For a business that spends most of its energy on words nobody reads, hiring a marketer who started her career making words worth listening to is not a small thing. It is close to the whole idea.
She is the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of EMC Insurance Companies in Des Moines, Iowa, responsible for marketing, advertising, branding and public relations.
She led communications and marketing at Selective Insurance Group and Munich Re, ran her own firm CCA Communications, and earlier worked at Allstate. She began her career as a broadcast reporter, anchor and producer.
A Master of Arts in Strategic Communications and Leadership from Seton Hall University and a Bachelor of Arts in Broadcast Journalism from the University of Illinois. She also holds the CPCU designation.
The Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter designation is a rigorous insurance credential usually earned by underwriters. Holding it lets Cooper understand the products she markets at a technical level, which is uncommon for a marketing executive.