Exclusive: Michael Kassan Reveals His Big Post-MediaLink Venture

Over the past few months, Michael Kassan has been quietly signing clients to his new consulting company, 3C Ventures. 

There is of course the question of whether 3CV, which Kassan is announcing in ADWEEK, should even exist. A Nov. 15 arbitration hearing will determine whether a noncompete should keep Kassan from building a rival to MediaLink, the advisory firm he founded in 2003 and which was sold to United Talent Agency in 2021. After either being fired for skimming at least $2.3 million in company funds (UTA alleges) or resigning (Kassan alleges), the two are prepared to throw down in arbitration. 

Kassan, through a spokesperson, said he is confident he can compete no matter what the arbitrator decides. 

UTA’s position is that if an arbitrator agrees Kassan was terminated for cause, he would be barred from poaching MediaLink clients and staff, and from competing with the consultancy. UTA is also looking to recover the allegedly stolen funds. 

Sitting comfortably in his high-rise Manhattan apartment, the legal battle hasn’t tarnished the polished confidence Kassan reflects to the world. Nor has it prevented clients from hiring 3CV, Kassan said. He’s already signed 10 of them, who he declined to name. He also declined to say whether these clients are brands, agencies or individuals.

Already, Kassan, 73, is planning ways to one-up the playbook he used and modified for 18 years to make MediaLink an ad industry linchpin. As Kassan describes it, that playbook involves putting clients in the center of the most relevant ad industry happenings. But MediaLink’s power also came from his deep-seated relationships with the industry’s major power brokers.

The old ad industry joke is that MediaLink basically throws parties—though in actuality, it provides an array of services to juice business growth. The company made its first splash at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas about 20 years ago, where Kassan would create a focused marketing track within the conference’s sprawl. He has repeated that at other large conferences, like the Cannes Lions.

“Those are very valuable to people, especially the folks coming up—the next generation of leaders,” Google CMO Lorraine Twohill told ADWEEK. 

The 2.0 game plan

In many ways, 3CV will look similar to MediaLink. Kassan will be a focal point, of course, and it will leverage his vast connections, which extend to the business world at large, meaning he can connect marketers to hard-to-reach CEOs and CIOs.

3CV will also differ significantly from MediaLink. It will be about a third of the 180 employees MediaLink had at its height, Kassan said. And he wants to staff his executive team with people who could eventually succeed him, when he anticipates stepping down in his early 80s. He’s looking specifically for people who, like Kassan, have varied professional experiences. Kassan noted how he started as a tax lawyer, ran an entertainment company, then went into the media business. 

We look to partner with investment banks, not compete with them.

Michael Kassan

“If I got to create the perfect person, that would be somebody with a similar background to mine, not identical, because I don’t want the person to be me,” Kassan said. “I’m looking at finding 2.0.”

But even as he builds, Kassan has MediaLink in his sights.

“In a 12- to 18-month window, I think this company will be larger than MediaLink by a margin,” Kassan said. “What seems to be pushing it over the edge is enormous excitement from clients.” He’s aiming to hit $100 million in revenue within that time. MediaLink made $44.2 million in revenue in 2020, the last time that figure was made public. UTA declined to comment on its current revenue.

One key cog in Kassan’s plan involves pushing 3CV beyond the services he installed at MediaLink. For instance, he plans on playing a bigger role in M&A deals; Kassan explained that MediaLink often took part in some of that process, performing the due diligence at the beginning. 3CV will also invest in advertising startups, negotiate M&A deals and integrate those companies into their acquirers. Not that investment banker mainstays like Terry Kawaja’s LUMA Partners need to watch their backs—“We look to partner with investment banks, not compete with them,” Kassan said.

Kassan hopes to capitalize on the fact that there’s less of a market for individual adtech solutions, since many media companies have a stack that solves all their needs. Now, the opportunity is to acquire small tech tools focused on solving a single problem and combine them into a larger solution, he said.

“The martech/adtech community needs to make sure that they’re not coming in with a piece, but marrying it with other pieces to give you an immense solution,” Kassan said. “That’s an area where I’m going to spend a lot of time.”

Problem-solving his way to power

Kassan continues to be one of the ad industry’s most polarizing figures. 

Even beyond the high-profile battle with UTA and his other legal entanglements, some people in the ad industry are wary of Kassan’s oft-repeated mantras (the 3 Cs in his new company stand for “consult, convene, co-invest,” which Kassan followers will recognize) and question the exorbitant prices they say MediaLink charged with Kassan at the helm and continues to charge today.

“Some of the things that MediaLink used to charge for confounded me, because their business model to me was very much ‘where there’s mystery, there’s margin,’” said one source who previously worked with Kassan, but did not work at MediaLink. “They just charge so much money for something that was fairly easy to do.” 

For instance, this person claims some clients pay a premium going through MediaLink for a presence at festivals like VivaTech and CES, when they could buy directly from those festivals for cheaper.

Other ad industry insiders question whether the types of relationships and connections that Kassan and MediaLink both get paid to cultivate are still relevant today. 

Certainly those connections influenced major business deals in the past, like when MediaLink ran Bank of America’s media review around 2015, said Lou Paskalis, who owns the consultancy AJL Advisory, and who was a longtime senior marketer at Bank of America.

“His superpower is that he’s able to see around corners because he has all these relationships,” Paskalis said. Kassan would know, for instance, if a company was making an acquisition, who it was going to acquire and what new capabilities that might add. 

“It changes the whole patina of the conversation,” Paskalis said. Bank of America decided to stay with Publicis over the challenger, WPP. 

Kassan has a knack for delivering crucial information, but without violating anyone’s confidence, said both Paskalis and Wendy Clark, former global CEO of Dentsu International, who’s currently a partner at the financial services firm Consello Group.

Kassan has also leveraged those connections to bail people out of sticky professional issues.

His superpower is that he’s able to see around corners because he has all these relationships.

Lou Paskalis, owner, AJL Advisory

Paskalis remembered years ago dealing with a celebrity who reneged at the last minute on a major brand deal. (Paskalis didn’t want to name either the celebrity or company.) He called Kassan for help.

“And he says, ‘Louie, give me an hour,’” Paskalis recalled. “He calls me Louie, which drives me fucking nuts. I’m not Louie, I’m Lou.”

Before the hour was up, Kassan called Paskalis back and said, “You’re all set.” 

Paskalis never knew what Kassan did or who he spoke to. “All I know is 54 minutes later, my problem was solved, and it was a big problem, which was going to get me a lot of egg on my face,” he said. “I didn’t have to go to my management team and say, ‘Whoopsie-daisy, I shouted the odds before it was a done deal.’ Even though it was a done deal.” 

At the time, Paskalis wasn’t a MediaLink client, just one of Kassan’s friends.

When former Meta exec Carolyn Everson jumped to Meta (called Facebook at the time) after an uncharacteristically brief nine-month stint at Microsoft, Kassan helped smooth things over.

“He did a lot behind the scenes to get Microsoft to be OK with the fact that I was leaving and going to Facebook, after such a short period of time,” she told ADWEEK. Kassan confirmed his involvement but declined to get into specifics. 

He would also offer counsel to her in 2020, as Facebook reeled from ad spend pullbacks after George Floyd’s murder.

Everson was swamped with 20-hour days as she developed a plan so advertisers would feel comfortable coming back. Kassan, she said, was a steady hand during this time.

“I was never a big client of MediaLink, and we didn’t have major contracts,” Everson said. “He just genuinely has stayed rock steady in terms of staying in touch with me, asking me where I need help.”

Even when he’s not helping people through their professional problems, Kassan has an innate charm that makes people want to stick with him. Twohill first met Kassan in 2014 at Cannes, as she nervously entered a large MediaLink party.

“I hate going into events, just hate it,” Twohill said. “I’ll often go in with somebody else, but that was an occasion where I was walking in by myself.” Kassan walked toward her with a martini glass. “He gave me the biggest hug and warmest welcome, and then introduced me to 10 interesting people I ought to know,” she recalled. “He sort of won me over in that moment in those ways.”

Loyalty to Kassan seems to extend beyond the industry power players he’s helped. The source who worked with Kassan has observed his team’s fondness for him.

“Part of his charm is he’s very personally invested in people who are loyal to him,” said the source. “What I’ve seen from his team is that they really respond to that, and they stay there a long, long time.”

The business of Michael Kassan

While friends and executives can easily bask in Kassan’s magnanimity, those who go into business with him have trickier ground to navigate.

“Michael is actually unbelievably collaborative, if you get him in the mode of wanting to be collaborative,” said Duncan Painter, former CEO of Ascential, which runs the Cannes Lions and owned MediaLink from 2017-2021. “A lot of that is treating him with respect and recognizing that he’s a very senior player in the industry.” 

Painter, who currently runs the Omnicom-owned digital commerce unit Flywheel Digital, has the background “of a data science and systems engineer” and the personality to match. But his and Kassan’s odd-couplage worked in favor of their business relationship.

“I was very happy to be in the background and let Michael absolutely take the foreground,” Painter said.

There was much less happiness for all parties when Ascential sold MediaLink to UTA in 2021.

The Hollywood agency wanted him to focus less on being a frontman and gallivanting from conference to conference, and more on building the success of MediaLink’s business, according to a UTA source with knowledge.

The UTA source said Kassan resisted oversight and wouldn’t align with UTA on business goals; instead, he focused on driving revenue instead of profit and insisted on being treated as talent.

Kassan’s attorney, Sanford Michelman, said: “UTA has failed at legally trying to prevent Kassan from competing, so they continue to launch these baseless, anonymous attacks to try and tarnish his reputation.”

But the biggest issue for UTA is the millions in business funds that Kassan allegedly used for himself, which will be addressed in private arbitration.

Those closest to Kassan insist that UTA should have anticipated his financial behavior.

Everson recalled her own thoughts and conversations she had with her peers after the clash exploded into the public sphere in March. “It seems like he was pretty transparent about what his expense account was, and the different ways in which he spends that money,” she said. “That wasn’t hidden.”

Painter also defended Kassan’s reputation: “My entire time working with Michael, and I can’t say this about many people in my life, but he never lied to me.”

UTA, in its complaint against Kassan, described a different experience: “Kassan used his influence to hide his misconduct from UTA for over a year.” A company spokesperson said the argument that Kassan’s financial habits are well-known is just a diversion from the accusations UTA is leveling against him. 

Painter added that he didn’t take issue with Kassan’s expenses when they worked together and was able to avoid issues by having Ascential run strict financial management in the background.

“Is he financially focused? Not really. That’s where his finance director needs to deliver, [in] that respect,” Painter said of Kassan. He added: “Michael needs those people to complement him to run a good business.”

It remains to be seen if this will hold true for Kassan’s next venture. As 3CV winds up, MediaLink has set up its post-Kassan executive leadership team, reporting to UTA CEO Jeremy Zimmer. Assuming the arbitrator decides in Kassan’s favor, the next test in terms of how deep that loyalty runs is whether MediaLink’s team and client base stay with UTA or abscond to 3CV. What happens then will show the extent to which MediaLink’s brand is synonymous with Kassan.