The Driving Force: Michael Kassan is still working the room

Michael Kassan has had more than his fair share of pivotal moments in his working life. You might say deciding to exit a career as a tax lawyer for one in business was one such moment. Or how about operating dozens of El Pollo Loco restaurants for 20 years as a side hustle? Or becoming president of a major independent home-video company, just as the business was being transformed? 

For those in advertising, that part of his résumé may seem like a preamble to the real beginning. Maybe that was when he took the reins at Western International Media, which was later sold to Interpublic Group. Or perhaps it was when he founded MediaLink, which he built over the next two decades, navigating the turbulence of the dot-com era and the rise of streaming, only to arrive in an industry being reshaped by AI.  

Kassan eventually sold MediaLink and exited as CEO. But not to play golf. Instead, at 73, he founded 3C Ventures, a strategic advisory firm that opened for business in September 2024. After 50 years in business, Kassan isn’t interested in retirement. He’s interested in relevance.  

“I felt like I had value that I could still deliver to an industry that seemed to want the information that I could share,” Kassan explains. “It just comes from wanting to be part of the conversation.” 

He’s been described as a “peerless matchmaker” in Frenemies, Ken Auletta’s 2018 exposé of the advertising industry. His old friend and former Group M CEO Rob Norman has called him “a one-man LinkedIn.” Kassan has been a potent force in the industry for several generations. Major marketing events have been shaped by his hand. CES. Cannes Lions. Possible. With 3C — which stands for consult, convene and co-invest — he’s still front and center in the world of advertising. Quite literally. 

The Current met with Kassan in his temporary air-conditioned office in Cannes, looking out across the glittering Mediterranean and along the beach where industry giants like Spotify, Meta and Stagwell had planted their flags. 

Kassan played a significant role in the evolution of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity into the apex industry conference it is today. Creative agencies initially looked askance at the incursion from the business side, Kassan recalled.  

Bill Wise, CEO of Mediaocean, credits Kassan with pioneering much of what has become standard at industry gatherings like Cannes, from branded beach activations to exclusive events bringing together business leaders and major entertainers. 
 
“A lot of the stuff that we as an industry now do at scale, he invented,” Wise said.  

When MediaLink wanted to make its presence felt at the festival, Kassan put up a big sign at the Carlton Hotel, traditionally home to the creative agencies. His friend, David Lubars, then the global chief creative officer for BBDO, channeled Little Red Riding Hood. “My, my, what a big sign you have,” Lubars told him.  

Kassan had a riposte at the ready: “I have a bad sense of direction, and I want to be able to find the Carlton from Shanghai. That’s why the sign is so big.” 

All joking aside, Kassan has an uncanny sense of direction — or perhaps location — even as technology is constantly changing the topography of the advertising industry.  

Initially it was about bridging Madison Avenue and Hollywood, bringing the worlds of advertising and entertainment together. Then the map expanded to include Silicon Valley.  

“I was in a position where, because of my varied experiences in all three of those areas, I felt uniquely qualified to help build those bridges amongst those various constituencies that were in chaos,” he said. 

Kassan points to the arrival of TiVo and digital video recording at the turn of the century as one such moment. “We didn’t think of streaming then, but the idea of handing the consumer the choice, that was the switch,” he said. “The whole concept of how you reach the consumer through television advertising was changing,” he said. “That was the chaos.” 

Over the arc of his career, Kassan navigated similar inflection points — from the rise of mobile telephony to the PC in the internet era. But all that pales for him beside to the new reality of AI. “I don’t think anything has the potential impact or — taking a show business term — the legs that AI will have,” he said. “I liken it to the [2022] Academy Award-winning movie ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once.’”  

“AI is exactly that.” 

At 3C, that means helping companies rethink their organizational design and workflows around AI — not simply adopting new tools but reimagining how the work itself gets done. 

I asked Kassan if he, like David Bowie, achieved his longevity by consciously reinventing himself every time the industry shifts. Kassan demurred.  

“I’m the same person I was when I was 12 years old,” he responded. “So, I haven’t reinvented myself. I’ve just reapplied aspects of my life in different ways. Reinvention sounds like you need to change. Well, we all need to change but I’d rather think my life has been a life of iterating, not reinventing.” 

Kassan credits the act of showing up as a fundamental reason for his success. “I’m able to say with conviction that over the 50 years of my career, I’ve shown up,” he told me. “I show up for the people. I show up for the event. I show up for the cause. I show up for the strategy.” 
 
“I may not show up well. That’s a judgment I can’t make, but I show up.” 

Wise can vouch for that instinct. “I’m always amazed that he’s everywhere,” he said. “At one point I told him that he’s like Waldo. You know he’s there. It’s just a matter of finding him.” 

For Wise, Kassan’s relentless travel schedule is a conscious decision to remain present. “I think he feeds off people,” he said. “He needs to be in person. He needs to continually make connections.”  

Wise’s friendship began in an unlikely place. For years, he regarded Kassan — an investor in Mediaocean rival Hudson MX — as a nemesis. “I had a dartboard with his face on it,” Wise recalled. 

Yet when Wise mentioned that his son was looking for work, Kassan immediately offered to help. Regardless of what was happening between their companies, Kassan told him, “Family is everything to me.” 

A born raconteur, Kassan has a metaphor for the way he has navigated his career: working the room. 

As a young lawyer, that was quite literal. “I had to meet people. I had to build presence. I was working the room as one does,” he said.  

Then the dynamic changed. “When I ran the largest media agency in the world and had a $10 billion budget in my hand, the room worked me. When I started MediaLink, I worked the room until a certain point in time, when the room worked me. When I started 3C, I had to work the room again.” 

Starting again at 73 carried a different kind of professional risk. This time, Kassan said, it felt “existential.” 

“Everything was at stake,” he said. “It was also a test of, I guess you could argue, whether or not I was still relevant. Maybe I needed to validate that for myself.” 

A few years ago, a friend of Kassan’s asked him to rank three things in order of importance: power, money and autonomy.  
  
“I won’t answer that question because I don’t understand the word power. It’s an amorphous term for me,” he recalled telling him. “I’m going to answer the question, but I’m going to replace the word power with a different word. And that word is relevance.” 
 
“If you asked me to stack rank three words, I put relevance at the top.”