Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Advertising Industry

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He gets the charm from his father, Michael’s wife, Ronnie Kassan, observes. “The teller of jokes. His mother was very tough, and had a very shrewd business sense. Michael has that too.” He was raised in a modest two-family home in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, that they shared with his mom’s dad and aunts and uncles. “It was basically a shtetl,” Michael recalls. He had two older sisters, and his mom focused on raising the three children while helping his dad run several dry cleaning stores. “My dad was a stand-up comic in the Catskills. It was a very, very, very sad thing that he did not follow that.” Asked what he sees in himself of his parents, Michael says, “I have a million jokes in the file cabinet of my brain. My dad had an extraordinary quick wit and humor. That’s the strongest gene I have from my father.” When the kids were older, his mother became a successful real estate broker. “My mother refined the use of Jewish guilt to an art form,” Kassan jokes. She played on the insecurities of potential customers.

His dad sold the dry cleaning business and relocated the family to Los Angeles when Michael was three, and started a thriving new chain of dry cleaning stores. Michael was gregarious and a good student, but never terribly tractable; the only bad marks he remembers receiving were in classroom cooperation. “I was a wiseass,” he says. “I would never raise my hand in class if I wanted to speak. I was a showman.”

His sister’s husband told him that the University of Miami had the best parties, so he enrolled there, but at the end of his freshman year he transferred home to USC for a year, then to UCLA, where he graduated as an English major. He stayed in California to get a law degree at Southwestern Law School.

In his second year of law school, Kassan met the Bronx-born Ronnie Klein, who had moved to Los Angeles after receiving a psychology degree from the University of Miami and an MA in counseling from New York University. She took a job as a school counselor in Los Angeles. They met when Michael had to fly to New York for a February wedding but didn’t have a winter coat. He remembered that a friend who lived in San Diego owned a really nice camel hair coat and he asked to borrow it. The friend happened to be coming to Los Angeles and was happy to drop it off. When Michael returned from the wedding, the friend told him that another friend was driving south to San Diego the next weekend; could Michael call her and drop off the coat? That friend was Ronnie Klein.

When Kassan called Ronnie she said she’d be at her apartment in the early afternoon. He didn’t ring the bell until 6 P.M. Annoyed, she took the coat from him and hurriedly shut the door in his face.

“I felt he was a little difficult. I was doing him a favor, and he was a pain in the ass,” Ronnie says.

“She had the most beautiful blue eyes,” he says. “I saw those eyes and went, Whoa!”

Michael phoned and asked her out the next weekend. Ronnie brushed him off by saying she couldn’t plan anything because she might be going to Palm Springs that weekend. She would let him know. “I never heard from her,” Michael says.

On Friday afternoon he was crossing Beverly Drive and Wilshire Boulevard on his way to lunch and they almost collided on the crosswalk. “Well, I guess you didn’t go to Palm Springs,” he said.

She was speechless. “I didn’t have an excuse. I was so embarrassed,” she recalls.

“I guess we’re going out then,” he said, shaming her into saying yes.

In early February 1974 they went to the theater and dinner. “It was a really nice evening, much to my surprise,” she remembers. He kept calling. They started going out twice a week. She’d kiss him good-night, but made excuses why he couldn’t come in. They dated other people, and while not yet lovers they were becoming close friends. He brought her to Passover dinner with his parents in April.

“At dinner in early May, he told me he was in love with me,” she says. “I told him I appreciated it, but I wasn’t there.” By mid-May, “I slept with him for the first time.” In late May, they spent a weekend together and “I realized I had feelings for him.” She had another date the next night but phoned Michael and asked if he could stop by her apartment because “I want to talk to you.”

“I just want to tell you I think I’m in love with you,” she announced.

They kissed and embraced. She mentioned that she was flying to New York in June to be matron of honor at her friend Randi’s wedding. “I should go to New York with you,” he told her.

He wasn’t invited, she said. Besides, Randi didn’t know him or even know she was dating him.

“Tell her you’re bringing someone,” he persisted.

She dialed Randi. Cupping the phone as it rang, she asked him, “Who do I tell her I’m bringing?”

“Tell her you’re bringing your fiancé.”

“Randi,” she blurted, “I have to call you back. I think I just got engaged!”

They married in December 1974 and moved to New York. He enrolled in NYU law school’s Master of Law (LLM) program in tax law; Ronnie supported them by working various jobs. They went back to Los Angeles in 1976. With his mother orchestrating the search, they tried to buy a house, but lacked the money to get what they wanted, so they rented an apartment. The next day “Michael went out and bought a Porsche, which was a little irresponsible,” Ronnie says. Then his mother discovered a great house in Sherman Oaks, which they were able to purchase with a helpful loan from his cousin, major Disney shareholder Stanley Gold, and from their parents.

Ronnie might have been exasperated by the Porsche, but by now she understood her husband. “Michael feels that everything will work out all the time,” she says. There is a reason the epigram at the end of each e-mail he sends reads ALL GOOD.

Michael was doing tax law for a firm; Ronnie was pregnant with the first of their three children. His salary was $1,500 per month, plus a percentage of any new business he brought in. He recruited twelve new clients the first month. “Being a rainmaker was easy for me,” he says. In 1977 he joined another firm, and a year later he and some friends opened their own law offices. Michael was restless. “He always wanted to be in business,” Ronnie says. “I think he felt that through some client somewhere something would happen. And it did.”

He became counsel to his law firm in 1986 when one of his clients, International Video Entertainment, at the time the largest independent home video company, distributor of such popular fare as G.I. Joe and The Transformers, enticed him to become president and COO. The company was run by Jose Menendez, one of the few individuals Kassan will not volunteer a kind word about. “He was very tough,” he says. “He had a chip on his shoulder the size of Cuba. And he used it always. ‘Good morning’ to him was adversarial.” Kassan helped engineer the sale of the company and left in 1987, two years before Menendez and his wife were famously murdered by their two aggrieved sons. He returned to his law firm, but still yearned to be a businessman.

Some years before, while attending a children’s birthday party at Harry’s Open Pit, the owner asked if he knew anything about franchise law because he wanted to franchise his rib restaurant. Michael said he did, and told him a first step with a franchise was to hire an accountant to prepare an audited financial statement for the state Division of Corporations. He put him in touch with an accountant, and some months later the accountant called Michael and said he was working with the owner of a Mexican chicken restaurant, El Pollo Loco, who wanted to franchise. Michael became both their lawyer and a believer. “I tasted the chicken in the guy’s garage and said, ‘This is unbelievable.’ It was healthy, nonfried fast food.” He recruited some of his law partners as fellow investors. He went to the American Heart Association and persuaded them, he says, “to put the heart-healthy logo on a fast-food restaurant. It had never been done.” The healthful and delicious Mexican chicken franchise would take off. Over the next fifteen years El Pollo Loco opened forty franchises, and Michael branched out by investing in Rally’s Hamburgers. He also continued as a law partner at his firm.

But he made a classic business mistake. The chicken franchise expanded too rapidly. “We took the concept to Las Vegas and we got our clock cleaned,” he says. They poured money into Vegas, and soon the business plunged from profit to loss. In California, the vast Hispanic population might eat at El Pollo Loco three times per week; in Vegas, with a relatively minuscule Hispanic population, one visit per month was more common. To shore up the franchises in Vegas and prevent its bankruptcy, Kassan became more engaged. They borrowed more money from the banks, and without seeking board approval transferred monies from El Pollo Loco franchises in California, weakening them. He had shifted monies from healthy California chicken franchises, albeit not to enrich himself, but to fortify cash-starved Las Vegas franchises. On the books, Kassan did not camouflage this act, recording these as loans. Soon the business could not meet the bank loan payments. Kassan drained $150,000 from his own pocket to help make the payments. In January 1994, investor Joel Ladin, one of the four partners in the law firm and the best man at Michael and Ronnie’s wedding, confronted Kassan with evidence of the unauthorized withdrawals. After Kassan admitted that he withdrew the funds, he was terminated. The next month Ladin filed a formal complaint against Kassan to the police, charging him with embezzlement. Kassan quickly repaid the entire $240,000 he had borrowed from the healthy El Pollo Locos, plus interest. “There were nights,” Kassan says, “Ronnie would say to me, ‘I just want to keep the house.’ It was Armageddon.”

In June 1995, a Superior Court judge found him guilty of “grand theft by embezzlement,” but ruled that his motive in taking the money was not personal greed but a desire to keep El Pollo Loco alive. Kassan won a measure of leniency when he reached an agreement with prosecutors to withdraw a planned not guilty plea. He says he did not know that a guilty plea resulted in automatic legal suspension in California, and he would not have pled guilty if he knew this. He received a suspended sentence, was placed on probation for three years, and ordered to perform five hundred hours of community service. He knew that if he successfully completed the terms of his probation, California law allowed him to change his plea to not guilty, and his felony conviction was reduced to a misdemeanor and eventually expunged. The State Bar of California, however, offered no leniency; he was formally suspended. In June 1996, after completing a year of probation, Kassan’s felony conviction was reduced to a misdemeanor and erased from his record. But the shame continued to haunt him.

Kassan was despondent. He poured out his hurt to a psychiatrist—four times each week, he says. He was determined to appeal the State Bar ruling, not because he cared to practice law again—he says he did not want to—but because he couldn’t bear the thought of his Jewish mother knowing her son could not practice law. “My mother always said, ‘You need something to fall back on.’” He appealed to the Supreme Court of California, challenging his suspension from the State Bar. “The one and only chance to tell my story was by challenging the California State Bar,” he says. After hearing the case, in April 1999 the state’s highest court ruled in his favor, finding:

In the matter before us the record is clear that respondent’s primary motivation was to save the various El Pollo Loco operations. … In respondent’s case there was no attempt to hide this conduct, and when confronted he immediately acknowledged his actions and made immediate arrangements to make good his theft. … We make no effort to minimize the seriousness of respondent’s criminal misconduct. He fraudulently converted a large amount of money to his own use in violation of a most fundamental rule of honesty. Nevertheless, considering the circumstances surrounding the criminal conduct, twenty years of blemish-free practice prior to the misconduct, respondent’s immediate restitution, recognition of wrongdoing and genuine remorse we believe the record demonstrates that disbarment is not required to achieve the goals of attorney discipline.

A Google search for Michael Kassan finds mention of his felony conviction and near disbarment only if one is willing to scroll through many pages; his Wikipedia profile is silent about it. Understandably, it is something he would prefer not to dwell on, and yet it’s never entirely gone from his thoughts. For much of his adult life since, he says, he has glanced up at the rearview mirror, fearing that he was being chased. His shame has remained dormant, but ever since there have been two Michael Kassans—the cheerful charmer and the sinner. Most see Michael Kassan the successful optimist; few see the self-conscious man fearful that his humiliating past could somehow come back to haunt him.

Dennis Holt, who had been a law client of Kassan’s, knew of his legal tribulations and in 1994 offered him an outstretched hand. Holt had founded Western International Media in 1970. At a time when agencies sold themselves as one-stop shopping places, offering clients a full range of creative, strategic, and media-buying services, Western successfully unbundled media buying. With thirty-seven offices and a thousand employees, Western became the world’s foremost buyer of local TV, radio, and out-of-home advertising like billboards or supermarket promotions. “He was the equivalent of what Irwin Gotlieb is today,” standing atop the most powerful media agency, Kassan says. “He was the largest independent media agency in the world.” Holt says he chose to ignore Kassan’s prior felony conviction. “I was the one who restored him,” Holt says. The business had outgrown Holt’s managerial style, which was to personally sign every check. “We had gotten so big and did so many different things that I wasn’t having fun anymore,” Holt says. He was determined to hire Kassan. At Nate’n Al’s in Beverly Hills, Holt looked him in the eye and said, “I’m not offering you a job. I’m offering you a life.” He was offering a way to regain his self-confidence, his swagger. Kassan’s prime mission would be to sell Western. Within six months, Kassan succeeded, consummating a sale to the Interpublic Group, then the world’s largest advertising holding company.

Kassan remained as president of the company for five years. By 1999, he was clashing with Holt, who had stayed on as chairman, as well as with senior executives at the parent company. Asked if Kassan did a good job, Holt did not answer for several seconds, then said “No,” adding, “he did a good job with the process of selling the company.” The clash with IPG became ugly. In August 1999, the firm locked Kassan out of his office and Kassan filed a $63.5 million lawsuit against them, alleging that IPG defamed him by claiming financial misconduct, and also breached his five-year employment contract. Days later the company announced that Kassan was “terminated.” IPG executives won’t discuss the matter. Kassan will only say, “What I am allowed to say is we amicably resolved our differences.” Dennis Holt, who remained with the company until 2000, says, “IPG wanted to fire him many times, but I defended him,” a claim that causes Ronnie Kassan to roll her eyes. IPG was offended by Kassan’s steep expenses, Holt says, including massages and charges on the New York City suite he maintained at the St. Regis hotel. Baloney, says Kassan’s friend Irwin Gotlieb, who first got to know him as a Western competitor. Because Michael was paid a handsome annual bonus from IPG as part of his five-year payout from the sale of Western, his jealous IPG boss “wasn’t the kind of guy who could watch someone else make a lot of money.”

The lawsuit was settled out of court, with IPG stating that it had conducted an audit and was satisfied there were no irregularities. But for the second time in less than a decade, it wasn’t “ALL GOOD” for Michael Kassan. “He was depressed,” Ronnie Kassan remembers. “We have a very close friend”—now Cerberus Capital Management vice chair, Lenard B. Tessler—“who called Michael every day and said, ‘I’m calling you because I don’t want you to think no one calls you.’ Michael didn’t want to go back to law. He just didn’t know what he wanted to do.”

Another close friend, prominent attorney Howard Weitzman, who is known in Los Angeles as an attorney for Hollywood celebrities, had participated in the launch of a software digital rights business, Massive Media, and in late 1999 Kassan was recruited. Kassan was enthused about the media and marketing business and intrigued because he saw Massive Media as a vehicle to broaden his expertise. “It gave me exposure to what was happening in the digital sphere,” Kassan says. His task, Weitzman says, was to boost sales and help shape business strategy.

One of the other partners in the company, former Viacom CEO Frank Biondi, who had never met Kassan before, was impressed by him; Kassan struck him as “a huge personality.” Biondi was shaken when a lawyer friend phoned to say he was representing a potential investor that Kassan had approached, and when the lawyer did his due diligence he discovered that Kassan had been convicted of fraud and almost disbarred. Weitzman assured Biondi that Kassan was of good character. And Biondi says that for the first year Kassan did a good job. “But the firm needed to raise more money, and Michael volunteered to lead the raise. The Internet bubble had begun to burst.” The money dried up. “In the end, Michael was totally unsuccessful in raising funds. In fairness to him, I’m not sure God could have raised money at that point.”

“He was home a lot,” Ronnie Kassan says, and people would call seeking his advice. “Michael, why don’t you charge them?” she asked him.

He listened to her. Over the next three years he performed a variety of consulting jobs for companies in the U.S. and Europe, mostly smaller companies asking him to help them strategize and to connect them to other companies.

Kassan saw a void he could fill. The advertising and marketing world was in turmoil, soon to be disrupted by the Internet and digital upstarts like Google and Yahoo. Clients who paid for and media platforms that sold advertising sought guidance, but couldn’t turn to agencies for neutral advice. Sellers wanted to be introduced to buyers, digital companies to brands. His experience with brands and media companies at Western and with digital companies at Massive Media—plus the insecurities of an industry seeking a life raft, plus his charm and connections and the three years he spent as a consultant—convinced Kassan he could build a unique service company. He and MediaLink would serve as both a connector and a hand-holder.

He set out to recruit a financial partner to help him quickly scale the business, and thought the Hollywood talent agencies would be a natural fit. “I walked up Wilshire where the talent agencies were located with my hat in my hand,” he recalls. “I didn’t need a job. My consulting business was doing well. But I wanted to do it with a team. The agencies gave me a lot of ‘Ya, ya. No, no.’”

Undaunted, he launched MediaLink himself in 2003, expanding over time to perform an array of related functions. MediaLink’s purpose, Kassan said, “was to provide adult supervision in the midst of chaos.” His friend Irwin Gotlieb sees a perfect match between a warm, capable personality and a frightened industry. “He knows everybody. My special talent is, you show me a number and I’ll remember it forever. Introduce me to three people, and I will have forgotten their names in five seconds. Michael will remember their names forever. He would be a natural politician.”

This time, Kassan monitored his appetite, growing MediaLink slowly. The fifth employee, Karl Spangenberg, was not hired until 2007. An experienced ad sales executive with a wide range of media and digital companies, Spangenberg says that when he was a senior marketing executive at AT&T he “hired Kassan and MediaLink to open doors for me.”

A New York office with a creaky freight elevator and little furniture was opened in 2008. Kassan gained a measure of fame when he was hired by Microsoft in 2008 to galvanize the digital community in opposition to Google making a search deal with Yahoo, and succeeded.

“When Wenda joined in 2009, the business exploded,” Spangenberg says. Wenda Millard’s résumé displays the laurels of thirty-five years of traditional publishing and digital media jobs, including publisher of Family Circle and group publisher of Adweek, Mediaweek, and Brandweek magazines; chief sales officer for six years at Yahoo when that company was an Internet darling; and chief Internet officer at Ziff Davis Media and executive vice president of DoubleClick. She had also chaired the Interactive Advertising Bureau and was former president of the Advertising Club of New York. Millard and Kassan had known each other for years. When he approached her she was president and co-CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, a company whose mercurial owner could be unsettling. Like Kassan, Millard knew most people in the business. Unlike him, she was fastidiously well organized. She mentioned that she was about to leave as co-CEO of Martha Stewart and was thinking of setting up her own marketing consultancy.

“Don’t do that,” he exclaimed. “We might end up as competitors. Let’s do this together and have some fun.” He then owned 100 percent of MediaLink, and offered her one-third ownership and the title of president and COO. He gave her the pitch: “MediaLink lives where Madison Avenue meets Silicon Valley, meets Hollywood, meets Wall Street. We live at that nexus.” She was intrigued, though some of her friends were not. One close friend says she told Millard she thought his slickness didn’t mesh with her sincerity, and mentioned a vague recollection of a rumor that some people in the industry whispered: Wasn’t he once convicted of something?

Millard signed on. Their sail has not always been smooth—they are indeed opposites in many ways, but measured by growth and reach, their partnership has been a success. Together, by the spring of 2017 they supervised 120 or so employees; most work with assigned clients in several divisions. Data & Technology Solutions under managing director Matt Spiegel, a digital entrepreneur who was Omnicom Media Group’s global digital CEO, advises companies on a range of technological solutions they might pursue, from programmatic advertising to AI to cybersecurity. If clients want to meet key people at Google, Kassan will help introduce them. When Unilever, one of MediaLink’s initial clients, was their first client to ask, seven years ago, for a tour of Silicon Valley, Kassan arranged it, including visits with Google, Facebook, and Twitter. “We were keen to understand what was going on,” Unilever’s Keith Weed says. “I’m a great believer in what Woody Allen once said: ‘Eighty percent of success is just showing up.’” Unilever, the world’s second largest advertiser, is today one of Google and Facebook’s biggest advertisers.

Marketing Optimization under managing director Lesley Klein, a former account director at Deutsch, offers consultation to companies on an ongoing basis; it is an influential part of MediaLink’s business, for it provides a client base. Potential start-up clients usually are courted by Kassan. Once signed on, they pay a monthly retainer that can range from $35,000 to several hundred thousand dollars per month; more established companies spend more time with Kassan and pay per project or place MediaLink on an ongoing retainer. The ninety-one clients serviced at the Cannes Lions Festival in 2016, for example, may already have been on retainer, or may have been billed just for this service. The Marketing Optimization division offers strategic or organizational advice, introduces them to people or ideas that might transform their business, and helps negotiate agency contracts. Lesley Klein and senior vice president Bernhard Glock also orchestrate the agency reviews for brand companies. The initial sales pitch is usually made by Kassan.

Business Acceleration, which each division has a hand in, services a bevy of traditional media clients like Hearst, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Condé Nast, Time Inc., Comcast, and NBCUniversal. They turn to MediaLink to help devise a corporate growth strategy and to make them more visible by arranging meetings, or to consult by coming in and doing what a McKinsey would and help devise a corporate reorganization, as MediaLink did for Condé Nast. “We advise these companies on chaos,” Kassan says. Like many traditional print companies, “they need to reimagine themselves as a media and not a print company. We try to help them reimagine their business.” Meredith Levien, executive vice president and chief revenue officer of the New York Times Company, says, “The landscape is complicated, and MediaLink helps us get in front of the right people.” Senior vice president Howard Homonoff, a former PricewaterhouseCoopers and NBCU executive who is part of this division, says their work can get pretty granular. Clients naturally fret about the speed of change and say to him, “‘Help me look at the next three to five years and help me define what it will look like and what are the best ways for me to succeed and grow in new areas. What are the new forms of advertising? And help me think through who my acquisition targets or partners might be.’”

A similar function is performed for digital publishing companies grouped in the Emerging Media division, which advises clients like Twitter or Refinery29 on strategic and marketing issues. This division is overseen by managing director Sunil Kapadia, a former Silicon Valley software engineer and Boston Consulting Group executive. Philippe von Borries, the cofounder of Refinery29, described what Kassan does for a smaller company like his that hopes to bust out: “Michael is the great connector. We think of Michael as an adviser, someone who has the ear of everyone in this space, connecting us to brands, media companies, platforms.”

A fifth division, the Investor Strategy group, is supervised by managing director JC Uva, a former investment banker. It serves clients who want to explore an acquisition or investment, including corporations, private equity firms, hedge funds, and venture capitalists, as Disney asked MediaLink how it would affect their family-friendly brand if they invested in Vice Media. Without identifying Disney, MediaLink called twenty-five of their clients and asked if an established media company partnered with “an edgy” company like Vice, would it help or harm the established brand? MediaLink is often asked by clients whether to buy a company outright; whether MediaLink should act like a venture capital firm and invest its own money in emerging companies; or whether MediaLink should accept stock in a start-up in exchange for its services. In performing these roles, JC Uva says MediaLink competes with consultants like McKinsey, and sometimes investment bankers or venture capitalists. Because of their breadth of experience and contacts in advertising, marketing, and the tech space, “our advantage is that we have more detailed information.”

Sometimes MediaLink, or just Kassan and Millard, have invested their own money and made a financial killing. Kassan as a personal investor and MediaLink in its role as strategic adviser were paid a bounty for steering the sale of two longtime clients—Maker Studios, a producer of digital video content, to Disney for $700 million, and Buddy Media, a company that creates an advertising infrastructure across social media platforms, to Salesforce.com (http://Salesforce.com) for $850 million. “Our role in that space,” Kassan explains, “has been enhanced because we are, fortunately, a very credible resource for people who have businesses that are premised on advertising as one of the primary revenue sources. It is good to have someone who is not just a banker but who can validate the business opportunities.”

A sixth division, the Talent@MediaLink group, performs a headhunting function for clients looking to fill positions, be they brands, publishing platforms, digital and traditional companies, or agencies. “We started seven years ago for GE,” Kassan recalls. They had advised the company on how to reorganize its global branding and marketing division, and the CMO, Beth Comstock, deputized MediaLink to lead the search to fill two new jobs. The next year, he says, “They wanted to build a Digital Centers of Excellence. What would it look like? Who would they hire? They wanted to ask Spencer Stuart. We said, ‘No, we’ll do it.’ Now executive search is almost fifteen percent of our business.” MediaLink has several advantages, he says. One, because his company is enmeshed in the industry, they offer “a scouting report from someone who has played shortstop while the other guy was at second base. We’ve done double plays together.” Two, because they often do strategic work for the same company, MediaLink has a leg up on their strategy and what best fits their corporate culture. And third, they earn gratitude. “It gives us an unfair advantage because often we’re placing someone who becomes our client.”

By early 2017, managing director Laurie Rosenfield, an experienced recruiter who has held executive positions at CBS, TiVo, and 20th Century Fox and who reported to Wenda Millard, says that she and her ten-member team were engaged in fifty executive searches. When the 4A’s on behalf of ad agencies in late 2016 sought a replacement for President and CEO Nancy Hill, who chose to retire from her $700,000-a-year job, they retained MediaLink. Jack Haber, longtime Colgate marketing chief who retired in 2016, was startled that MediaLink’s intelligence network provided an early warning system that reached into his organization. “One day,” he says, “my global VP of Marketing resigned. MediaLink already knew. They said, ‘We have a list.’”

Another division, Market Visibility, is overseen by managing directors Brett Kassan Smith, Michael’s daughter, an experienced marketing and public relations executive, and Lena Petersen, who hails from the advertising agency world. Many of these divisions overlap at various points, but this one takes the lead in the promotional or connector role, including getting iHeartMedia or GroupM to invest in MediaLink events at Cannes or the CES, recruiting speakers for ad agency panels at conferences, making sure that the clients who come to Cannes or CES have scheduled meetings with agencies and brands. When Michael Kassan got Universal Music to gift Lady Gaga to perform at MediaLink’s CES party in 2016, it was Brett Kassan who had to intervene to halt her father from violating the fire code by inviting more guests. Her group, more than the others, performs the convener function.

Kassan himself is, of course, the ultimate convener at MediaLink.

Michael Roth, CEO of IPG, starts laughing when he describes Kassan as a “matchmaker,” and offers this example: “We hire him on a consulting basis. Or sometimes he wants us to sponsor one of his events, and he’ll call me up and tell me, ‘John [Wren, CEO of Omnicom] and Martin [Sorrell] are going to do it. Are you going to?’ Then he calls John and Martin and says ‘Roth is going to do it.’ Then we’ll all meet at the event and say, ‘Why the fuck are we doing this?’”

One gets a sense of Michael Kassan, connector, watching him confer with his chief of stuff, Martin Rothman, on the leased six-seat NetJet as it leaves Miami after a 4A’s conference in April 2016. They review a draft presentation he had dictated and the staff honed, which he’s to present to a client the next day, suggesting how the client should market itself and what new media efforts it should undertake. “One of the questions the client asked,” Kassan says, “is how do we benchmark against what our competitors are doing?” He smiles. Of course, he doesn’t say that “some of the competitors are also our clients.” Nor, he adds, do they share information with any of them. They review a list of potential speakers he will recruit to attend client Alan Patricof’s Greycroft Partners annual June conference in Montauk. They review a staff-drafted memo to a bevy of clients for his signature. They review and he prioritizes from a long list of phone calls he needs to make, and breakfast, lunch, cocktails, and dinners he needs to schedule. Although Rothman lives in New York, when Kassan is in Los Angeles or traveling elsewhere, he is usually at his side, taking notes at his meetings, briefing Kassan before his hundred or so daily phone calls, listening in on them and taking notes, and being copied on what he describes as up to five hundred “actionable e-mails” Kassan receives daily.

Kassan’s day is usually broken up into somewhere between five- and twenty-minute increments, and it begins around 7:40 A.M. and ends every day before or after dinner. Every meeting has a purpose, an action. “The only thing Michael has is his time,” says Grant Gittlin, his first chief of stuff and today MediaLink’s chief execution officer. Kassan is overwhelmed by a torrent of e-mails, calls, meetings, he says. “You get to a point where you’re so busy it’s hard to actually delegate. Having someone who can listen in lets him play jazz” while the chief of stuff takes notes and follows up. “My job was to be the steady rhythm man.” Of course, playing jazz is instinctual, improvisational. Kassan often drives his coworkers mad as he flits from meeting to meeting, subject to subject, unable to sit down for a meeting or to allow them to pry a definitive answer from him. “Michael invented ADD,” Millard says. “It is very difficult for him to focus on any one issue”—until he has to, she adds. Even his beloved Ronnie remembers how angry she was with him in August 2015, when they rented a home in the Hamptons. “The first two weeks in August he left me in the Hamptons and worked in New York.” When they rented a house in the Hamptons the following summer, she issued an ultimatum: “I made a deal with him. If he went to New York City I would fly back to LA.”

Kassan’s network of relationships grants him immense power. He is advertising’s Dolly Levi, the matchmaking lead character in the musical Hello, Dolly!, whose score he loves to hum. When Wendy Clark was being wooed by Omnicom to leave Coca-Cola and become North American CEO of DDB, she says he negotiated her contract, serving as “my attorney, my counsel,” and would take not a penny. “I have only paid MediaLink one time, when I was at Coca-Cola and he arranged an executive tour at CES,” she says. Facebook’s Carolyn Everson says of him, “He’s kind of like the Godfather of this industry. When Michael likes you and respects you, you become part of his family. He treats me like his niece. He invited me to his first grandson’s bris.” Dana Anderson, former senior vice president and CMO of Mondelēz, who joined MediaLink as its CMO in mid-2017, still marvels how with just two days’ notice he was able to deliver Kim Kardashian to a Mondelēz gathering.

While few fail to mention Kassan’s charm and intelligence as reasons for his success, Rishad Tobaccowala of Publicis has known Kassan for many years and offers this explanation of his power: “What he has managed to do is to play on all sides of the party. I don’t know how he did it, but hats off. I would feel somewhat squirrelly because I wouldn’t know whether I could trust you. But what he has basically done is become a sort of synapse of the industry. And so now people are very scared that if they don’t pay him they will lose something. No one opposes him, and the reason no one opposes him is because he runs pitches like the Bank of America agency pitch.” This feeds into Tobaccowala’s underlying explanation for Kassan and MediaLink’s power: “This industry is full of deeply insecure people who don’t know what is happening and are buying hedges.” Over the years, when agencies discussed with Kassan the possibility of acquiring MediaLink and mentioned that under them it would be a conflict for MediaLink to conduct agency reviews, Kassan knew that would neuter MediaLink, because agencies would no longer fear what he whispered in the ear of advertisers. Often, he is retained by agencies as well as advertisers and platforms that sell ad space. Tim Andree, executive chairman and executive vice president of Dentsu’s operations outside Japan, said his agency retained MediaLink for certain projects. So too, chimes Havas CEO Yannick Bolloré, does his agency.

Veteran advertising observer Jack Myers, chairman of MyersBizNet, which provides a steady stream of marketing and other data to companies, says of Kassan, “Michael is a maestro at convincing people they can’t do business without him. He is the most powerful of the power brokers in that business. No one comes close.” Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, the largest radio company in the U.S., likens him to nineteenth-century Chinese compradors, who built trading bridges to the West. Les Moonves, chairman and CEO of CBS, describes him as “a wheeler-dealer” who “represents everybody. He was always a player, but in the last six, seven, eight years he’s definitely become a power broker.” Kassan regularly solicits CBS executives under Moonves, suggesting they meet one of his clients. “He’s a little slick. But he gets stuff done,” Moonves says.

What surprises people is how little muscular competition MediaLink confronts. Beth Comstock of GE says, “I am shocked that MediaLink doesn’t have more competition.” Yes, there are individuals like Shelly Palmer, whose Strategic Advisors serves advertising clients, distributes a regular and smart blog post, and arranges tours and meetings at confabs like CES. But he lacks size. “No one else has scaled it,” Irwin Gotlieb says. “You can’t scale if you’re just an individual. What Michael did most successfully was he expanded from a one-man operation.” There are consultancies that headhunt or advise on management, but these are siloed efforts. After operating largely uncontested since 2003, MediaLink benefits from network effects.

Michael Kassan has his critics, though the fiercest criticism is usually volunteered only after the critic is guaranteed anonymity. “MediaLink is like the Mafia. You pay them for protection,” the CEO of one tech firm who retained them says. “I used to pay them twenty thousand dollars per month during year one. Year two went up to twenty-five thousand per month. At first I’d meet with Michael and Wenda. Then you’re dealing with a kid. … You pay them money so you can go to their CES party. I no longer pay so I’m no longer invited.” Kassan counters, “Only clients are invited.” Aghast at what he sees as the contradiction between where advertising is heading and the P. T. Barnum character that Michael Kassan represents, one digital executive fumes, “We have an industry that says we are moving from art to science, away from the hucksterism and legerdemain of the last two centuries and into the era of definable return on investment that can identify who watched an ad and whether it registered a sale. And who is the character that is the connective tissue for the entire industry? It’s a guy who is all legerdemain and hucksterism.”

This harsh critique dovetails with another criticism sometimes lodged against Kassan: that he blows smoke at people, too eager to be everybody’s friend. When he conducts interviews onstage, as he does at confabs like Advertising Week, CES, and Cannes, he asks knowledgeable questions but only after unashamedly lacquering his guests with praise, telling the audience that Bob Pittman’s rebranding of iHeartMedia, which, he fails to mention, has to pay down huge debts and through the end of 2016 lost money over twenty-seven consecutive quarters, is “a great story.” He usually spares his real or potential clients uncomfortable but essential questions, as when he interviewed Les Moonves in Cannes and did not ask if he would support a merger of CBS and Viacom and whether he yearned to become CEO of the new entity, as the controlling shareholder, the Redstone family, desired.

There are several ways to look at Kassan’s ingratiating manner. One, as the critic who compared him to P. T. Barnum does, is to label him a bullshit artist. Two, as his friend Howard Weitzman does, who when told that Kassan reached out and recently invited to dinner his nemesis, Dennis Holt, said, “I’m not sure I would have done that. Michael sees the good in people, and sometimes ignores the bad. He’s a generous person.” Like Weitzman, Ronnie Kassan would not have gone to dinner with Dennis Holt. She agrees that her husband is a generous soul. But she adds this twist, which she means as a loving observation that others may interpret differently: “Michael has got some insecurities. He really wants to be liked.”

The other criticism aimed at Kassan centers on MediaLink’s perceived conflicts of interest. How, critics wonder, can Kassan represent companies that are rivals—Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, or Disney, 21st Century Fox, and NBCU, or both buyer and seller—and wall off information from each side? How can Kassan personally invest in companies—Maker Studios, or marketing companies like Buddy Media—without being tempted to urge his brand clients to divert ad dollars to them? How can he represent all sides in a negotiation—the buyer of ads (the client and the agency) and the seller (the publisher or platform)?

Those who deal with Michael Kassan acknowledge his charm. Armies of friends attest to his capacity for friendship and loyalty. And as to his alleged conflicts of interest, Kassan likes to say, “No conflict, no interest.” Even when he represents clients on opposite sides of the same table, he says, “our special sauce” is that they trust MediaLink not to betray them or their information. Although his is an unusual definition of neutrality, he insists he is “transparent” because everyone at the table knows he represents both parties. “We really do represent everyone. We’re so conflicted that we’re not conflicted anymore. There’s an old joke about the lawyer who used to say, ‘Two clients in a category is a conflict, three is a specialty.’” He laughs, charmingly.

5. (#ulink_35a7405a-41f6-5683-be2a-4f53052f8b74)

ANXIOUS CLIENTS (#ulink_35a7405a-41f6-5683-be2a-4f53052f8b74)

“If you want a good kisser, we’re your date!”

—Michael Kassan

At dinner at one of Michael Kassan’s favorite Italian restaurants, Scalinatella on East Sixty-first Street, a darkened, downstairs cave where waiters greet him by name and he hugs Johnnie, the majordomo, and everyone knows he prefers his vodka martinis dry without olives and straight up, Kassan ordered a tomato-and-onion salad followed by a generous veal chop with a side of broccoli rabe. Tucking into his meal, attired casually in the California style he prefers of a sweater over an open-necked shirt, dark khakis, and soft, black shoes, he recounted a pitch he’d made to the CEO of a major advertiser. “You talk to all my competitors,” the worried CEO told him. “How can I feel comfortable opening my kimono to you?”

“Look at it this way: we’re fortunate that we get to kiss lots of girls,” Kassan told him. “We never kiss and tell. It just informs our ability as kissers. So if you want a good kisser, we’re your date!” Kassan likened his mix of powerful clients to the Hollywood law firm of Ziffren Brittenham or New York entertainment lawyer Allen Grubman: “You go to them because they represent everybody and know everything.”

Spurred, in part, by Jon Mandel’s assault on agency holding companies, throughout 2015 and into 2016, brand clients reviewing whether to kiss their agencies good-bye—Unilever, Bank of America, 21st Century Fox, among others—turned to Kassan for guidance. The trust issue went far deeper than a matter of hidden kickbacks, as Bank of America’s longtime CMO and now vice chair, Anne Finucane, would explain. Finucane believes that financial transparency can be codified in agency contracts, and she has done so, but a larger issue is that the agencies are now parts of bigger marketing Goliaths offering a range of services, which pull agencies away from “thinking like a client.” It bugs her when agencies bombard her with “hard sell” proposals for new services from their sister divisions.

Jack Haber of Colgate makes a similar point about how agencies sabotage trust by constantly peddling a variety of services. Once, the relationship between client and agency was simple, he says. Instead of a lucrative 15 percent commission, agencies now negotiate a fee. And they are part of giant holding companies seeking more and more fees. “When I worked at an agency, I wanted to sell ads. Now our agency, WPP, wants to sell other services. Their strategy is to get more money out of clients.” In earlier days, “the focus was on the work. Now the conversation has shifted.” Agencies talk more about data, and spending more money to target audiences, and bringing in public relations and social network experts. He says he keeps asking, “Where are the creative people?” The biggest change in his own behavior as CMO, he says, was that “we had to be more demanding.”

There are, of course, other logical reasons for tensions between clients and agencies. Step into the shoes of the client: new technologies and a multiplicity of digital platforms offer baffling and expensive choices.

No secret drawer contains a checklist of the correct answers to the dizzying array of new choices clients face. No agency or McKinsey adviser who is not insufferably arrogant would declare they know the answers. The CEOs of the brands badger their team about company profit margins, as if marketing costs were an extravagance. The agencies complain they are being choked by low fees, but the CEO knows that agency holding company profit margins are still a relatively robust 15 or so percent. So the company CEO demands to know the return on investment of what is spent on marketing, and the honest answer is at best a guess. Corporate raiders are circling, pressing companies to manufacture short-term gains. The average CMO holds office for only about two years before being replaced by a new CMO. The new CMO is probably inclined to bring in a new agency and to insist that the agency reduce its costs.

What does the CMO do about the digital fraud issue? A 2015 study by Distil Networks concluded that one of every three digital ad dollars is wasted by ad fraud, meaning ads are clicked and paid for but are not viewed by desired consumers. Often, the culprits are computer programs or bots. The CMOs’ official spokesman, Bob Liodice of the ANA, said in late 2015, “Roughly at least twelve percent of digital ads are going to nonhumans, and twenty-three percent of digital ads are going to criminals.” He pegged the cost to his advertiser constituents at $6.5 billion, and bluntly blamed clients for being “negligent. We spend nothing on cybersecurity.” The Distil study totaled the loss to clients in 2015 at a much higher $18.5 billion. Liodice’s global counterpart, the World Federation of Advertisers, estimated that if fraud continued unpoliced, by 2025 global marketers would be robbed of $50 billion annually.

The CMOs feel trapped. Their CFO or procurement officer demands that the company stop wasting money on false clicks and ads that were paid for but never delivered to an audience. But how? Can the CMO fully trust social networks like Facebook, given that the more reported viewers of an ad, the more Facebook gets paid? The CMO doesn’t completely trust the ad agency, for they are compensated for placing the digital ads. The CMO is wary of Nielsen or other measurement agencies, for they still have a primitive way to gauge the size of the digital audience and whether an ad was actually viewed.

Not all clients are dissatisfied with their agencies. Keith Weed of Unilever, for example, has four hundred brands served by multiple agencies, foremost among them the agencies of WPP. Weed flatly says, “I don’t trust my agencies less.” And as for the cost cutters, he says, “Procurement works for me at Unilever.” It would have pleased advertising agency executives to attend a crowded panel discussion among CMOs on the beach at the 2016 Cannes festival. Marc Pritchard, the chief brand officer of Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest advertiser, surprised members of the audience by expressing sympathy for agencies and criticism of many clients: “When we treat our agencies as partners, we get great work. When we treat them as suppliers, we get crap work.” He heaped blame on procurement officers: “The single biggest complaint agencies have is that this relationship is managed by procurement. The problem is we are thinking of marketing as a cost rather than a value.”

Brad Jakeman, then president of the Global Beverage Group at PepsiCo, jumped in, noting that his company eliminated the procurement function earlier that year in order “to focus on marketing.” By moving procurement “out of a control function,” Michael Kassan would later say, PepsiCo had boldly relegated them “from first string violin to the orchestra.” Jakeman went on to express sympathy for beleaguered agencies: “They knew we respected that they had to make money. They’re a public company, like we are. They have margin commitments to hit, just like we do. They have revenue targets to hit, just like we do. And the only variable they have to play with to hit these margins is the quality of the people they put on your business. So if we pay them less, they’re going to put more junior people on the business. Probably not as talented people. And that’s going to show up in the quality of the work.”

The agency reviews of 2015 engendered some bitter feelings. Maurice Levy of Publicis, as we’ve seen, was angry that Omnicom bested Publicis to snatch the P&G account from them, and he was ecstatic to pluck the Bank of America strategic planning business from WPP’s Martin Sorrell. Levy was on his game for that pitch, exuding Gallic charm, and in control of the message from the broad strokes down to a granular level. He promised that his respected chief strategist, Rishad Tobaccowala, would be directly involved with BofA in planning and executing its annual $2 billion marketing spend. By contrast, BofA executives grumble that they were offended by WPP’s performance: Martin Sorrell brought in a truckload of different CEOs, many of whom did not seem to know one another, and their presentation was disjointed. Bank executives felt Sorrell and Irwin Gotlieb lectured them. “Martin spoke for a half hour,” a senior executive says, “and Irwin for one hour. That only left a half hour for discussion.”

There was nothing new about nailing a pitch in an agency review, or blowing it, for that matter, but the wave of agency reviews that started post-Mandel’s 2015 speech felt different. For the first time ever to this degree, efforts were intensifying to discard the middleman. Increasingly, clients were taking work away from agencies to do it in-house. Procter & Gamble has created its own proprietary programmatic ad buying system, taking some—not all—of programmatic buying away from its agencies. The ANA reported in 2016 that 31 percent of advertisers responding to one of their surveys said they had brought elements of programmatic ad buying in-house. Obstacles remain, particularly for smaller companies, because programmatic buying rewards scale, but for agencies the trends are ominous.

Even more worrisome, clients are also doing more creative work in-house. Unilever outsourced Unilever Studio to a company to perform tasks once outsourced to agencies. Airbnb CMO Jonathan Mildenhall, who left a top marketing job at Coca-Cola to join this digital upstart in 2014, says half his marketing department “are creative. They’re writers and art directors and photographers and videographers.” A major reason, he says, is that agencies don’t move fast enough. A client performing more of its own creative work was a practice he followed when he was at Coca-Cola, and it’s practiced at companies like Apple. It’s true as well in the world of fashion, where the designers’ vision is central, and where internal marketing departments are usually entrusted to create marketing campaigns.

More nimble public relations firms now commonly supplant ad agencies to tweet, blog, and podcast for advertisers. Edelman is the largest privately owned public relations firm in the world. For clients like Samsung or Taco Bell they engage in online discussions with consumers on social networks or on the client’s Web site, or recruit influencers to engage consumers on various digital platforms. For the Dove Hair team, for example, CEO Richard Edelman says they created a variety of colorful, curly-haired Love Your Curls emojis, generating 414 million impressions on sites like Fashionista.com (http://Fashionista.com), HypeHair.com (http://HypeHair.com), MarieClaire.com (http://MarieClaire.com), and SheSpeaks.com (http://SheSpeaks.com). With newspapers contracting or closing, he says, “We’re trying to find other channels because we can’t pitch to reporters anymore. We’re now dealing with Buzzfeed and Vice and Business Insider. They want sponsored or branded content. They want something funny, clever” to sneak past the defenses of millennials on guard against interruptive ads. To millennials, he is selling advertising, not news.

But even with more work migrating to PR agencies or in-house for the creation and execution of big brand ideas, clients are still usually reliant on their agencies. While Mildenhall says “eighty percent of my content needs I do in-house,” he also says that his agency, TBWA\Chiat\Day, “gets eighty percent of my media budget.” His in-house creative revolves mostly around promotional materials and activities like designing corporate Web sites. Because speed counts, clients increasingly take in-house their blogging and tweeting and social network posts. What retards a client’s ability to do more of its own creative work is that creative executives don’t clamor to work for a single brand, as ad agency executives proclaim, because abundantly talented creatives don’t want to devote themselves to only one client. “The best people want to feel free to work for many clients and across many sectors,” Sorrell’s éminence grise Jeremy Bullmore says. Nevertheless, clients moving more work in-house poses an ongoing challenge to agencies.

Another assault on agencies comes from publishing platforms performing the creative functions of ad agencies. This effort is fueled by native ads which can take the form of stories about a brand that appear in newspapers, magazines, or online and look like news stories; or compelling human interest stories in which the brand is barely mentioned. An impetus for these native ads came from the introduction of ad blockers, which imposed a nearly impregnable wall to block clearly labeled ads. Because they don’t appear to be ads, native tricks the ad-blocking software and, often, the consumer. Vice was a native pioneer when it went to Intel in 2013 and created an online Intel art exhibition that encouraged residents of certain areas to communicate with each other by joining, say, the Brooklyn Art Project. Publishing platforms sell the storytelling ability of the journalists they hire to craft native ads, and bypass the agency to pitch clients directly. The New York Times may be shedding older journalists, but it had hired 110 copywriters and art directors (almost one third of its ad sales department) to create native ads for brands. Agencies desperate not to offend clients have little leverage to counter this new threat.

To discuss the various threats to his agencies, Martin Sorrell leans forward on the wooden chair facing the small conference table cluttered with papers in his second-floor London office. He is not blind to these threats, and often speaks of the competition from digital and consulting and PR and publishing platforms. If anything, his constant travels and attendance at conferences and meetings with an array of frenemies make him unusually aware of potential threats to his business. Of the threat posed by platforms serving as agencies, he notes that WPP has partial ownership stakes in some of these potential competitors, including Vice. “Just think about our strategy: It’s to get the Don Draper companies—the traditional companies—to move quickly into digital. It’s to get the digital companies to go even faster,” and he cites the aggressive move to beef up the digital operations of such WPP companies as Wunderman, Ogilvy, and AKQA. He dismisses the notion that the New York Times poses an advertising threat. “I don’t worry about them. The Times should be worried, because 110 people creating native content are not going to put off the evil day, the continued decline of print.”

Bill Bernbach and David Ogilvy would be horrified by the behavior of today’s restive advertising clients. Those, of course, were simpler times. Ad agencies were once mom and pop businesses that oversaw everything, from devising the strategy to creating the ads to buying ad space. But when the founders of these agencies sold to emerging holding companies, these giants consolidated strategy and media buying under separate media agencies whose size granted leverage over the TV and media platforms who were selling ads. And as the profitability of creative agencies contracted and marketing functions expanded, holding companies purchased direct mail and public relations and polling and design and other marketing agencies. In place of a single 15 percent agency fee, each agency charged a separate fee for their services.

The media landscape changed just as fundamentally. “Back in Don Draper’s day you had three major networks,” says GE’s Beth Comstock. “You had people’s attention. People had fewer choices.” Today, she continued, “digital changes the definition of what advertising is. A well-done thirty-second spot in the right form is really very good. But luckily it’s not my only option anymore.”

Comstock’s early career did not herald that she would be an innovator. She joined NBC as publicity coordinator for NBC News in 1986, worked in publicity for CNN and CBS News, returned to NBC in 1994, and became chief of all NBC communications in 1996. GE was the parent company of NBC, and when its top communications job opened in 1998, CEO Jack Welch plucked her for the job. She made it her business to become expert on an array of subjects, from the digital upheaval to social networks and new ways of marketing. After CEO Jeff Immelt elevated her to CMO, she took it upon herself to become GE’s digital point person, constantly exploring how digital would change not just marketing but all of GE. Then as vice chair heading Business Innovations, Comstock became the company’s chief futurist, attending digital confabs, planting herself in Silicon Valley, scouting and making it her business to know cutting-edge agencies and entrepreneurs, seeking out partners for unusual ways to market. A marketing challenge for GE, enunciated at every monthly marketing meeting chaired by CMO Linda Boff, with their agencies in attendance, is to shift the brand ID of GE from an old industrial to a cool digital company. Cool digital companies are more attractive to Wall Street because they are perceived as growth stocks, and are seen as welcoming to the young engineers that shape digital companies.

A way to advance this goal was for GE to establish under the auspices of the CMO a four-person office, the Disruption Lab, directed by Sam Olstein, thirty-three, who comes to work with his hair spiked and wearing jeans and sneakers. His foremost task, he says, is to “have a good perspective of trends and technology; of where we see activity of new start-ups forming around, say, messaging, around content creation.” He says they search “for what people think is cool and interesting and primed for growth.” He scans Apple’s App Store to check on new apps that break into the top 100. Encouraged by Comstock and Boff, he pushed, he says, to make GE “a publisher, a content creator. What our brand represents is science and technology and the awe around science and technology, and that’s a very focused perspective. It’s the same focused perspective that HBO has, that Discovery channels have, that the Walt Disney Company has. We want to build a platform with the reach of any other media and entertainment platform out there.” It need not be branded like Disney, but he believes GE can create content and distribute it over its own Web site, over Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, National Geographic channels, or online publications like Slate.

As a content creator, GE formed a partnership with the National Geographic Channel “to bring to life great stories” for a six-part series called Breakthrough. It was directed by Ron Howard and shaped by Howard and his Imagine Entertainment partner, Brian Grazer. (WPP owns 10 percent of Imagine.) Each one-hour segment covered scientific topics like robotics, the brain, and energy. GE did not suffocate the drama with advertising. Instead, each hour opened by saying it was codeveloped by GE, and Boff says the episodes featured “our scientists or technologies or customers, but in an organic way.”

GE has worked hard to create an image as a “cool” company, a company welcoming to young engineers. One of their notable marketing campaigns was “What’s the Matter with Owen?” A college graduate, Owen decides to go to work for GE, to the disappointment of his friends and family, who grouse that 138-year-old GE is not an innovative company. Owen is a bit of a nerd, but he has a sense of humor. We follow his journey over the course of the marketing campaign, as he—and thus GE—becomes cool. The Owen campaign brings to mind Apple’s funny but potent “I’m a Mac” campaign a decade earlier, in which the cool Mac guy in a T-shirt makes fun of the uncool Microsoft “I’m a PC” guy in a suit and tie. GE boasts that its Owen videos were viewed fifty million times on WeChat in China.

A more offbeat marketing campaign materialized when GE stretched to try to make, in Boff’s words, “GE more relatable” to young people, especially aspiring engineers. The idea they settled on was to produce a trendy hot sauce that would be packaged in a ceramic container composed of such advanced materials as silicone carbide and a nickel-based superalloy used in making GE’s jet engines. These materials are able to withstand temperatures of 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit. Using two of the world’s hottest peppers, GE manufactured a limited supply of the hot sauce and sold and promoted it on Thrillist, a popular men’s shopping site. When it sold out, the news went viral. Message: GE is cool. GE’s Podcast Theater produced ten- to fifteen-minute science fiction stories that over eight weeks, according to Andy Goldberg, Boff’s deputy and chief creative officer, were the most downloaded “podcast on iTunes seventeen straight days, generating four million downloads.” The only advertisement was “Brought to you by GE” at the start of the podcast. At the end of the podcast, Goldberg says, “The consumer says, ‘GE gave me a great piece of content.’ They don’t say, ‘GE makes great engines.’”

For almost a century, GE has relied on the same lead ad agency, BBDO. Reflecting another change in the agency business, GE now farms their work out to a half dozen agencies and to many outside project partners, like the New York Times. Once a month, Boff chairs a meeting of all the agencies. “The belief is that you have to have different points of view in the room,” says Goldberg. “Not every agency is good at everything.” VaynerMedia, for instance, is expert at social media marketing, a reason they’re invited along with a couple dozen attendees. “I don’t know who half these people are,” Alan Cohen, a cofounder of Giant Spoon, said after one meeting. But, he adds, “The GE model is to pick people they like. So we feel like we’re employees of the company.” David Lubars, the creative director of BBDO, says he welcomes “other partners” and that “healthy paranoia” drives all agencies to better performance. Linda Boff insists that the agencies are not competitive with each other, that they collaborate because they want “to be their best selves.” Perhaps. It’s a noble sentiment. But the Buddha is not often among us, particularly in times of wrenching change, when much of what is solid melts.

But there is no question that GE’s marketing efforts are widely and justly admired. For a relatively puny annual marketing budget of $100 million, because GE has been innovative its footprint is much larger. Lou Paskalis, an experienced marketing executive who today is a senior vice president of marketing at Bank of America, praises the team culture GE and Linda Boff have forged among agencies to deliver amazing work. “Linda is so far ahead in what she is doing in content marketing. She is the gold standard of turning jet engines and trains into iconography that people love and that speaks volumes about the commitment to the environment, as well as trains and jet engines! Actually, they’re performing alchemy over there. I envy that.” The alchemy, however, has not impacted GE’s stock price, which fell 27 percent between September 7, 2001, when Jeff Immelt was anointed CEO, and June 13, 2017, when it was announced that he was stepping down.

The marketing team effort can fall short of Boff’s teamwork ideal because talented people do not easily restrain the ambition that accompanies talent. Take Gary Vaynerchuk, who admires how GE “tries different things,” yet makes it clear that the agency he founded, VaynerMedia, is competitive and will not be content just doing social network marketing. “I know we’ll get a bigger piece and one day take over the TV ads that BBDO does,” he says. More than once, Vaynerchuk, who bristles with ideas, has phoned Boff with creative ideas for TV spots.

VaynerMedia is emblematic of the type of digital-first independent agency that aims to disrupt both advertising and its big agencies. Presided over by forty-one-year-old Vaynerchuk, the eight-year-old company had revenue of $100 million, the bulk of it from Facebook marketing campaigns. He delights in sticking his fingers in the eyes of the advertising establishment. “You’re going to die,” he declared when invited to address the ANA’s Masters of Marketing Conference in October 2016. “It’s an amazing time to be in this industry if you’re on the offense. It’s the worst time if you’re on the defense, and ninety-five percent of you are on the defense.”