COLOGNE – Strategic advisory firm MediaLink considers itself as occupying “the intersection of marketing, media, advertising, entertainment and technology.” To say it’s a busy place to be is an understatement, according to Chairman & CEO Michael Kassan.
“We are in an absolute state of transformation. I’ll be kind, I used to say chaos. It’s controlled chaos,” Kassan says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference, where MediaLink is a longtime attendee.
A year and a half after its acquisition by Assential plc, “it’s been a wonderful experience so far,” says Kassan. MediaLink opened a London office last year and “we’re very serious about our foray into Asia Pacific and China. They’re great partners and they’ve been a tremendous boost to MediaLink in terms of our ability to really create that global scale.”
Kassan considers DMEXCO to be “one of the best places to bring the adtech and martech communities together,” although not necessarily a venue where one can interact with lots of brand advertisers.
“One of the challenges of DMEXCO has always been there’s not a lot of brands here,” he explains. “There’s a lot of sellers. If you look around the show flow you see all the bold faced names that matter in martech and adtech.”
He harkens back to his opening day at law school and the prevailing expression, “Look to your left, look to your right one of those people won’t be here when you graduate.” Fortunately, whoever was sitting on his right or left “looked at me and I still made it, but there was truth in what they said.
“I think if you look to your left and look to your right, in 2019 there’ll be a few different players here. They may be merged or they may be purged. One of the two.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
