The Scoop
One of the media industry’s great blood feuds could be headed for détente, as the United Talent Agency and the advertising dealmaker Michael Kassan appear close to reaching a settlement that could be announced in time for the annual Cannes Lions festival later this month.
UTA acquired Kassan’s consulting firm, MediaLink, in 2021, paying $125 million for a set of relationships that pushed the agency into the heart of the big-dollar advertising business and seemed logical at a moment when its celebrity clients were playing a larger and larger role in marketing. Kassan has long been singularly able to connect marketers and media companies, and UTA co-founder and then-CEO Jeremy Zimmer said the deal would give his firm “a much bigger seat at the table.”
But the deal exploded into recriminations in March of 2024, with UTA filing a suit against Kassan full of splashy claims that he and his wife had abused their expense accounts, and revealing that the agency had failed to get the value out of MediaLink it had hoped for.
Now, Zimmer is out — he departed UTA abruptly in March, replaced by current CEO David Kramer — and Kassan, the ad industry’s ultimate survivor, is back.
This year in Cannes, Kassan will be hosting “Plage 3CV,” next to Spotify’s beachfront spot, for his new company, 3C Ventures, which has peeled off a string of MediaLink’s big clients. One of them, the radio company iHeart, long co-hosted one of the festival’s hottest tickets, a party at the Hotel du Cap, with MediaLink. This year, it’s hosting a similar party with 3CV. (A MediaLink employee told Semafor that the company added more clients last year than it lost.)
UTA, meanwhile, is also planning an event at Cannes, and while MediaLink’s beachfront venue will remain, the talent agency’s own brand at the festival may now overshadow the company it acquired. Alongside MediaLink, it’s throwing a party with Klutch Sports, the buzzy sports representation agency run by Rich Paul, the longtime agent of LeBron James and dozens of other NBA athletes.
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The MediaLink acquisition seemed star-crossed from the start, something we noticed when we sat down with both men at Cannes in 2022, just six months after the deal was announced.
The logic seemed clear: Brands were spending big on celebrities and creators UTA represented, and instead of eliminating the middleman, UTA would buy him. “What we’re really trying to accomplish is a lot of creating relationships that go beyond the 30-second-spot and the endorsement into real creative partnerships between creative people and brands that really can drive value for both sides,” Zimmer said.
But the personal and stylistic conflict was already brewing then. Kassan was unreformed and wisecracking, telling us that accusations that MediaLink had “hands in everybody’s pockets” were a source of pride, and citing his favorite aphorism: “No conflict, no interest.”
Zimmer winced a little when we repeated that riff to him over breakfast: “He’s got a lot of jokes.”
Over the next two years, Kassan didn’t exactly lean into the kinds of synergies that typically justify a merger, and continued to run MediaLink as he’d run it as a private company. The men’s personal relationship deteriorated, and the lawsuit felt like as much a vendetta as a business dispute.
And while the media reveled in the details, UTA’s board had grown concerned with Zimmer’s leadership. The line inside the company at the time was that the CEO had “lost the troops,” but two people familiar with the conversation said the failed MediaLink deal and the ugly public fallout had become a particular concern.
The conversations accelerated when Kramer, then the company’s president, evacuated his home during the LA fires and went to stay with his friend and fellow UTA board member Jay Sures, a high-profile agent, people familiar with those talks said.
Among the many topics that the duo discussed amid the chaos of the fires was the simmering tensions within the talent agency over Zimmer’s leadership, and the unexpected public and financial costs of the ugly, drawn out public feud with Kassan.
Zimmer and Kassan both declined to be interviewed about the battle.
Max’s view
The underlying logic of bringing the talent and advertising businesses together still makes sense, as we wrote when the deal first imploded. But Kassan’s triumphant return marks the power of culture and the historic difficulty of melding these two very different industries.
UTA’s high profile at Cannes reflects a different tactic, and one that is closer to its core: It’ll try to push its way into marketing budgets through the power of its celebrities and its own relationships, not by trying to buy a new set of relationships in a more crowded marketplace.
Room for Disagreement
Perhaps some of the big spending of the marketing industry is in the past, and UTA had a point about Kassan, Alison Weissbrot wrote in Campaign last year: “As the industry and the broader business world grapples with automation, layoffs and what seems like permanent economic uncertainty, the days and figures of advertising excess feel like relics of the past.”
Notable
- “The strategy of our brand-facing business is right, and MediaLink fits well into that strategy,” Zimmer insisted to The Wrap after his departure, suggesting the only issue was Kassan’s conduct.
- The legal mess offered “a glimpse at the money, ego and power that fuel Hollywood and Madison Avenue,” The Wall Street Journal wrote last year.
Correction: A prior version of this story misstated the plaintiff of the lawsuit against Kassan; it was UTA.