Read Online Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else) by Ken Auletta - Free Book Online
Authors: Ken Auletta
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shadow still chasing him in his rearview mirror.
4.
THE MATCHMAKER
Michael Kassan is advertising’s Dolly Levi, the matchmaking lead character in the musical Hello, Dolly!, whose score he loves to hum.
Wenda Millard likes to say of her partner that he believes that everything is a yes, symbolized by the two-word sign above his desk: ALL GOOD . Millard has more shoes than Imelda Marcos, she says, “but my shoes have dents in the toe from shoving my foot into his shoe because I know he’s going to say yes.” An oft-told MediaLink story illustrates Kassan’s skill at pleasing others. He carries in his black Tumi backpack multiple portable devices—a Samsung Galaxy, two iPhones, a BlackBerry, an iPad, along with phone chargers and connector wires. Several years ago, the brand stamped on the back of his cell phones was either Verizon or AT&T. The latter was a client, and he had flown to Dallas for a dinner meeting with an imposing AT&T senior female executive he barely knew. After dinner, as they stepped outside the restaurant his phone rang. Reaching into his bag, he pulled out the Verizon phone.
“Michael, you didn’t just take a Verizon phone out of your pocket, did you?” she exclaimed.
“I think to myself, ‘You fucking idiot, Michael Kassan!’” Instantly, he flung the Verizon phone to the pavement, smashing it into pieces with his heel. Turning to her, he exclaimed, “Excuse me, was there a question?”
She smiled. He smiled. He explained that he needed a Verizon phone in Los Angeles because AT&T service there was patchy. “It was a bonding moment,” he recalls.
It is also a moment shared by more than one MediaLink executive as emblematic of their boss. “He has this perpetual smile on his face,” says Robert Salter, who was Kassan’s second chief of stuff, as he calls his chief of staff. “When he does something that is so clearly wrong, he does it with a smile and in a way that somehow earns the affection of the person on the other end. He manages to charm them. He’s able to make awkward conversations very easy.”
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
4.
THE MATCHMAKER
Michael Kassan is advertising’s Dolly Levi, the matchmaking lead character in the musical Hello, Dolly!, whose score he loves to hum.
Wenda Millard likes to say of her partner that he believes that everything is a yes, symbolized by the two-word sign above his desk: ALL GOOD . Millard has more shoes than Imelda Marcos, she says, “but my shoes have dents in the toe from shoving my foot into his shoe because I know he’s going to say yes.” An oft-told MediaLink story illustrates Kassan’s skill at pleasing others. He carries in his black Tumi backpack multiple portable devices—a Samsung Galaxy, two iPhones, a BlackBerry, an iPad, along with phone chargers and connector wires. Several years ago, the brand stamped on the back of his cell phones was either Verizon or AT&T. The latter was a client, and he had flown to Dallas for a dinner meeting with an imposing AT&T senior female executive he barely knew. After dinner, as they stepped outside the restaurant his phone rang. Reaching into his bag, he pulled out the Verizon phone.
“Michael, you didn’t just take a Verizon phone out of your pocket, did you?” she exclaimed.
“I think to myself, ‘You fucking idiot, Michael Kassan!’” Instantly, he flung the Verizon phone to the pavement, smashing it into pieces with his heel. Turning to her, he exclaimed, “Excuse me, was there a question?”
She smiled. He smiled. He explained that he needed a Verizon phone in Los Angeles because AT&T service there was patchy. “It was a bonding moment,” he recalls.
It is also a moment shared by more than one MediaLink executive as emblematic of their boss. “He has this perpetual smile on his face,” says Robert Salter, who was Kassan’s second chief of stuff, as he calls his chief of staff. “When he does something that is so clearly wrong, he does it with a smile and in a way that somehow earns the affection of the person on the other end. He manages to charm them. He’s able to make awkward conversations very easy.”
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
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