COLOGNE – To Michael Kassan, there could not be a better time for The Relevance Conference that AT&T will host later this month. “I think the name speaks for itself. We are at a point in time where we all are kind of drowning in information,” he says.
Not only will AT&T unveil the name and road map for its advanced advertising goals at the event in Santa Barbara, Kassan will get to explore how one of the newest video content startups intends to become relevant.
Kassan will moderate a discussion at Relevance between Jeffrey Katzenberg, who is Managing Partner of WndrCo and Chairman & Founder of mobile media startup NewTV, and Meg Whitman, the former CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and CEO of NewTV.
“What Jeffrey and Meg have cooked up, having just raised a billion dollars from all the key entertainment companies to launch NewTV, I think should be very exciting,” the CEO of MediaLink says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO 2018 conference.
In the walkup to Relevance, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has been emphasizing how the company’s traditional and newly acquired assets—including AppNexus and Time Warner—gives it lots of potential leverage in the advanced advertising space.
“The AppNexus acquisition certainly underscores how serious he was. While at the same time disclosing an 83 billion-dollar purchase of Warner Media there was still room and some cash left on the table to do a one point six billion acquisition of AppNexus.
“I think it validates everything Randall said publicly and as well, candidly, in the trial that happened around the Department of Justice challenging the deal,” Kassan adds.
That’s a reference to AT&T’s public position that scale was its ultimate goal in its acquisition pursuits “and they certainly have put their money where their mouth is.”
Other highlights of the conference for Kassan will include hearing from Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner, whose latest effort is a series titled The Romanoffs, and former Huffington Post chief Ariana Huffington regarding her venture called Thrive Global.
This video is part of a series leading up to and documenting the AT&T Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
