How do Different Franchises Connect? Ross Siegel Explains It to a Teenager
I interviewed Ross from MediaLink in Cannes, and I live in Los Angeles, where MediaLink as a company is based. Now that I’m home and learning more about the business I found out that I have been hanging out in the backyard of their building for years! I found that to be really cool, and I’ll keep Ross in mind if I go there again. Anyway, my conversation with Ross was really interesting, and it explained the reasoning for why I was even here in these MediaLink tents with so many other companies. He was so nice to talk to and I’m (as usual) very grateful for the opportunity.
What does Ross do?
Ross is the executive vice president of a company called Medialink. Medialink is a company that combines industries like advertising, technology, entertainment, and finance. They help bring these companies and franchises together and then help manage their relations. Ross himself works as a man of many talents, such as a strategist, advisor, connector, and even occasionally a therapist.
What's interesting about what Ross does?
I think there are two main things that I find very interesting about what Ross and Medialink do. The first thing is how Medialink itself is bringing together companies that have almost no relation to each other. I think this is super intriguing because it's one of the most original ideas I have personally seen interviewing, even though it seems like such a simple idea. The other thing that I find interesting is how Ross’s job works. Mainly how he has multiple jobs, and how they just change based on how he’s needed.
What did I like about Ross’s message?
The best thing about Ross’s message is that you should always ask questions instead of guessing what the answer is, so you end up getting actual correct answers instead of being too scared to ask and potentially messing something up. It serves to always ask questions, which many people (myself included) are too scared to do. It’s still a great lesson and I think we all should be curious and we all should ask questions.
TRANSCRIPT:
RIO: Alright, so to start can you please tell me your name and what do you do?
ROSS: Ross Siegal, executive vice president MediaLink. What do I do? It changes every day, changes every hour. But I'd say usually I try to be equal parts, strategist, advisor, connector, occasionally therapist, I try to understand where our marketplace however you define that is moving. I tried to help my friends, many of whom are clients, and our clients, some of whom are friends, and navigate towards whatever goal that they have in the marketplace.
RIO: And what is your company and what does your company do?
ROSS: We're from MediaLink, we’re a part of the talent giant UTA. That I'm very proud to be a part of, we like to think of ourselves as the nexus point between Madison Avenue, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Wall Street which basically means we connect the financiers, we connect the content creators, we connect the technologists and we connect the people that are paying for all this stuff, which tends to be the marketers. But I say we connect there's a lot of ways to do that. There’s straight up Rio, meet Ross. There is Rio, we think you should meet Ross. But before we do that, we want to make sure you have something to tell Ross, that will resonate. There is what is Ross thinking? There is, Ross is going to open his wallet and buy something, under what circumstances would he do that? And what are his opportunity costs? What else could he do? And we like to think that whether it's media companies, startups, tech companies, content creators, all of the above even brands, we help them sort of figure out and navigate that in an ever-changing landscape.
RIO: So you kind of help bring companies?
ROSS: Yeah, I mean, that's, among other things. That is what we do. We also create knowledge and gather intelligence and create plans and strategies, a lot of which comes from our connections, and the information we're sourcing in macro, and microwaves from all of them constantly.
RIO: So when you say you're sort of getting knowledge, what does that mean?
ROSS: Tjats's good question. It can mean a lot of things, right? Knowledge, I think at the end of the day, probably means; what is the information that any one person needs to be effective in the organization. And then what does that mean? What is the knowledge that an organization needs to progress? And obviously, all those things can be very different. The way I would probably break that down is, at any given moment, in the world of media and marketing, this sort of spectrum of or maybe divide is subject to the forces of can a beer company afford hops, at costs, can they ship those things across the Atlantic Ocean in a way that allows them to pay for whatever they're trying to do, and then market and still make money, right? There's Google and Apple, and Amazon, these platforms, they have their own agenda. And sometimes that agenda has technology shifts, like this thing called a cookie, which is like this underlying framework of the digital marketing world. That's a controversial idea. If one company decides we're gonna get rid of a cookie, which is happening, it throws the entire model, it's been being built since 2000, since 1994, into jeopardy, meaning that all of these companies need to then figure out how do we do what we've been doing for over a quarter of a century as well as we've been doing it now. And what does the future hold? And how do we keep in front of our competitors, that can be Coca-Cola? It can be Warner, Warner Brothers television, it can be Warner Music, it can be a musician, it can be some tech company that ties it all together, big and small. We like to think that when one little thing happens it’s a butterfly effect. And then we try to help companies understand where's that butterfly effect gonna to occur? Three derivatives down the road, and how to companies stay ahead.
RIO: Thank you. And one final thing, a message or any messages to marketers?
ROSS: Sure. I think there's one thing that because there are two things that I've lived by in my career that I like to think about is, if you don't know, don't know something, don't assume, ask a question, because you'd rather look like kind of a dummy by asking a really good question. Then look like a total dummy when you don't know something and you make a big assumption. That's kind of like I think how MediaLink is based, like we try to sort of seek truth, even when it may be staring us in the face, even when it may be obvious, because usually it's not. And the other thing is, I think that what I'm proud of is that the people I work with care so much, and we care about the intellectual challenge of all this, we care about that puzzle. That's the dynamic, we care about the people we work with and I'm just fortunate to be in working with people like you and the people that we all work with and people that are very thoughtful and considerate.
When I was a kid, which was a while ago, TV was this thing that you turned on and the content look different. When I was 1615, would come home and watch MTV, which now just looks silly. It was like a bunch of videos that were kind of silly. With music, that was pretty silly. And we turn it on. And if you didn't like the video that was on you to sit there for five hours until you add that, you know, Guns and Roses or Nirvana video that came up. The commercials made no sense to me.
And the reality is my parents didn't even let me watch TV. So I kind of had to sneak it on this big television. That was a huge box, right? Now I'm 45 years old, I've got two kids, I live in New York, I lived in California at the time, my TV is on my phone, it's not plugged in.
If I don't want to watch something that I don't want to watch, I don't have to watch it. I am in control of the ads that I see. I can tell Apple, I can tell whoever what I want to see. This is good and bad, right? The good thing is, I now can only be filled with content that makes me happy. That makes me excited that I can only see brands that I like, this is something I'd use. The bad thing is that it removes all serendipity. And it removes all discovery of ideas or concepts of products that I didn't even know I was interested in, or maybe I should be interested in. So what I think the world is dealing with on both the marketing side, and the technologies on the content side is this filter bubble, and I didn't coin that term, I can go my entire year consuming content and media and advertising is only the stuff I know about and like fits me. And I will never be exposed to anything else. This is the divide that I think is like an existential problem for marketers, content creators, for our democracy that we're going through now.
RIO: That's really interesting.
ROSS: Yeah. And I will also say like, going through that five hours on MTV-remember MTV? Remember? You may not have wanted to see a lot of the stuff that came in the middle. But you know, for the fact that *incoherent*-Whitesnake-perfect example, right, like when you have to be faced with these ideas that you don't necessarily want. You're faced with those ideas that you don't necessarily want, you have to grapple with that. It's a very, very strange universe right now where you can only be in front of ideas or products or things that you want to see. I mean, that is good and bad, but it is undiscovered territory. It's only training you to things to buy products you've already bought. Yeah, it's only adding power to companies that already have power and making it harder to crack that. But I think even more than that like we somehow like it. Yeah. And why would any of us possibly like the idea of not hearing other ideas that might be uncomfortable or kind of boring? But every one of us has been like, has heard about something a book, a show a product just out of the blue that we loved. We are making it harder and harder to do that.
