The last time I saw Michael Kassan was, quite naturally, in Cannes, at the Carlton Beach Club on the Croisette, five years ago. I was having lunch with a certain former magazine editor and executive who called the affable and conspicuously-tanned trade marketing entrepreneur over to our table and insisted that “I must know Michael,” because “Michael knows everyone,” and “Michael runs all of this,” which I took to mean that he owned the annual advertising festival. Not quite. In fact, at that point, Kassan had just sold his strategic advisory firm MediaLink to the festival’s owners. But the deal formalized his self-ascribed role as “Mr. Cannes,” the conference’s de facto ambassador and its omnipresent heavy on the weeklong party circuit. A few years later, Kassan would mount an ill-fated bid to buy the festival, but it died in the crib.