Q&A with Jason Kopeloff: Leverage Your Media Finance Talent to Power Strategy & Innovation
As media finance becomes more central to agency operations, the need for innovative solutions is greater than ever. In this conversation, Jessie De Luca sits down with Jason Kopeloff, CFO of Hudson MX and former CFO at Assembly, a Stagwell media agency, to explore how modern technology is reshaping media finance. Drawing from his extensive experience, Jason discusses the common challenges agencies face and how dedicated tools like the MX Platform are empowering finance teams to take on a more strategic, value-driven role in their organizations.
Jessie De Luca: Hello and welcome. Thank you for joining the conversation with Jason Kopeloff Hudson MX’s CFO, and the previous CFO at Assembly, a Stagwell media agency. With his background, Jason is in the unique position to be able to speak to the pain points of managing media finance without the right tools is the future of the media finance profession now that modern technology is available, Jason is passionate about moving finance from a back office function to client finance or front office, where they can provide value to the rest of the organization. Jason, thank you for joining.
What does modern, dedicated media finance software mean to you?
Historically, when I worked at agencies, media software seemed a barrier to progress and likened to a necessary evil. But to me, modern software should allow users to spend less time doing and more time thinking. What this means in real terms is analyzing data for actionable insight. In the end, the purpose is to help our clients make smarter business decisions. Modern software should be a tool to help achieve that.
Working in a media agency and a media landscape, every CFO in media deals with and worries about the timely reconciliation of invoices that allow fluid payments to your partners. As an agency, you're handling your clients’ money, which are really large sums of funds, requiring a heightened sense of fiscal responsibility. You want it to be on top of it because that volume is quite error-prone. I always treated our media partners just as important as our clients because, in some ways, you even have to pay more attention to them. After all, they're servicing all your clients. So you have this one-to-many relationship; if you fail there, you will fail with many of your constituents. I would also say, in addition, from a cash flow perspective, whether you're billing on estimates or you're billing on actuals, you really have to keep track of all of this data and a modern system, and you have to give the people on your teams the tools to be able to reconcile, not just efficiently and quickly, but also accurately. And so it's very important from a risk management perspective, but also a cashflow management perspective.
Why is media vendor invoice reconciliation so challenging—and what happens when it goes wrong?
Some of the things that come to mind are that it's sort of a there's mismatch between how a client governs their budgets and how an agency looks at it. For instance, a client may use purchase orders, but on the agency side, you're using estimates and media authorizations to track and then tying your partner invoices as a kind of third metric or a third way to track. And sometimes, tying those invoices back to the root budgets can be cumbersome and inefficient. So that's one challenge when you think about it. Partners don't necessarily send the invoices in groupings that the brand or agency purchase them by. This makes it difficult to tie the invoices back to the requisite box. There can be minor discrepancies due to click fraud or invalid traffic that can cause this matching to break. Partners may give credits in large lump sums that don't indicate how you should be breaking it out, what campaigns they have to do with what buy detail, etc., which could cause audit and compliance headaches.
Also, many times, there will be instances where one party buys the media, but another party pays for the media. So you want to ensure this is tracked accurately and the buying system is correct; otherwise, you may be accidentally paying for media covered elsewhere or in terms of makers or other media. You want to make sure that it's flowing correctly and not being flagged to pay when you're not wanting to pay it because it's a lot more challenging to get that money in the right spot once it leaves the door. And you can add a lot of time to the workflow. And I would say the last piece that was challenging or can be difficult is if none of this works correctly. There's a problem with cash flow management; the sequential liability bottleneck grows and grows and grows, causing a massive downward spiral. You have to build your clients so you can pay a partner. So you can reconcile and then build on actuals and adjust.
It's a very delicate and circular process. It's a very delicate dance. We do in finance.
I would say audibility. You can have audit logs that tell you when things change, who changes them, how they change every step of the way. So any third party can come in relatively quickly and have access to an open system that really can save a lot of time in their audits by minimizing these discrepancies.
Another considerable benefit is adding much-needed insight into cash flow. So not just having data come in and out, but also seeing what's forecast based on the media that's bought or planned to be bought. So you can look a month to three months ahead to see how things are going to ebb and flow and to track the timing of these payments. The timing of media is all important.
The system itself uplevels or upskills the client finance team. It can help move them from the back office to a more strategic partner with the internal teams.
You're not just a data processor, you're leaning on the system to compute things. The system allows humans to use their mind and analyze rather than just processing. And then, because of the way our workflows and our system works and how things flow between the teams, you have your client finance teams embedded with your media and account teams because essentially you become your clients outsourced finance group. So the more embedded you are, the more upstream you are with your client and the better it is for everyone.
I also think that our system allows flexibility, even to the point where you can have your client finance so knowledgeable about the business that they're helping with pitches and articulate the value the client finance brings via the system.
Why does successful retail media buying rely on a modern system like the MX Platform?
In my history, I hadn't spent much time working with retail media, and as a media type at Hudson, we have clients who buy retail media. So I learned how in that space working with Amazon and Walmart, the gap between the cost of media and the measurable impact of that media is really as close as you can possibly get. You need modern technology to keep track of these sorts of new KPIs in real time.
What about Hudson excites you for the future?
As we continue to grow and build the next generation of media-buying software, I think we're creating new ways of working. It's not just about the software itself, but about the people who do the work.
For instance, having actionable data coming in real-time or near real time, being able to scale the platform as the industry changes because the way it's built is dynamic, it can be adjusted very quickly. Senior executives won't have to wait for all this data. They'll be able to look at things in real-time. Dashboard infographics, things like that. That's the type of valuable insight I think Hudson can lend in different views for different people, adjusted for what they need, at what time throughout the workday.
I'm also excited about the coming of artificial intelligence into the media workflow and how it could help the users make better decisions. How Hudson's continuing to break new ground, connecting the data where it exists from all the different transaction points and funneling it to who needs it. The most at any given point in the day.
And finally, with all that said, I would say how we work with people and how we work with clients of brands excites me the most. It's such a collaborative approach. I might be aging myself a bit here by saying this, but it's not like you're going to CompUSA and pulling a piece of software off the shelf and putting in a register, and then that's it, right? You're on your own when you work with Hudson.
We're not just dropping the software in your lap. You're buying all the years of expertise in the media we have. We partner with you every step of the way. It's a true partnership. It's not just a vendor-client relationship. It's a it's a partner relationship. we look forward to partnering with all of these exciting new brands as agencies as they go into the next evolution of their own business.
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About the Interviewee
Jason Kopeloff
Chief Financial Officer, Hudson MX
Before joining the Hudson MX executive team in 2021, Jason was CFO at Assembly U.S. following significant advertising finance experience at other top industry firms. Jason has brought positive change to corporate infrastructure from an operational and financial perspective with 20 years of media and marketing agency experience. Connect with Jason here.
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