Michael Tabasso remembers the table. It was small, in borrowed space, with no windows. He and Andy Cantos sat head to head, starting the business that became Gen3 Marketing. When he recalled the arrangement on the agency’s eighteenth anniversary, the comparison was a team of 200 people on six continents. The original office had rather less geography.
The room makes an appealing starting point because its occupants already had a history. Tabasso and Cantos had worked together at GSI Commerce and Advanta before establishing Gen3 in 2007. Their company’s name marked their third collaboration. In a business where names often advertise a revolution, theirs kept a record of two people choosing to work together again.
Tabasso, based in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, now serves as Gen3’s co-founder and CEO. The agency is headquartered nearby in Blue Bell, while its work extends internationally. His career follows the expansion of affiliate marketing from a specialist online discipline into a broader conversation about how brands find customers, how publishers earn revenue, and how anyone decides which activity deserves the credit.
There is a human story tucked inside those commercial questions. It concerns colleagues who stay in each other’s orbit, founders who bring their teams into a larger organization, and a customer who eventually crosses the table to join the agency. Tabasso’s business has grown through such connections. For all its digital machinery, it has repeatedly depended on people recognizing people.
Three chapters. The same founding partnership.
A name with a memory
Before Gen3, Tabasso’s work included managing affiliate programs at GSI Commerce, directing business development at UnREAL Marketing, and overseeing online marketing at Advanta. His education included marketing studies at West Chester University and an MBA at Penn State. These were practical preparations for running an agency: retail, business development, and the problem of turning online attention into a commercial result.
The founding decision came with responsibilities outside the office. Cantos later recalled that the pair had five young children between them and no clients when they set out. That detail gives the borrowed room its proper scale. An entrepreneurial beginning can sound adventurous after the outcome is known; at the time, a client list was still something they had to build.
By 2013, Gen3 managed more than 70 programs on the CJ network and had won its 2012 Agency of the Year award. Tabasso’s explanation for the progress began with experience on the ecommerce side. He put profit margins, brand value, compliance, customer experience, and analysis into the same discussion. His compact phrase, “margin matters,” gives the argument its center of gravity.
A campaign can produce a gratifying number while leaving awkward questions for the business paying for it. How much did the sale cost? Was the offer appropriate? Did the experience encourage the customer to return? Tabasso’s emphasis on the wider business helps explain why the agency’s work could reach beyond maintaining an affiliate program. The transaction has consequences after the report has been delivered.
“margin matters”Michael Tabasso · 2013
The people behind the acquisitions
In February 2019, Gen3 acquired Montreal-based OPM Pros. Its founders, Paresh Vadavia and Sonny Lamba, joined the senior management team and continued in their daily roles. Vadavia’s explanation was unusually personal for a transaction announcement: he had known Mike and Andy throughout his time in affiliate marketing, and praised their integrity and attention to clients.
The relationship had a photographic history, too. In an anniversary retrospective, Vadavia shared pictures from the industry’s earlier years and from the 2019 partnership announcement in Montreal. Tabasso appears among the colleagues gathered together. Acquisitions are usually recorded as dates and company names; these pictures preserve the less formal version, with people standing beside the people they would later build with.
Another acquisition followed in January 2020: AffiliateManager.com, based in Orlando, and its paid search division, The Performance Company. Founder Mike Nunez joined Gen3. The deal added both affiliate expertise and paid search capability. Tabasso’s public welcome stressed Nunez’s standing in the industry and the team’s reputation for looking after clients. Familiarity again appeared beside the commercial rationale.
Outside capital was part of the expansion. LaSalle Capital’s August 2020 exit announcement described three years of organic sales growth and two sizable acquisitions. Tabasso thanked the firm for its support and capital resources. The acknowledgment is a useful corrective to the solitary-founder portrait: the company’s development involved financial partners as well as the two people who had started it.
In 2021, Gen3 acquired Optimus Performance Marketing in Plymouth, England. Its founders, Mark Russell and Bruce Clayton, joined in executive roles to lead expansion in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific. Tabasso highlighted their years of serving clients. For the agency, geographic growth arrived with operators who already understood the markets they would help it enter.
Comvest Partners announced a strategic investment that September. By then, Gen3 had operations in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Tabasso connected the investment to further spending on the company’s capabilities and team. The office that began with two familiar colleagues was becoming an organization with more people, more locations, and more decisions to coordinate.
Five agencies, one front door
OAK Digital joined in December 2021. Founded by Amit Khera, it brought an emphasis on direct-to-consumer brands and content publishers. Khera described a decade-long relationship with Andy and Mike. Again, the announcement contained a history longer than the transaction itself. A new business combination could be announced in a day; the acquaintance behind it had taken considerably longer.
OAK’s work included strategy, recruiting content publishers, management, and analytics. Its addition widened the agency’s content offering. That matters to the shape of Tabasso’s career: affiliate marketing increasingly overlaps with the places where shoppers read, compare, and make up their minds. The agency needed relationships with those publishers alongside the systems that recorded a sale.
In January 2023, Gen3 brought the acquired brands together under a single identity. Five agencies now shared one name. The consolidation also introduced a Premium Content team combining affiliate and public relations approaches. The company’s expansion had reached another stage: assembling the businesses was followed by bringing their work into a common offer.
An acquisition list makes growth look tidy. Integration asks less tidy questions about who does what, how information travels, and which experience a customer receives. Gen3 described the consolidation in terms of shared resources, data, relationships, and services. Those are the working materials of a larger agency, but their value depends on the organization being able to put them together.
Today, Gen3’s services span affiliate marketing, influencer work, paid media, SEO, and performance PR. Its public company history describes more than 200 professionals across six continents and programs for hundreds of businesses. Tabasso’s biography identifies building and scaling the agency as his career highlight. The achievement is an organization, with all the coordination that word implies.
- Gen3 acquired OPM Pros in Montreal.
- Gen3 acquired AffiliateManager.com and its paid search division.
- Gen3 acquired Optimus Performance Marketing and OAK Digital; Comvest announced a strategic investment.
- The agency consolidated its acquired brands under the Gen3 name.
- Gen3 announced Strategy and Delivery Operations divisions and new analytics and customer leadership.
A customer changes sides
The next turn came in March 2026, when Gen3 announced dedicated Strategy and Delivery Operations divisions. It also named Chris Sementa vice president of Analytics and Harvey Bierman its first chief customer officer. After years of adding businesses and capabilities, the agency was changing the way responsibility moved through the business.
Bierman’s appointment supplies the most revealing detail. He had been a Gen3 customer three times before joining the company. Tabasso emphasized that experience when explaining the choice. An agency can ask customers what they expect; here, it hired someone who had repeatedly occupied the position of expecting it. The customer’s side of the table acquired an executive chair.
Tabasso’s own announcement returned to the belief he and Cantos had held when starting out: brands should receive measurable results from a performance marketing partner. He presented the new structure as a way to give customers greater strategic depth and put colleagues in roles where they could do their best work. The ambition had become organizational as well as commercial.
The agency’s updated analytics practice focuses on attribution and incrementality. In ordinary language, those questions concern what receives credit and what actually contributes additional business. Gen3 is also investing in visibility within AI-driven search and discovery. The routes through which customers encounter a brand keep changing, and the agency’s responsibilities change with them.
Harvey Bierman’s history with Gen3 before becoming its first chief customer officer.
The table gets bigger
Tabasso’s published guide to partnership marketing looks across affiliates, creators, strategic alliances, and other relationships through which brands reach customers. It treats the choice of partners and the alignment of incentives as central work. The vocabulary has broadened since his early affiliate roles, but the underlying arrangement remains recognizable: different businesses need a reason to help each other succeed.
The anniversary message gave credit to the people who had helped Gen3, past and present. It ended with an invitation to keep going. That combination of gratitude and continuation is a fitting place to leave this chapter. The company has accumulated acquisitions, investors, international operations, and specialist teams; Tabasso still describes its history through the people involved.
The small table is therefore more than a pleasing before picture. It holds the first relationship in a business built around relationships. Cantos and Tabasso had already worked together twice. They made the third collaboration their own, then kept inviting other people into it. The name stayed Gen3. The seating arrangements became considerably more complicated.