A reporter from Toronto’s Globe and Mail had a sit down at One Restaurant in Yorkville’s Hazelton Hotel with MDC Partners founder and Chariman, Miles Nadal.
“Everyone always makes fun of me because I have a multitude of devices,” he explains, pulling from his pocket a $60 no-name cellphone, of which he says he bought 20. Why 20? “Because inevitably when you like something, they discontinue them,” he says. When he found a fax machine he liked, he bought four. “Invariably, that will break down. Something will happen, or there will be a part missing, and for me, life is about instantaneous solutions.”
“I always manage everything in life about contingencies – because I never want to be in a position to be disappointed.”
Really? That doesn’t sound healthy to me.
At any rate, let’s hear how Nadal sees his holding company as being distinct from the rest.
He insists that the approach of much larger advertising holding companies like Omnicom and WPP, stacked with agencies that do everything from strategic planning to media buying and creative duties, is a turnoff for clients. “Scale, multi-national, multi-service, multi-office is a negative,” he says. “A negative for the ability to drive creativity, innovation, and that kind of nimble performance, because scale and innovation are to some degree mutually exclusive.”
It’s funny how relative “nimble performance” can be. When you work at a small independent firm, MDC Partners (which has ownership stakes in Crispin Porter & Bogusky, Colle&McVoy, Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners, Vitro, Attention and Bruce Mau Design, among others) seems like a monolithic institution and their $80 mil in revenue as untouchable.