Stake-Taking Tops Buying

The shops need cash to realize their goals faster and are willing to trade some equity to get it. Anomaly and 72andSunny aspire to become global micro networks a la Wieden + Kennedy and Bartle Bogle Hegarty with offices in key hubs like South America, Europe and Asia. After talking to a handful of holding companies and private equity firms, each agency sold a majority stake to MDC, in part because of MDC CEO Miles Nadal’s reputation for being a hands-off owner.

While leaving equity on the table is hardly a new strategy in the realm of mergers and acquisitions, MDC nonetheless deserves “credit for coming up with a way of presenting a package that looks very attractive to certain kinds of entrepreneurs who love their independence and are able to retain it to a very large degree,” said Seth Alpert, a managing director at M&A firm AdMedia Partners in New York. Alpert compared Nadal’s approach of taking majority stakes and leaving equity with principals as “similar to the private equity model, and he ends up with a portfolio. But the key difference is he’s not a re-seller.”
David Jones, global CEO of Havas, which took a 51 percent stake in Socialistic and an estimated 35 percent stake in Camp+King

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