• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, December 6, 2012

While stopping short of calling it official guidance for next year, David Doft, CFO at agency holding company MDC Partners, said the company currently believes it can achieve between 5% and 7% organic revenue growth in 2013.

That’s in line with what the company expects to achieve in 2012. In the third quarter of this year, MDC posted organic growth of 6.7%, higher than most of its holding company competitors.

Doft commented on the future growth prospects for the company at this week’s UBS media conference in New York.

He noted that the company’s European offices -- including locations in the UK, the Netherlands and Sweden -- are on track to break even next year, roughly 24 months after they were launched. For the first nine months of 2012, those offices grew their combined revenue by 80% -- albeit from a small base -- as 95% of the company’s revenue is still generated in North America.

Europe, said Doft, “is the beginning” of the holding company’s overseas expansion. Some of the company’s agencies are now working with local partners in Latin America and Asia to service global accounts. Doft said it was likely that the holding company would establish its own presence in those regions “in the next couple of years.” Servicing clients with global interests “is a big opportunity for us,” he said.

Doft said media revenues now account for nearly 10% of the company’s total business. In the past year, MDC went on a media agency-buying spree, acquiring shops such as TargetCast, R.J. Palmer and IMS. Scaling up in media, Doft said, allows the company to pursue bigger pieces of business on its own. Before the media scale-up, he said, “it was frustrating for us because we had the creative firepower, but we’d have to partner with” outside media shops on some larger pitches. “Now we can keep it in-house.”

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