• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, November 2, 2009

MDC Partners has tapped Chris McDonald to advise agencies in bolstering data-mining capabilities and help the holding company evaluate potential acquisition opportunities in the research area.

McDonald, who was executive vice president and general manager at Abacus, heads MDC's newly formed Consumer Insights Group. His role will intersect with MDC's more than 30 agencies that stretch from Crispin Porter + Bogusky to Media Kitchen to Dotglu.

As marketers seek greater ROI via targeted advertising, MDC has pinpointed companies specializing in data handling and analytics as possible expansion turf.

"We are interested in building a portfolio of companies through partnerships and acquisitions that give us more performance-based and addressable marketing and advertising capabilities," McDonald said.

MDC, which has a new 5-year, $75 million revolving credit facility, could continue its model of taking majority stakes in firms.

"To glean behavioral insights about the consumer from (data) and know how to better measure marketing performance and better optimize how you spend your media budget -- that's going to become a competitive necessity for every marketer out there," McDonald said.

At Abacus, a former DoubleClick arm, McDonald oversaw database operations in the business-to-consumer and business-to-business areas in North America. After Abacus, he served as president of market research firm Pluris Marketing.

Addressable advertising has been a cornerstone in the online space for some time. But there is a move to give the capability scale in the television arena, propelled by the increased availability of set-top-box data.

"Marketers have become Google-ized across all forms of media," McDonald said. "Google trained marketers to pay for performance. If people click; if it converts; if there's some sort of action; you pay for it. That thinking is becoming more and more pervasive across the way advertisers work with their budget."

With agencies such as Crispin and Kirshenbaum Bond at MDC, McDonald said: "There is still plenty of room for the big brand idea, but the accountability underneath it is becoming more and more of a requirement."