• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, September 23, 2013

Growing advertising businesses take risk for advertising holding company MDC Partners -- as well as coming up short from time to time.

“We want to fail -- but we want to fail real small,” says Miles Nadal, chairman/CEO of MDC Partners, speaking at OMMA Global at Advertising Week conference.

“We think of ourselves a startup,” says Nadal, who wants to continually add staff and companies from a number of backgrounds. “We don’t care where they come from. Everybody should come from a diversity of skills...I hope we find more and more firms."
With that process, Nadal says, "we have created more value in the past 12 months than than last twenty years.”

In the future, Nadal believes that “technology, analytics, and insight will be the key drivers.” He adds: “I don’t care about speed, but I care about effectiveness.... Speed without genius doesn’t work."