• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, September 12, 2018

It’s been a big day for holding company leadership news. Publicis Groupe’s Arthur Sadoun, a year and three months on the job, received a four-year contract extension, as did other Management Board members including Steve King, who oversees the holding company’s media agency operations.

That makes sense. The holding company spent years looking for Maurice Levy’s replacement and let’s face it—it’s a huge job in an industry facing massive change on a daily basis. Sadoun has spent the last year assembling his team and getting to know the company inside-out. He deserves more time to prove his mettle in the job and he’s getting it.

At the other end of the scale, MDC Partners announced that Scott Kauffman is stepping down as CEO after three plus years on the job. The announcement came after the markets closed today. The stock was up nearly 6% in after-hours trading on the news.

MDC’s financials have been pretty ugly the last couple of quarters and there has been lots of speculation about the company being in play. And Kauffman was dealt a bad hand from the get-go. He succeeded the disgraced Miles Nadal, who was ousted in the summer of 2015 after using the public company as his personal piggybank. I don’t think the company ever really recovered.

Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital is considered a potential acquirer of MDC or some of its assets. Sorrell issued a statement today commenting on the prospectus issued a day earlier providing details about the company’s proposed reverse takeover of Derriston Capital, with plans to be trading on the London Stock Exchange later this month.

In the statement, Sorrell talked about expansion plans for recently acquired MediaMonks before launching into a tirade about industry change and modest GDP growth, which you’ve heard from him before if you listened to the last two dozen analyst conference calls he presided over before exiting WPP earlier this year. I don’t think Mark Read has uttered a single public thought about GDP since taking de facto control of WPP after Sorrell’s departure in April.

Anyway Sir Martin ended his statement on an upbeat note. After going over well-trod ground about increased competition he concluded, “Whilst this is a very challenging environment in many respects, the industry’s scale and continued growth, particularly in the digital, media and data areas offer tremendous opportunity to well-funded, agile and entrepreneurial disrupters.”

 I think MDC Partners could use a little disrupting.