MDC culls senior management line-up – is this an opportunity for S4C’s Sir Martin Sorrell?

MDC Partners, which owns Anomaly and 72andSunny among others, had a decent 2017 after years of under-performance but it looks like the wheels might be coming off in 2018.

Its Q1 results were described as “unacceptable” by CEO Scott Kauffman and now Kauffman is culling the senior management team, most notably CMO Bob Kantor.

Kantor (left) seemed highly valued; according to Ad Age he was paid nearly $1.3m in 2017 including a $500,000 performance related bonus.

MDC says: “As we look to the future and refine the structure of our organization to best support our clients and agency partners, we made the difficult decision to part ways with a small handful of individuals within our corporate team.”

MDC is pretty friendless in financial markets with a market capitalisation of just $311m. It reports its Q2 earnings on August 2.

Its fortunes, or lack of them, won’t have escaped the attention of S4Capital’s Sir Martin Sorrell who could, if he wished, snap up a gaggle of creative agencies and others with some sort of presence around the world for not much more than he paid for Dutch production company MediaMonks.

Sorrell might not fancy spending the final phase of his career sorting out creative agencies although MDC has other companies in it that may better meet his requirement of a combination of technology, data and content. But he’ll be taking a close look at the small print in the numbers later this week.