MDC Partners has created a chief administrative officer role and hired David Dabill to oversee the company’s international growth, financial reporting and overall management.
Dabill was formerly a partner at independent agency Toy, but has also worked at Fallon and Leo Burnett.
“He brings the maturity, wisdom and experience that we find exciting,” said Miles Nadal, MDC chairman and CEO. “Obviously he has great financial-management skills, but he’s exceedingly knowledgeable about the entrepreneurial spirit and DNA that make creative firms succeed.”
Nadal added that MDC is looking to expand the company’s footprint globally, including in Brazil, China and India, in order to better service the growing needs of Fortune 100 clients – and to do so, “you need people with on-the-ground knowledge and experience.”
Most recently, Dabill was at Toy, a shop he helmed with partners Anne Bologna and Ari Merkin. The trio met while working at Fallon’s now-defunct New York outpost. Toy was launched in 2005 when Bologna and Merkin left Fallon to launch their own agency. Dabill joined as partner in early 2006. Toy shut its doors in early 2010 because the agency hadn’t “reached the scale we’d hoped for” in its four-year lifespan, Bologna told Ad Age in February 2010. Merkin is now VP-executive creative director at MDC’s CP&B Miami office.
Prior to his chief operating officer post at Fallon, Mr. Dabill spent more than a decade at Publicis Groupe’s Leo Burnett, a stint that included global finance roles. He began his career as a tax manager at Arthur Andersen.
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