Carol Krol

Holding company MDC Partners announced December 15 that it has acquired a majority stake in agency 72andSunny. It did not disclose terms of the deal. The Los Angeles-based agency's clients include Hewlett-Packard Co., CKE Restaurants and Nike, which it won this year.

All of the news and news leads here in the Direct Marketing News newsroom today centered on mobile marketing. Two studies and a marketing campaign in particular stood out and underscored growth in the sector. One study, from BIA/Kelsey, was bullish on ad revenue potential, predicting mobile will grow to $2.9 billion by 2014. The prediction represents a compound annual growth of 43% for the sector, which brought in $491 million in 2009.

Dependable and accessible high-speed wireless has become a critical component of hotel service to guests, but many hotels are still lacking the infrastructure

Value. As I perused the final draft pages of this month's issue, it struck me how many of our stories involve the idea of providing value to customers.

Infogroup and Name Dynamics will announce a partnership on November 30, Direct Marketing News has learned. The deal calls for UniversalBusinessListing.org, Name Dynamics' business data and reputation monitoring service, to provide expanded business listing data for the Infogroup Express Update product, part of the Infogroup Licensing division. Express Update provides data for most major search platforms and navigation systems.

Forbes Media named veteran media executive Mike Perlis president and CEO on November 15. Perlis was most recently a general partner at SoftBank Capital, a venture firm specializing in digital and Internet-based properties. He focused on companies including Associated Content, BeliefNet and Huffington Post while at the firm.

KeyBank, a division of KeyCorp, was spending an inordinate amount of time and budget on the creative portion of its direct marketing efforts to consumers and small business customers.

Poison front man Bret Michaels as savvy marketer? Don't laugh.

Ed Mallin, president of Infogroup's services group, will leave the company after more than two decades there in mid-November. Franklin Rios, currently president of Infogroup's enterprise solutions division, will replace him.

EBay announced October 15 that it has named Richelle Parham CMO for eBay North America. It is a newly created position, the company said.