Two of the biggest names in Boston’s advertising circles have teamed up.
Connelly Partners announced on Tuesday that it has acquired McCarthy Mambro Bertino, a smaller ad agency and longtime neighbor in the South End, for an undisclosed amount. MMB cofounder Fred Bertino will work with Connelly Partners chief executive Steve Connelly, overseeing a marketing group that will keep the MMB name; partner Jamie Mambro has sold his stake and is no longer involved.
They’re two of the largest independent agencies in Boston, in an industry that’s often dominated by the mega holding companies like Omnicom and IPG (which are in the midst of their own, much bigger merger).
Connelly and Bertino have long shared the same parking lot, working in buildings owned by Mario Nicosia’s GTI properties.
“Freddie would park his car and turn left, I would park my car and turn right, and we would have lunch every now and then,” Connelly said.
In the past year, Bertino moved MMB into Connelly’s spacious digs at 46 Waltham St., and the two firms began bidding on jobs together.
“We’ve had a chance to ‘date’ while living together,” Connelly said. “It just kept making more and more sense. We were pitching things together. He was using our folks. We were using his folks.”
The two have known each other since the 1990s when they both worked for other firms, Connelly at Ingalls Advertising and Bertino at Hill Holliday. Both launched their own firms around the turn of the century. Bertino said his first client was Jim Koch at Boston Beer, to promote Koch’s new light beer at the time; MMB was often seen as punching above its weight, chasing after national clients, and winning over many of them, most notably Subway.
As the industry consolidated, Connelly Partners emerged as the biggest independent agency in the city, with additional services such as media buying and data analytics that MMB did not offer; Bertino said he’s happy to finally have those tools at his disposal. (Connelly also expanded to Vancouver and Dublin.) They see their firm’s independence as giving them an edge, as they don’t have to report profits up to an out-of-town holding company.
Connelly employs about 175 people today, including 100 in Boston. That number includes 20 people who came over from MMB, such as David Register, now Executive Creative Director at Connelly. Both firms had layoffs in the past year as the overall industry retrenched in part due to uncertainty around trade and tariffs.
Now, Connelly and Bertino are talking about growing again, building off recent wins such as an expansion of their relationship with Yale New Haven Health.
“We just felt like now is the time to get it all under one roof,” Bertino said. “That seems to be what clients want today.”
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