Meet The People, a New York-based marketing holding company, recently entered the pre-packaged software market with a product called MTP Intelligence. It’s designed to optimize the advertising campaigns of the firm’s clients. The software also performs certain related tasks such as finding design inconsistencies in marketing materials. We caught up with Tim Ringel, Meet The People’s co-founder and global CEO, to get a closer look at the technology. We also used the opportunity to dive into the firm’s organizational structure. Meet The People operates 10 agencies that provide marketing and technology consulting services. Ringel explained what benefits that approach brings to the table at a time when several other industry players are consolidating their operating brands.

Boardroom Insight: What kind of internal changes were involved in expanding MTP’s focus from offering professional services to providing AI software?

Tim Ringel: The advertising industry and the agency landscape are in an evolutionary cycle right now. Technologies like AI are liberating the industry from a “you have to have scale to compete” into “if you are clever and fast you can compete” – mindset. I call it a natural progression of the agency industry. There isn’t a lot of change that needs to happen within Meet The People as it’s clear to everyone that AI and our proprietary tools/platform position us for the inevitable future of our services and business model.  

Boardroom Insight: MTP Intelligence ships with a tool called Media Mix Modeling that simulates different marketing budget combinations to find ways of improving campaign ROI. How does the tool work and how can marketers ensure that simulation-generated data is accurate before using it to make decisions?

Tim Ringel: We only offer our proprietary products and solutions to our agency client base. This allows for us to tap real 1st party data and real proprietary media/creative and performance data from our clients in real-time. Our MMM ingests this data, instead of using hypothetical assumptions, to draw real insights from the past 2-3 years into the MMM process. AI has made the aggregation and interpretation of that data so much easier and fast that now, we can offer MMM to any of our clients that we have data access too and model at any frequency needed. It’s beautiful to see! 

Boardroom Insight: What benefits does operating multiple agency brands offer over a single consolidated brand? A number of major market players including S4 Capital, the parent company of ad industry heavyweight Monks, have shifted towards the latter approach in recent years.

Tim Ringel: There are many benefits to either / or model. We don’t compare ourselves to agency groups like Monks or DEPT, even if we do win business from them and pitch against them. The main reason we don’t see ourselves in their domain is that our breath of services and depth of DNA is different. We don’t only operate “in digital”, we love taking traditional signals from retail, creative, traditional media into account when we advise clients on their overall marketing, lead, business growth strategy. The multi-brand setup allows us to operate as extremely deep specialists (physical retail in store in shelf vs. retail media alone) while the MTP umbrella allows us to combine all trades for a client who wants to work with us across all capabilities, at the same time. It’s the perfect setup, especially for mid-market brands looking for a partner that’s at scale and has extremely deep specialized skills across all digital, traditional, and business capabilities needed to drive real growth and ROI for their business. 

Boardroom Insight: Many marketing software vendors offer LLM-powered automation tools as part of their feature sets. Are those automation tools creating competition for agencies?

Tim Ringel: I don’t think they are competing with the agency business model. The main reason for my POV is that agency groups like MTP do not just do one thing. We don’t just do research, or just do content, or just do media buying, we are touching every piece of the journey for a brand and we are bringing it together in a cohesive strategy for the client, marrying their brand, activation, sales and reengagement teams, all in one. LLM agents can replace single work streams but making sense of the architecture of a brand and the differentiation it takes from upper funnel to mid-funnel, to conversion in relation to their competitors and their overall business strategy is something LLMs will struggle with for a long time. Furthermore, our clients trust us with business data you would not trust the blackhole of an LLM with. No executive wants to see their 3-year business plan uploaded into an LLM that’s owned by large tech. It’s too risky.

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