Scaling a Successful Marketing Agency: Insights from Tim Ringel

Mike Lander (02:09.655)
Tim, thanks ever so much for joining us on Hegel, the B2B Sales Club podcast. Delighted to have you with us.

Tim Ringel (02:19.938)
Great, amazing.

Tim Ringel (02:30.562)
Thank you, Mike. Thanks for having me.

Mike Lander (02:32.735)
I'm really looking forward to this because we had a pre-recording session. I laughed and I really had to think. So it should be an interesting exploratory discussion about all things to do commercial and agencies. So just before we start off, a bit of background about who are you, what do you do, and what's your kind of background.

Tim Ringel (02:38.902)
I'm sorry.

Tim Ringel (02:42.375)
Excellent.

Tim Ringel (02:51.422)
Okay, cool. So I'm a serial entrepreneur. I'm 47 years old. I have I married and have two children teenagers. So you can probably relate to what my day to day life looks like when I'm at home. I have built digital agencies my entire life. I started my first company together with a friend of mine from out of college that became one of the leading digital performance marketing agencies in

Mike Lander (03:04.887)
Absolutely.

Tim Ringel (03:19.942)
the German speaking markets. I sold that with 33. I started with 21, sold it with 33. And then I built another company where we rolled up multiple performance marketing agencies headquartered in Paris. That company became nearly a thousand people. I sold my piece of that. And I think one of the funny stories about building that company out of Paris was that I failed 10th grade because of my French.

Mike Lander (03:36.427)
Bye, y'all.

Tim Ringel (03:49.194)
So I ended up running a stock market listed company in Paris with my extremely bad school French. And to this day, I do wish that I would meet my French teacher on the street at some point, just to tell her the story of how...

Mike Lander (03:54.067)
Okay?

Mike Lander (03:59.095)
Well, without speaking French. Oh dear, okay.

Mike Lander (04:11.979)
Well, obviously some of it rubbed off, which is good, Tim.

Tim Ringel (04:14.818)
Well, absolutely, absolutely. And that's why I'm so confident with my bad French nowadays. Anyways, so we built this business for four and a half years, and then I sold my equity in that business. And then I moved to America because every bloke who makes it in Europe wants to make it in America, right? So I decided to move to New York city. And again, they are built an agency for inter-public group of companies.

Mike Lander (04:35.339)
Sure.

Tim Ringel (04:43.638)
really the only time where I wasn't entrepreneurial as such because I worked for one of the large holding companies for three years. I inherited a business with what they thought was 500 people. It ended up being actually 800 people that I inherited in 50 locations in the world, also performance marketing agency. And I promised them I gonna double the size of the business because they were trying to compete with performance and I prospect at the time. And they just didn't have an offering at the time.

Mike Lander (05:12.843)
That was brave, Tim. That was brave.

Tim Ringel (05:13.242)
I left, sorry. Yeah, well, but you know, honestly, I was comfortable with the scale, because 500 people, 1000 people is kind of the same problems, right? It's just, you know, and in this case, this was multi-market, but majority in the US and mine was multi-market. We missed 1000 people out of Paris, we had 25 offices, 17 markets in Europe, Middle East and Asia. So if I can do that, I can definitely do America in terms of like

Mike Lander (05:19.67)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Lander (05:40.478)
Exactly.

Tim Ringel (05:41.11)
You know, 500 people in the US shouldn't be in one language, one and a half languages shouldn't be such a challenge. Right. And if I can, if I can wing it in France, I can wing it in the US. That was kind of my assumption. Um, um, I ended up leaving IPG after three years point to the dot because I signed up for three years. That was the whole deal because I really wanted to build an agency, not really just to run it. Right. Um, but I left the company with 3000 people and

Mike Lander (05:44.235)
Ha ha ha.

Tim Ringel (06:08.118)
haven't had tripled the scale and made it extremely profitable. Because performance marketing in large holding companies is so easy. Why? Because as an entrepreneur, and you know this, you build your company based on who you are and what your relationships are. Right? Like you are the first person people see and you're the last person people see. That's how it works. And I always had to work really hard to win business. Really hard. Nobody.

Mike Lander (06:25.651)
Yeah, yeah. Correct. Yeah.

Tim Ringel (06:36.99)
phones you when you're nobody and says, I want to work with you. Right. So, but, but when you're sitting exactly, and when you sit at the holding companies, they drink out of this endless water hose of leads. Like people just call them because they exist for, for 60 years, WPP for 20 something years. They are the brands in the market you call when you have money to spend in advertising. Right. And so all they did, all their sales team had to do.

Mike Lander (06:42.788)
I know it Tim? Don't I know it? Exactly.

Tim Ringel (07:06.75)
was take a lead, put it on the pile, go on the pile, no go. And as I'm an entrepreneur, everything they would say they don't go for, I would go for. So it wasn't really difficult because the stuff was just coming in. You just had to say, I go for it. And then you see what you get and what you don't. So it was beautifully easy to do. It was culturally difficult because you're trying to build something within an established environment of CEOs who have climbed these ladders for 15 years.

Mike Lander (07:13.024)
Mm-hmm.

Thanks.

Tim Ringel (07:36.43)
proving themselves and earning their stripes. And then this entrepreneur comes around and says, I can triple this in three years, blah, blah. So I had a lot of fun. I learned, I always say like, I wanted to be on the dark side for a little bit to understand what I can learn from the people that I have fought for so many years before. So I left after three years and then had a two year stint in a creative agency, creative and studio. Why? Because...

I had a big realization in IPG. Even if I look at the decks and the presentations and the thinking we put into the pitches we won when I had 1,000 people in performance marketing and compare that to how a creative agency pitches, it's completely different. Right? So.

Mike Lander (08:22.151)
In what way, Tim? So we've got some questions, but I'm gonna come explore this a bit more. How is that so different? Because surely it's the same problem statement the client's got and similar approach and...

Tim Ringel (08:29.266)
Oh, it's very different. You would think so. A digital media agency approaches a pitch traditionally from an ROI perspective. What's probably the return on investment? You immediately fall into the trap of talking tactics and you fall into the trap of talking rates. That's a typical media agency pitch. When I worked at IPG, so that would be a

That was how I approached pitching as a 150 people business out of Germany and probably 1,000 people business in Europe, Middle East, and Asia. We were very good at the tactics. We know everything about the latest feature, in the latest ad center, whatever it was, how to improve your conversion rate, how to make this financially viable for you as a client. This is how I won business. Then I go to the public group, and they have these amazing creative thinkers that cost an arm and a leg.

Mike Lander (09:21.94)
Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ringel (09:23.81)
who are not measurable at all, who live somewhere in the cloud in their heads, right? And they walk into these rooms, and you have beautiful thought-through processes and thinking how your brand is so valuable and how what we spend here just feeds into the awareness and valuability of your brand, where I'm like, where's the tangible ROI? And they're like, doesn't matter. Because at that scale, when you pitch a billion dollars media,

You are clearly talking to procurement about the rates you purchased the media down the road, but that's not how you win the pitch. That is a really important component because no matter if you're WP, Omnicom, Pimlitz, IPG, your rate's going to be pretty good because you're buying at scale. So yeah, there is a component of the rates make a difference, but the differentiation wasn't the rates. The differentiation was the...

Mike Lander (09:59.925)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (10:10.071)
Correct.

Mike Lander (10:15.831)
But in reality, correct, because in reality, they've all got scale. So therefore the rates would be at that end of the market. The rates should be quite similar.

Tim Ringel (10:21.394)
Exactly. That's right. But that's not how you rule the CMO. That's not how you rule the CEO, because they look at the procurement department and say, like, do the rates match up? Right? And then we're going to adjust. So they had to win the room with their creative thinking. What creative is going to resonate the best with the audience rather than what is delivering the best

Mike Lander (10:29.374)
No, no.

Tim Ringel (10:50.814)
I realized that I don't value creative enough. I don't value the process of creative enough to be able to tell the story. But I did have a general belief, a deep belief that I never understood why creative and media were so separate in large agencies as well, right? Why would the people who come up with the logo and the color and the font who spent hours and hours and hours, days that are paid for millions of dollars to come up with...

Mike Lander (10:54.283)
Oh...

Mike Lander (10:58.55)
Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ringel (11:18.326)
why the font of a can of soda is the font a can of soda has. And then the person who buys programmatic has never heard the story. Doesn't even know why it's red. So that disconnect made no sense to me. But I also wasn't educated enough, because I'm a college dropout, serial entrepreneur who doesn't know anything he doesn't know. So I never thought about, I never learned about the power of color, the power of fonts, the power of a logo. I knew how to sell products online.

Mike Lander (11:38.871)
What?

Mike Lander (11:44.689)
Mm-hmm.

Tim Ringel (11:48.458)
For me, my logical next step was I needed to be involved in a creative agency. I really wanted to understand how can I tie creative and media closer together. Right? So after IPG, I left IPG and I bought into a company called Spring Studios. And this company is world famous, I would say, in the luxury industry, because any luxury brand that wants to be someone creates, uses their studios, their event spaces, and all their creative chops.

and we worked for really any luxury brand you can imagine. And if anyone understands creative and longevity of brand, it's the luxury industry, right? So I signed up there as global CEO for a reason, and I bought equity in the business because I really wanted to understand how that side of our industry looks like and how it operates. I joined there September 19. I got the business to a 100 million net revenue run rate.

Mike Lander (12:24.831)
Absolutely. Yeah.

Tim Ringel (12:44.95)
within a few months, we were 350 people, and then the pandemic came. And then a business that was really, really reliant on actual in-person shoots of content and events and whatnot, just all of a sudden stopped overnight. And we had to go from scaling a business to a really valuable size into making sure the business survives the pandemic. Right. So.

Mike Lander (12:50.512)
All right. Yeah.

Mike Lander (13:02.036)
stopped overnight. Yeah.

Tim Ringel (13:15.402)
But as an entrepreneur, yet again, as someone who, like I started my first business with two people in the basement, literally, right? And I knew what it meant not knowing how to pay my people because that's what happens to every entrepreneur if you don't take external capital at some point in your journey, right? So going through that experience again was very, very interesting, very intense, very interesting. And we tried to do the best we could to our people, to our clients. And I can report back the agency exists.

It survived the pandemic and it is probably bigger and better than it was ever before. Right. So we did, it seems we did everything right in that time, but having done that for two years, I then realized, okay, now it's time for me, now it's time for me to do what I really came to America to do. And that is build my own business again. Right. And this is where I started, uh, meet the people, um, my new generation, not anti-holding company, um,

Mike Lander (13:45.836)
Very good.

Tim Ringel (14:13.462)
in September 21. We started the company in June, I joined in September.

Mike Lander (14:17.975)
And what's the uniqueness of Meet the People? What exactly is it?

Tim Ringel (14:20.63)
Well, in the end, nothing is really unique, right? If you're not the inventor of the next TikTok, you're probably never gonna really be super unique. But I think, right, that's probably the better question. So as, again, as an entrepreneur, you build businesses on the back of your experiences, right? That's how you do it. And I have certain experience I really loved and I have certain experience I really didn't like and inefficiencies I saw in the industry that really inspired me to do it differently.

Mike Lander (14:26.068)
Ultimately, yeah, what's different?

Tim Ringel (14:50.538)
So what I really loved, I'm not even talking about my first business. Like I love that business was incredible. It's like, it's like your first child. It's amazing people, amazing clients. What an experience. How blessed am I to have had that experience? Right. Um, but what I really value because my first business was very German, Germany, Switzerland, we had an office in London, San Francisco and Hong Kong, but it was a very German company in itself. What I really appreciated.

was the multicultural aspect of the second business, where we had these 25 offices in 17 markets and where we were winning Emirate Airlines and building a business in Dubai out of nothing, right? Like these experiences were absolutely stunning. So I loved the entrepreneurial drive and spirit of that business and how we managed it from a cultural perspective. But I want to combine it with the professionalism I encountered at the large holding company.

You know, and I talked a little bit about the way how they pitch. So my vision was like, number one, bring creative and media together. Like absolutely nonsensical that this stuff is separate between an RGA or McCann and the UM and initiative makes no sense that these people don't talk. Right. No sense, not for the client, not for the team. It makes sense for the holding company because that's a way to extract more profits, but if we read honest about it, it delivers a bad product because of these people don't talk, you're wasting time and money, right? So.

Mike Lander (15:48.821)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ringel (16:17.702)
not really client centric, the approach. So I want to change that. That's number one. Number two, what I don't like or didn't like in the industry is because I did build businesses on the back of mergers and acquisition, M&A, right? So acquiring businesses as well. So, right. So what I didn't like was that a lot of M&A, when you sell your business as a seller, the business kind of disappears within a structure within a few years, right?

Mike Lander (16:30.559)
Yep, which we're going to talk about in a second. Yeah.

Tim Ringel (16:44.458)
When you sell your business, you usually have some money upfront and then some more money to get through what we call earn-out deal, right? So you can earn more. So after the earn-out, most of the companies that my friends built at the time disappeared because they got absorbed by WPP, Brent got taken away, the founders left, all the people who actually made it successful left. And that's so inefficient. It makes no sense to me, right? So

Mike Lander (16:51.515)
Exactly correct.

Tim Ringel (17:09.746)
I wanted, because we're building Meet the People on the back of M&A, so we're acquiring agencies, right? And I said, I'm not... Yep. Oh, absolutely.

Mike Lander (17:14.391)
Okay, so you're basically you're a platform. So you've built a platform and then you're acquiring businesses. And are you integrating those businesses or are you leaving the brands?

Tim Ringel (17:23.85)
That's right. So one of the learnings was, and I think Sorrel showed it with S4 Capital again, where he initially started with independent brands, right? And then rolled it all into the media dot amongst a kind of infrastructure. And I think the unitary brand approach for entrepreneurially run businesses that you acquire is the wrong approach because it destroys the DNA of what you acquired, right? And we see

Mike Lander (17:32.364)
That's right.

Mike Lander (17:46.495)
So this is the House of Bruns versus branded house kind of argument.

Tim Ringel (17:50.514)
Correct. And to a certain scale, my belief is that you don't need a unitary brand strategy. You don't need to be one brand at a certain scale. Then for another scale, let's say 5,000 to 10,000 people, you probably need it, right? Because otherwise it's going to be a shit show to manage. And then later onwards, you actually don't need it again when your assets are big enough. So my theory, my thesis, my investment thesis is that we're going to have independent brands. We own them 100%.

but we run them independently and we come together with virtual P&Ls when clients want to live across multiple of our companies and we're doing that today. The role of the center is funding, number one, we have the money, right? Number two is we give the HR, finance, M&A, IT infrastructure because in most agencies that's the biggest pain point. They don't have capital to grow.

Mike Lander (18:27.819)
So what's the role of the center? Because there must be a center.

Tim Ringel (18:47.222)
They have shitty financials in terms of controlling accounting. Um, they have not the best benefits for their teams because they're not at scale. They're 50 to a hundred people, 150 people. You just don't get the same benefits. Right. Um, the IT infrastructure sucks, right? I'm not saying we have solved all of that, but the, really the, the role of the center is take away all this stuff that has nothing to do with the actual work output. Right.

Mike Lander (19:02.772)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (19:08.627)
Exactly. So it's a shared service model in many ways.

Tim Ringel (19:11.894)
Technically, yes, but we are drawing right now the shared services from the agencies. Whoever does it best is the one that we apply across. That's kind of the logic. And then we implemented some tools like central HR tool, meaning we have a central HR platform that no matter which brand you work in, no matter which level of seniority you are within the organization, you can see everybody who is part of Meet the People, no matter where they sit, no matter what company they work in, no matter what their title is, and you can approach all of them. So it's like, imagine a social...

Mike Lander (19:19.255)
Okay. Yeah.

Tim Ringel (19:41.934)
network intranet for HR where you have your W2, your benefits, blah, blah. But you also have a social stream in the middle where you can chat, give kudos, interact with anyone who is in the organization. No matter if you're our creative agency, VSA partners, if you're our digital agency, Saltwater, if you are match retail in Canada, we are all part of one family and one platform. That's the idea, right?

Mike Lander (20:03.159)
So Tim, what happens when a client has got a big problem, big marketing problem they want to solve, and it requires a full service agency, which is what you're kind of talking about. If you've got a house of brands, individual brands that exist, and there's a big pitch, who leads that big pitch and how do you make sure that everyone is aligned within that kind of pitch process?

Tim Ringel (20:30.378)
Yeah. So that.

Mike Lander (20:30.719)
so that the client sees one point of accountability and they see an integrated proposition. How does that work?

Tim Ringel (20:36.626)
So two things to mention. You mentioned one thing already yourself. How do you motivate? Let's put a pin in this. And the second one is how do you come across as integrated? What does the client want to do? So let's address these two. Every client, so number one, we are very selective where we make these

Mike Lander (20:38.315)
This is fascinating. This is really interesting. Nothing to do with the questions we thought about at all. It's great. Ha ha ha.

Mike Lander (20:56.459)
That's right.

Tim Ringel (21:05.57)
concise efforts, like I can talk through an example that I'm working on right now with the team. We have right now, I think, three or four of these holding pitches, I would say, that are happening on the meet the people level. What we do is we pull a SWAT team together for the pitch, number one. So, the biggest problem, so every large holding company has tried to address the fact that they have pitches that need to live across multiple of their assets.

Mike Lander (21:21.684)
Makes sense? Yeah.

Tim Ringel (21:35.582)
IPG calls it open architecture, publicist calls it one publicist, you name it. But I sat in these pitches. The reality is there is no intrinsic incentive for any of the CEOs of the individual agencies in these holding companies to do this. Why? Because they're not getting anything for it. They get incentivized against their own P&L. Right. When I was, yeah, so it's very simple to fix because human behavior is so simple. Like humans get.

Mike Lander (21:50.059)
Correct.

Yeah.

their own PNL. Exactly.

Tim Ringel (22:03.986)
intrinsically motivated if they get something for what they're doing. How do we fix the problem that people might not want to work together is we incentivize them against the P&L of Meet the People, not the P&L of their own agency. It's really that simple and everybody who runs a business within Meet the People doesn't own equity within their specific but they own equity on the holding level.

Mike Lander (22:09.715)
Yeah, some kind of reward mechanism.

Mike Lander (22:31.327)
Yeah, so it's in Topco. Yeah.

Tim Ringel (22:33.81)
Exactly. So that solves the problem of why would I do this, right? And how do I incentivize the people? So that brings us to the problem of would a client want to see a dispersed set of brands working on their account? And I'm going to be honest with you, when the economical times are amazing, probably they would. Right now, clients only have to fix problems. We have a problem. Our revenue is declining. We have a problem. We're losing market share. We have a problem.

We don't know how to get this product in market. We have a problem. Our audience, the product doesn't resonate with the audience anymore. So honestly, they don't care what brand solves the problem. If the trust is there, brands exist for trust. They just want the best people. And this is where we SWOT team them. We then put a virtual P&L against it. And honestly, I have this case with a client out of Philadelphia right now who asked exactly that question. So if you SWOT team this, if you bring

people together from four different agencies. Like, how does this work for them? Like, you know, how do we make sure these people stay on the account? I say like, because we create that virtual P&L and we incentivize people against that, right? To work really hard on your account. But keep in mind, we are just 550 people. And that sounds a lot, but actually in comparison to the Stagwells, the S4 Capitals, the debt agencies, the WPPs, we are tiny.

So the buck stops with me, that's how the Americans say it. So in the end, I'm pretty much involved in all of these pitches when they come in on the MTP level. When there is a creative pitch, our creative agency goes for it. We have an amazing team there. If it's a digital pitch, let's say building a website, coming up with social strategy, it goes to the management.

Mike Lander (23:57.984)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Lander (24:02.483)
Yeah, that's right.

Mike Lander (24:19.731)
Yeah, if it's SEO or exactly. Yeah.

Tim Ringel (24:23.05)
It goes into the specifics. So either it's specialized or it's generalized. If it's generalized, honestly, I'm involved to make it work because it always comes down to what do you really want to solve for your client? And going back to why we're doing this session on your podcast, how do you win pitches, right? Or how do you sell? It comes down to three very simple things from my perspective, right? Number one is trust. Why want to like, let's presume.

Mike Lander (24:41.591)
Exactly.

Tim Ringel (24:52.566)
You are a brand that people don't know, right? Because it's very different if you're a brand that people know. And exactly. So we are, we are a challenger brand. We are a challenger brand. Meet the people means nothing to anyone, really, if you're honest. But besides the people who are in it and the people who work with us and the people we work for, right? So that's the people who care about because they have an affinity to it. But it's the same thing. If you see a new car rolling down the street, you remember the Kia rebranding.

Mike Lander (24:57.715)
Yeah, so if you're a challenger brand, so let's take a challenger brand in consumer packaged goods. Yeah.

Tim Ringel (25:20.754)
America was talking about in the last month, what is KN? What car brand is KN? Because they changed the logo and it reads like KN, but it's actually Kia, right? So if you don't have an affinity to that car that drives by, you probably pay much less attention to it. And it's the same with challenger brands in the agency industry, like nobody cares. So the first thing you need is to create trust. Besides the fact that you need to get somehow your foot in the door, that's what outbound sales and outbound marketing strategies are for therefore.

Mike Lander (25:27.775)
Right, Kia, yeah.

Tim Ringel (25:49.666)
But the first thing is to build trust. So you have to be able to tell a story that creates trust. Relatability, meaning what credentials do you have in the industry? If you can't beat the competition with your brand, then you have to show you, you have to beat the competition with your authenticity and your credibility. And the credibility comes from, exactly. And that comes from understanding the industry. So if you don't, like, let's say you want to sell airline tickets, if you have never worked on an airline before,

Mike Lander (25:59.991)
Correct.

Mike Lander (26:08.951)
and your deep insights.

Mike Lander (26:13.516)
Correct.

Tim Ringel (26:19.602)
and you're not a brand that has the credibility and the brand halo, you don't belong into that room. So fish web.

Mike Lander (26:26.011)
Exactly right. So Tim, I talk to clients about this all the time. It's about if you're gonna win any kind of, you know, formal pitch process with a brand. For me, so let's see if this resonates. What I say to agencies is, you have to have sector expertise and you've got to have deep capability expertise. So on both those areas,

You've got to go way beyond what the client knows already. You have to provide insight and thought leadership and understand where all of the bear traps are, way ahead of where they are, if you're gonna stand a chance of winning. Otherwise, don't play, just don't play.

Tim Ringel (27:11.822)
Correct. You have to fish where the fish are for you. That's the point. Again, if you don't speak the lingo of that industry, you're not going to win it. If you don't understand seed load, yield calculation, origin to destination importance, if you don't understand the diversity of people sitting on a BA flight from London to Dubai, you have no place to be in that pitch if you are not WPP, Publizis, Omnicom. That's the reason how they get into the pitches because they're brands.

Mike Lander (27:14.164)
Yeah, congrats.

Mike Lander (27:19.956)
Absolutely.

Mike Lander (27:30.847)
Dynamic pricing models, yeah, precisely.

Tim Ringel (27:40.798)
If you are building a brand, you have to kill it on the expertise.

Mike Lander (27:43.999)
Which was the same if you go back, wow Tim, if you go back 20 years, when I was in tech, 30 years, people said it doesn't go wrong if you buy IBM. If you bought the blue suit, it wouldn't go wrong. And I got that, it's like you're buying a brand and therefore you're buying trust in the brand whereby it isn't gonna go wrong. Whatever happens, they'll fix it. So yeah, completely agree.

Tim Ringel (27:57.048)
That's right.

Tim Ringel (28:09.307)
Yeah. But I've seen moments even in our group where we won business. So I think sector expertise even beats tactical expertise. Why am I saying this? Like, yeah. So if you really know, I'm just making this up. If you really know the spirits industry really well and how that works, it probably

Mike Lander (28:23.014)
So capability, yeah? Right.

Tim Ringel (28:35.674)
is likelier that you can sell something where your capabilities are maybe half as strong as they should be. But if you don't have the sector expertise but you have the deep capability expertise, it's less likely for you to win. Because

Mike Lander (28:42.25)
Right.

Mike Lander (28:47.139)
Yeah.

because you'll bounce off the sides.

Tim Ringel (28:51.938)
So it all comes exactly, it all comes from the industry expertise. So when I go into a room, can opening a session with the CMO, I'm usually not the industry expert. So what I bring is industry experts, right? Who speak the lingo, like why, why is this product not moving in shelf? How does it work on the POS? Like, you know, all the value.

Mike Lander (29:05.509)
Exactly.

Mike Lander (29:14.839)
So Tim, when you're buying companies then, are you looking for particular sector expertise, deep sector expertise? Is that part of investment thesis?

Tim Ringel (29:20.598)
Right.

Tim Ringel (29:24.842)
Well, it's so we have really three main layers we look at. Like one layer is number one, complete capabilities. Why? Because ultimately my thesis is that I want to have end-to-end capabilities. And with end-to-end, I'm talking about I don't have a product standing around me right now. It's always so helpful. I always do this and hold something into the camera. But the capabilities means like.

If we work for a very large company, I'm just making it up. One of our largest clients is LVMH with their Moe Hennessey Spirits and Champagne brands, right? We never going to be the global AOR for LVMH Spirits and Champagnes doing creative content, social media and data analytics. Never. It's never going to happen until we are 50, 100,000 people, right? And even then it might not happen. So why? Because the bug.

Mike Lander (30:18.068)
Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ringel (30:22.418)
stops with probably the VP or SVP of something. But we work for these clients and we are specialists. That's why I keep the brands intact, because we're always going to be a specialist, deep specialism at the same time for mid-sized brands. And I'm making this up again, not talking car manufacturers, but talking day-to-day products of companies here in the US that move half a billion to three, four billion in revenue, right? In total.

Mike Lander (30:31.667)
Yeah, because you're a deep specialist.

Tim Ringel (30:50.082)
They can't afford a roster of five agencies for creative, or they don't move 100 million in media, right? Where WPP gets all hyper about it. Like they are our absolute sweet spot. That's mid-sized brands that want end-to-end fully integrated solutions. And they don't want five agencies to touch something. They want one partner to own it, and one partner to hold accountable. Example, let's presume you're...

Mike Lander (30:57.706)
Exactly.

Mike Lander (31:11.005)
No.

Tim Ringel (31:17.866)
making ready-made dishes, right? Food. You know, you're one of these food companies and you need someone to come up with the brand, the narrative, the destinations, website, e-comm. You need someone to do the social content. You also need someone to buy the social ads against it as well as the search ads. And you also need someone to put that product into an aisle so it looks nice in Walmart and Whole Foods. Call me, that's the clients I love. Why? I love the big ones as well, but we always gonna be a specialist.

I love these clients because we're going to be a generalist who controls the entire customer experience from I see the brand on a commercial, no matter if it's a billboard, TV, online, and I touch the brand in the shelf and put it in my basket. That controlling that entire value chain, the entire customer experience plus the after sales is a QR code on the package. Can I sign up for a loyalty program, earn points, motivate my friends to join, try that product? I love that.

That is where we want to play.

Mike Lander (32:19.487)
So what have you learned Tim? This is really interesting. So I think that's a really core central theme about how as an agency you win, be it an RFP or be a less formal client brief, steep sector expertise, really, really critical and the breadth of capabilities that says we can do an end to end job that makes us accountable for the outcomes. So you can then truly partner. I do get a bit tired of agencies saying,

we have clients who are partners. I'm like, well, okay, but that means that you're sharing risk and reward. Are you truly sharing risk and reward?

Tim Ringel (32:53.322)
That's right. And actually, I kid you not, Mike, I offer this. I tell, like, because ultimately the problem of the agency business model is that your earning potential on a client is technically kept, right? If you run it transparent, and that's my ambition, right? So I wanna be fully, I want people to know what they're paying for. So you technically cap yourself on certain hourly rates and premiums that are pre-negotiated, right? But the whole game changes if it's fully measurable.

Like if I tell you these glasses should be brown because it's gonna resonate better with the audience, the client's gonna be like, how do I know? Like, how do you prove that? Okay, if I control the entire customer experience in terms of as an agency partner, and I also measure how many products got sold in Amazon, in shelf, in your own retail, I'm ready to put skin in the game. I'm ready to do it. But you need to allow me to measure the touch points and attribute it back. And this is the beauty.

Mike Lander (33:24.028)
Exactly.

Mike Lander (33:46.539)
Correct.

Tim Ringel (33:53.086)
of what we're trying to create here for these mid-size companies. We're trying to create this measurability from the very first moment you decide on a color to the very moment when a person picks up a product in a shelf, digital or physical, and then comes back into the process. That's my dream scenario. And I actually forgot to answer your question from before. First one, capabilities. Why? Because I have this vision of real end-to-end. Number two, then, is industries.

Mike Lander (34:06.901)
Yep.

Tim Ringel (34:21.098)
So we are consciously looking, we are really strong in spirits because our largest clients is in spirits, a very specific market in the United States. We're really strong in tech, SaaS, like clients like Google and IBM that we had for years, are very, very good clients of ours, very good in finance and insurance, very good in the wireless space. Where I'm good, but I'm not where I want to be is

Mike Lander (34:31.707)
Yep.

Tim Ringel (34:48.61)
the whole FMCG consumer goods, foods, for example. We do food, we do beverages, but we don't necessarily do the likes of Kellogg's or these kind of, so I'm consciously looking at these areas right now. And then, and hopefully you're not gonna laugh about this, I love B2B, I love B2B. Less competitive.

Mike Lander (35:08.707)
Ah yeah, yeah. I think it's one of the untapped marketing gems.

Tim Ringel (35:13.219)
Totally.

Tim Ringel (35:16.606)
And I'm not only saying that because Forrester said it two years ago in their market report, but it's untapped. It's now pretty much fully measurable, right? Because everybody needs lead gen. And in the end, you do still speak to consumers. So you still have the same human triggers, right? How to influence someone to purchase a product. In this case, you don't really purchase the product. You do lead gen or whatever it is, right? But

Mike Lander (35:20.311)
No, but it's true. It's true.

Mike Lander (35:27.411)
Yep. Exactly.

Mike Lander (35:43.702)
Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ringel (35:44.79)
The B2B market is highly interesting for us. So we are honestly, we're doing two things right now with Meet the People. I kept it really broad the first two years in terms of our own positioning because it really didn't matter. It didn't matter to the world. I always say this and it sounds always a little bit sad when I say nobody cares about us because the reality is you don't need to care about us. We don't really exist in your relevant set until at some point we exist in your relevant set, right? That's how brand building works. So...

Until then, it really doesn't matter what I position Meet the People for. It's all about client centricity, people centricity. That's my main positioning as a new holding company, right? Because that's ultimately what really matters on all the solutions we create. But now for 24, I'm going to go into a more specific positioning about Meet the People. It's going to be your growth partner for revenue and ROI, right? And we don't shy away from the B2B challenge, right? So that...

Mike Lander (36:40.319)
Yep, exactly. In fact, we embraced the B2B challenge.

Tim Ringel (36:43.998)
Absolutely. And honestly, 40 to 50% of our book of business is B2B already.

Mike Lander (36:48.679)
Yeah, so Tim, so I'm conscious of your time. Where do you think, so for the people listening in the audience, we didn't script this question. So I've no idea at all what Tim's gonna say. So where do you think the future of marketing agencies lies in the next kind of five years, given what's going on with technology and AI that everyone's talking about and...

Tim Ringel (37:00.15)
You-

Tim Ringel (37:03.55)
Uh-uh.

Tim Ringel (37:12.398)
Hmm.

Mike Lander (37:16.811)
what brands need and B2B. Where should agencies be looking at positioning themselves? Do you believe?

Tim Ringel (37:22.954)
Yeah. So that's how much time you have, right? So I'm okay, so I'm not I'm not gonna presume your age, Mike, because that would be inappropriate. But I think, okay, fair enough. So you're a little tiny bit older than me. So you have seen this more often than I have. I have seen tech cycles now probably three times in my professional career over 26 years, where agencies thought they're going to be eradicated.

Mike Lander (37:28.319)
So we have about three minutes, Tim.

Mike Lander (37:35.504)
But I am 59.

Tim Ringel (37:53.034)
Right? AI is another version of that. That's going to have an impact on our industry without any question. But we shouldn't forget that us agencies are still run by humans. We are run by people. And we create something for people. I'm going to be bold and say we're always going to be better at that than any machine probably can be.

Mike Lander (38:13.911)
Correct.

Tim Ringel (38:20.97)
And I'm not talking about the tactical copywriting. If you're a copywriter, you have to think right now. How do you pivot your career? Because the reality is 80% of the heavy lifting is gonna be done by machines, fair enough. But what we're gonna need in the future is architects for copywriting, right? How do you build a story that resonates with an audience that doesn't feel like it's written by AI? So again, we have been here. Like...

Mike Lander (38:24.393)
No, no, no.

Mike Lander (38:31.157)
Yeah.

Tim Ringel (38:50.014)
When Google revolutionized media, over a period of 10, 15 years, media agencies' valuations were in the gutter. TV got completely disrupted by streaming. It doesn't mean linear TV doesn't exist anymore. It's just right size to where it should be. And there is another channel now. There is streaming. And streaming now becomes advertising, because the streamers want to monetize. And we are somehow back to the same model, just more technologized than it was before. So if

Mike Lander (38:52.436)
Yeah.

Tim Ringel (39:18.41)
The problem is people have a tendency, number one, clients have a tendency to run after shiny objects. Why? Because they want to make sure they're securing their jobs in a large corporate environment with hierarchy and where there's always people who are smarter and probably younger with more ideas. So you have to run after the shiny object. The problem is that the agencies use that to sell products they don't know anything about, right? Instead of telling their clients.

Guys, we don't have to be the first. We don't have to be first movers on AI, because if we're really honest about it, if you are serious about AI, you have to create your, you have to feed your own large language model yourself and not go to chat GPT, right? So everything I've seen so far from our beautiful competitors is, oh, we're utilizing chat GPT to be more, that's not what AI is gonna do for you. AI is gonna be your brain.

Mike Lander (39:59.339)
Correct.

Mike Lander (40:14.219)
set. Oh, we.

Tim Ringel (40:14.334)
in your agency behind your walled gardens to create IP. That's very different. Yeah, sorry.

Mike Lander (40:18.411)
So we could go on for hours, Tim, on this. We're not going to, but I, no, no. I think it's, so what do I know? I'm a guy sat in the UK with a few thoughts and a bit of history. Where I believe the value truly is with AI is what you've just said. If you take all of the collective knowledge, TAS it in people's heads, and the digital assets that you have on your shared drives inside your agency,

and you train an AI model to more efficiently find information and you train it to give you insights that you may not be able to readily see because of the volume of data and then you enhance it as human beings. There's value in that enormously. I think. Yeah.

Tim Ringel (40:53.335)
Mm-hmm.

Tim Ringel (41:09.322)
It's going to change how we work. It's going to change how we create the work product, but it's nothing to do with JetGPT stealing our jobs. It's to do with, it was in the agency, we need a large language model that we feed with what our agency is about the culture, the knowledge, the work, and it's going to help us create the output. And it's still our IP. The problem that people forget is everything you put into JetGPT is not your IP anymore. You can't sell it to a client legally. You can't sell it. It's not yours.

Mike Lander (41:23.507)
Yep, correct.

Mike Lander (41:29.76)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (41:33.483)
That's right. Nope. Correct.

Tim Ringel (41:37.918)
It belongs to the AI. But if you create your own version of it within your organization, then it's your IP. So nothing really changes besides the fact that you are much better and probably more efficient, and you need few different skills. But you as an agency have all the right to exist. Until Coca-Cola figures out to do their own large language model to create all their social content and creative, it's gonna take them years because they have bigger fish to fry from my perspective. So...

Mike Lander (41:41.927)
Yeah, behind your firewall, yeah.

Mike Lander (42:05.332)
Exactly right.

Tim Ringel (42:06.698)
So again, I'm not super scared of the future if you are ready to adapt to the future like we have done with Google, we have done with Amazon, we have done it with social, we are doing it with blockchain, right? Nobody's talking about blockchain anymore, but it is here to stay. It is so important to the internet, the decentralization of information and the accountability and traceability of things, right? These technologies gonna stay and there's gonna be something else in two, three years that we're all gonna run after, but they change how we operate.

Mike Lander (42:17.238)
Yep.

Tim Ringel (42:36.258)
but they don't fundamentally change our existence. That's my belief. But we have to be smart enough to think about how does my job need to change from being someone who aggregates data manually into someone who architects data, right?

Mike Lander (42:38.843)
Exactly right, they don't replace us. Tim, it's-

Mike Lander (42:50.559)
Yeah, I think that's a great place to leave it Tim. Tim, this has been nothing like what we kind of like, you know, wrote down a few questions and have some, but it's been fascinating and it's really on topic. It's completely on topic about how do you add value to clients in a kind of commercial structure and how do you differentiate yourself by standing out with your deep sector expertise and how do you embrace AI rather than run away from it?

Tim Ringel (42:54.254)
Good.

Mike Lander (43:20.455)
So Tim, it's been amazing. Where can people find out more about you?

Tim Ringel (43:25.378)
Well, on LinkedIn is the easiest, right? You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on the meetthepeople.com website. Yeah, that's usually the channels where I talk about what I think.

Mike Lander (43:36.523)
Tim, it's been amazing. Thank you ever so much.

Tim Ringel (43:39.018)
Thank you so much, Mike. Appreciate it.

Mike Lander (43:41.835)
So I'm gonna stop recording just to check that it's.