Tim Ringel, Founder and Global CEO of Meet The People, explains why last-mile optimization stalls growth, why behavioral data is the most undervalued asset on your website, and why building AI agents won’t set anyone apart.
Here’s a number that stuck with me. Tim Ringel’s agency group, Meet The People, works with around 263 paying clients. He says the problems they bring are almost always the same. The bigger the company, the more scattered the data that touches its customers every day. And most of those companies are optimizing the last few clicks while their competitors take market share at the top of the funnel.
Tim has spent close to 30 years building and selling agency businesses in Europe and the US, including a stint inside IPG. Five years ago he started Meet The People to fix what he saw breaking inside the big holding companies. Today it’s 850 people across 10 agencies and 13 locations in the US and Canada, all under one ownership structure. That background shows up in everything he said on the show.
Why do big companies struggle to connect customer data to marketing performance?
Tim’s answer is silos. Not just data silos, but org-chart silos. Large holding companies and large brands are built around local P&Ls, capability-specific P&Ls, and departments that are measured and paid separately. So creative, data, media, and commerce rarely get combined.
“Combining creative, data, media, commerce doesn’t really naturally come to those really large conglomerates. And it doesn’t really naturally come to very large corporations, either, because they’re organized in silos and measured and incentivized in silos.”
— Tim Ringel, Founder and Global CEO, Meet The People
That’s why Meet The People is set up the way it is. Everyone who owns a piece of one agency owns a piece of the group, so the reason to work together is shared equity. Tim compares it to the Avengers: each agency can win on its own, and they’re much stronger together.
The other half of the problem is the data itself. When a client tells Meet The People they need a rebrand, the team sets the brief aside and asks how people actually find the brand, and what data is being collected along the way.
“Often the data exists, it’s just not organized, it’s not standardized, it’s not structured enough, and then naming conventions are incorrect.”
— Tim Ringel, Founder and Global CEO, Meet The People
Sometimes the answer isn’t a rebrand at all. The brand needs to find people earlier and nurture them better. Tim says the best results, often a 10%, 20%, even 40% lift, come when every piece of the journey is tied together.
What is the emotional decision-making layer in customer data?
This was the part I found most interesting. Most companies collect transactional data: clicks, conversions, cost per lead. Tim says they’re missing the behavioral signals that explain why people buy.
“We call it the emotional decision-making layer that goes beyond the transactional decision-making layer when you collect data.”
— Tim Ringel, Founder and Global CEO, Meet The People
His higher education example is a great one. If an anonymous prospective student spends more time on financial aid and tuition pages, they’re thinking about cost. If they spend more time on dorm photos, clubs, and the curriculum, money matters less to them. Two simple signals, and they can change how that person should be nurtured and how good the conversion is.
Meta, TikTok, and Snap already read our behavior this way. Tim’s point is that very few brands do it on their own websites, even though the data is sitting in their analytics and AI makes it practical to analyze.
What about products sold through walled gardens, like a drink on a Walmart shelf? Meet The People has about 3,500 brand ambassadors working in stores for clients like Nespresso, LG Electronics, and cell phone carriers. They explain the product, offer samples, and collect pre-sale data. Someone may not buy a $6,000 TV today, but they can still answer a few questions and share an email address. Product registration, by comparison, only tells you about someone after they’ve already bought.
How should CMOs measure what actually drives growth?
Tim was blunt about this. The biggest mistake he sees is CMOs squeezing efficiency out of the lower funnel and handing all of the savings back to the business as a win.
The trouble is that the lower funnel is full of people who were already going to buy. Optimizing it can improve your return, but it doesn’t create new demand. And since the pandemic, upper-funnel spend has been the first thing CFOs cut, because it’s the hardest to measure and nobody wants to lose their job defending it.
“What they should do is they should say, ‘Dear business, I give back 50% to the business, better profitability, but I reinvest 50% into building that funnel.'”
— Tim Ringel, Founder and Global CEO, Meet The People
Tim says that when upper-funnel spend gets cut, growth usually falls off within 12 to 24 months. In crowded categories where products are easy to swap and Amazon can deliver the same day, brand awareness is often the only real difference. And it doesn’t have to be 50/50. Even keeping 25% of the savings for demand creation is better than nothing. To measure it, he recommends building a blended KPI for your own business, because cost per sale on its own won’t show it.
Is building AI agents a competitive advantage for agencies?
Tim doesn’t think so, and I agree with him more than I expected to.
“Building agents is kind of switching from a pencil to a ballpoint. You’re going to have to do it, right? It’s not even a conversation.”
— Tim Ringel, Founder and Global CEO, Meet The People
In his view, the real value is in getting AI to do things people simply couldn’t do before, not in doing the same work with fewer people. Last year Meet The People put $800,000 into eight proprietary AI tools on one shared platform, connected to more than 500 client APIs. One example: a client asks where they should spend an extra $2 million. Working that out across TV, CTV, search, social, and creative used to take a team weeks. Now it can be modeled almost instantly from historical data and forecasts.
“I don’t measure our AI success in, oh, we succeeded in letting go of 100 people. That’s not AI success. It’s nothing to do with AI success. It’s purely financial motivation.”
— Tim Ringel, Founder and Global CEO, Meet The People
He also pointed out that AI can’t fix the people side of things. Licensing an enterprise AI tool won’t settle the turf wars inside a marketing team.
“AI can do a lot but it can’t really solve your internal friction as a team.”
— Tim Ringel, Founder and Global CEO, Meet The People
The bigger picture
What stood out to me is that Tim’s three ideas are really one. Combine the silos so the data connects. Read the emotional signals, not just the transactional ones. Reinvest the savings into growth instead of just making the quarter look good. And use AI the same way, to grow what your people can do instead of to shrink the team.
We talk to a lot of guests about data quality, and this conversation was a reminder that clean data is only useful if the organization around it is set up to act on it. Tim built a whole agency group around that idea. I think more companies need to think the same way.
Connect with Tim: Find Tim Ringel on LinkedIn and learn more about Meet The People at meetthepeople.com.
Work with BDEX: Want identity data that connects the whole customer journey? Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert.”
Watch the episode: What Actually Drives Marketing Performance?
This article was adapted from an episode of Deconstructing Data, BDEX’s weekly podcast on data-driven marketing. Tune in live every Thursday at 4:15 PM Eastern on LinkedIn.
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