Independents Unite: Meet The People Launches as Alternative to Large Holding Companies
Meet The People is bringing a fresh approach to how holding companies operate in the advertising industry and they’re starting it in North America, seeking to deploy $150MM over the next 24 months.
Created by a team of exceptional industry leaders and entrepreneurs, with decades of experience creating marketing services groups, Meet The People becomes the first people-centric Advertising Group. With a powerful agency roster and the ambition to bring together and deliver seamless creative and digital offerings, Meet The People is attracting entrepreneurially-minded agencies that are ready to evolve and provide their clients and partners with 24/7, always-on access to an array of services and talents in one fully integrated platform. Financial support will come from Innovatus Capital Partners, LLC., an investment adviser and portfolio management firm.
So, what makes this model so revolutionary? No more agency silos and a total focus on people and their work. While the world has figured out how to obtain the pick n’ mix of what they like from online and offline offerings, agencies have yet to follow suit. Meet The People is a group of agency partners, bringing the best and brightest experts from their fields together under the same unitary umbrella.
The brainchild of a team of award-winning agency leaders and entrepreneurs – Tim Ringel, global CEO; Tom Armbruster, global COO; and Natalie Alberta Dusey, global chief of staff and corporate secretary – and backed by New York based boutique specialty finance firm, Innovatus Capital Partners, Meet The People combines the experience of established agencies across multiple marketing disciplines with the data-driven and digitally-enabled capabilities of industry disruptors. The result is a bespoke modern and unique model that can support large and medium-sized brands with cutting edge initiatives, and offer what clients truly want – better services, faster solutions, broad expertise, in a collaborative and transparent manner.
“With Meet The People, we’re evolving creative and digital with extraordinary talent and data,” said Tim. “We‘re building a unique, digital-first infrastructure from the ground up that will appeal to brands that are looking to scale with soul and move away from the status quo. Our agency partners will cut through the clutter of the industry and become an extension of a client’s team, ambition and success.”
Meet The People is taking an iconoclastic approach to discussing the growth of the business, with a focus on transparency that it will use to attract the attention of agencies, analysts and industry watchers. The company has aggressive growth goals – to build up a group of 2,000 people – and plans to add additional specialty agencies in the coming months to round out its full-service capabilities.
Meet The People currently oversees three category leading agencies with more than 350 people: VSA Partners, a creative, design and branding agency; Public Label, an integrated agency with above-the-line, experiential and shopper expertise; and Match Retail, a top sales, merchandising and branded retail agency. Under the new model, each agency will work together as a community while retaining its own identity and culture.
Tim continued: “Traditional holding company players own sixty percent of the market but they are incredibly siloed and don’t integrate across all relevant services for their clients. We are claiming our space by rolling up specialised entrepreneurial agencies under one roof to become a true integrated global partner, with a breadth and depth of experience that will be hard to rival.”
So who are ‘the People’? Tim, Tom and Natalie most recently worked together at full service, luxury brand-focused creative agency Spring Studios and the European performance marketing company, Artefact (previously NetBooster). Tim was Global CEO at IPG Mediabrands’ Reprise, where he doubled the size, revenue and profit of the agency in just 24 months, scaling it to 3,000 people. He is also an active investor in well known EU and US early-and late stage start-ups.
Innovatus Capital Partners acquired VSA Partners, Public Label and Match Retail in Q1 of this year. Ravi Bhagavatula, Partner at Innovatus Capital Partners: “As we look to expand our portfolio and grow our marketing services capabilities, there is no stronger leadership team to build this vision than Tim, Tom and Natalie and the immense talents of each individual agency. Meet The People has arrived.”
