My Big Idea: advertising agency collective Meet The People

Hi Tim! What’s your elevator pitch?

Meet The People was created as an alternative to the traditional advertising holding company model. We’re a group of unified but independent agencies bringing together Creative, Commerce, Media, Performance, and Retail Media under one umbrella, backed by Innovatus Capital Partners. 

We founded MTP in 2021. Since then, we’ve completed 10 acquisitions and grown to more than 850 employees across the U.S. and Canada. We work with clients including Google, Moët Hennessy, IBM, Nespresso, and Nike. Our model gives brands the integrated capabilities of a holding company with the agility, senior-level attention, and specialized expertise of an independent shop.

Why does the market need it?

The advertising industry has been consolidating for 30 years around a small handful of holding companies. Those groups are optimized for Fortune 500 accounts with multi-year, multi-million-dollar retainers. That leaves an enormous segment of the market underserved. 

Mid-market brands and specialized enterprise units want strategic, integrated marketing capabilities but can’t get senior attention from a WPP or Omnicom, and can’t get integrated services from a single-discipline independent shop.

The other pressure is how clients want to work today. Retainers have given way to quarterly, project-based engagements where budgets are $250,000 to $500,000 and results are measured immediately. Large holding companies can’t operate that way. Their overhead structures require long-term commitments to be profitable. That reality has been building for years, and it’s what created the space MTP was built for.

Where is the business today?

As I mentioned, we’re at more than 850 full-time employees across the U.S. and Canada, having completed 10 acquisitions since we founded the business in 2021. Our capabilities span Creative, Commerce, Media, Performance, and Retail Media, with recent additions strengthening our position on Amazon, Walmart, and Target through the Yeoman Technology Group acquisition.

We’ve also expanded our transatlantic capabilities through a strategic alliance with KD Global USA that helps European small and mid-sized businesses enter the North American market through an integrated solution combining logistics, import management, e-commerce, and marketing. Our long-term goal is a billion-dollar valuation combining 15 or more businesses in North America, Europe, and Asia, with 1,500-plus employees. We’re on track for that trajectory.

What made you think there was money in this?

I’ve spent 25-plus years building and running agency businesses across Europe and the U.S. 

So that trajectory gave me an unusually clear view of what the holding company model does well and where it breaks. It scales operational and financial reporting brilliantly. It handles global blue-chip accounts. But it struggles with agility, with mid-market clients, and with anything requiring quick decisions. 

Those weaknesses were becoming more expensive every year. In 2021 I raised more than $150 million from Innovatus Capital Partners to build the alternative.

Alongside the operator work, I’ve been an active investor in 50-plus early-stage technology companies, including pre-IPO positions in Airbnb, Palantir, Spotify, and SoFi. That investor perspective informs how I think about M&A discipline and where value gets created.

What’s your biggest strength?

An acquisition discipline that most of the industry gets wrong. When Martin Sorrell built WPP, he paid up to 20 times EBITDA to acquire large agencies with blue-chip client rosters. That works if you have hyper-organic growth or you can sell for double what you paid. Both are rare.

We take a different approach. We buy regional sub-scale agencies at roughly one-third the multiple of at-scale assets. These are businesses with strong economics and healthy client relationships that never got the platform to scale nationally. We integrate them onto that platform, retain the founder-led teams, and add mid-market organic growth. The math works even before AI enters the picture. Adding AI-enabled capabilities on top of that structure gives us another layer of margin expansion the incumbents can’t match.

The second strength is the leadership model. Every client team is senior-led. Nobody at MTP spends a client’s budget training junior account coordinators. That’s a small structural choice with big compounding effects on retention.

What is the secret to making the business work?

Preserve what makes acquired agencies special. Every M&A textbook tells you to consolidate operations, standardize systems, and centralize decisions to capture synergies. In agency services, that instinct destroys the value you just bought. Founders and senior talent leave, culture flattens, clients notice, and you’ve wasted the acquisition premium.

Our model is deliberately federated. When we acquired Yeoman Technology Group, we kept the founder in place, kept the team intact, and connected them to more clients through the group. 

We’ve done the same with every other acquisition. The corporate function provides shared services where they add value — finance, HR, technology, business development — and stays out of the way where it doesn’t.

The second discipline is honesty about what the current agency economy demands. Clients want performance-based engagements at quarterly cadences. That means faster decisions, leaner teams, and outcome-based pricing where possible. Any agency clinging to the old retainer model is running out of runway.

How do you market the company?

Client outcomes and referrals do most of the work. Enterprise marketing decision-makers move between companies, and if we did strong work with a CMO at one brand, that’s often our best introduction to their next employer.

Beyond that, I make myself available as a spokesperson. Bylined thinking in trade and business press, speaking engagements, and increasingly financial press coverage as the investor thesis becomes more relevant. We don’t spend heavily on brand advertising for the group itself. The clients we want don’t discover their next agency through a banner ad or a trade magazine spread. They discover it through peers they trust and thinking they respect.

Our acquisitions also do marketing work for us. Each one signals capability expansion, geographic reach, or specialization to the market. A press release announcing a strategic acquisition reaches more of the audience we want than a brand campaign would.

What funding do you have? Is it enough?

We raised more than $150 million from Innovatus Capital Partners in 2021 to fund the initial build-out, and we’ve financed subsequent growth through a combination of operating cash flow and strategic capital.

Whether it’s “enough” depends on the pace of acquisitions. We’re currently able to fund the deal flow we want at the multiples we’re targeting. As the group grows and we look at larger transactions — particularly in Europe and Asia to hit our billion-dollar vision — we’ll evaluate additional capital when the right opportunities emerge. That could be additional PE investment, strategic capital from a corporate partner, or eventual public markets. The M&A opportunity in specialized independents is deep enough that capital is rarely the constraint. Discipline is.

Tell us about the business model.

We’re a group of specialized independent agencies operating under a shared platform. Each agency runs with its own P&L accountability, its own leadership, and its own client relationships. Revenue comes from client engagements structured as project fees, retainers, performance-based deals, and increasingly outcome-based arrangements where we get paid for measurable business results rather than hours worked.

Growth compounds through three channels. Organic growth of the acquired agencies as we connect them to more clients and capabilities. Cross-selling of specialized services across the group, so a client working with one agency gets exposed to complementary capabilities elsewhere. And continued acquisitions of agencies that fit the model.

The financial discipline is what I described earlier. We acquire at roughly one-third the multiples the large holding companies paid during their build-outs, which means the group can create meaningful equity value even before organic growth compounds. Add integration synergies where they genuinely exist — shared technology, shared business development, shared operational infrastructure — and the unit economics work at a scale that individual independents can’t match.

What were you doing before?

Most recently I was Global CEO of Spring Studios from 2019 to 2021, running 300 staff across offices in New York, London, and Milan and overseeing the home for New York Fashion Week, TriBeCa Film Festival, Vogue Forces of Fashion, and the Independent Art Fair.

I moved to New York in 2017 to relaunch Reprise at IPG Mediabrands, growing it from 800 to 3,000 employees across 69 offices in three years. 

Before Reprise I was CEO of NetBooster Group, a stock-market-listed independent digital agency conglomerate based in London and Paris, where I scaled the business from 370 to 950-plus employees. And just to reiterate, before that I founded my first digital agency, metapeople, in Germany in 1999, and grew it to hundreds of employees before selling to NetBooster in 2011.

Alongside all of that, I’ve been an active investor in 50-plus early-stage technology companies, mainly in digital and blockchain, and I serve as a director and advisory board member on two venture funds.

Are there any technologies you’ve found useful?

MTP Intelligence, our internal AI platform, is central to how we operate now. It’s built as modular tools sitting on shared infrastructure that can talk to each other, which lets us combine fragmented client data — CRM, media activation, creative touchpoints, retail signals — and generate strategic recommendations in minutes rather than quarters. Enterprise clients pay enormous sums to acquire that kind of data and struggle to use it because their teams are siloed. Our platform lets us unify it faster than the client can internally.

Beyond our own platform, we use the major frontier AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google across creative and analytical workflows. We’re also watching AI compute economics closely. Tokens are becoming a currency clients will need to procure at scale, and the ability to load-balance across providers will be a meaningful capability within two years.

For the operational side, standard modern SaaS — a good CRM, a good project management system, strong finance and HR platforms. Nothing exotic. Discipline in using what you have matters more than accumulating tools.

What is the future vision?

Two horizons. In the near term, we’re on track to hit our stated goal of a billion-dollar valuation, combining 15-plus businesses across North America, Europe, and Asia with more than 1,500 employees. That’s a matter of continued execution on the acquisition playbook, expansion into new geographies, and deepening our specialized capabilities in areas like retail media and performance marketing.

Longer term, the advertising industry is in the early stages of a much bigger restructuring than most people realize. The revenue sitting inside the largest holding companies will redistribute over the next decade as clients move to more agile, performance-based partners and as AI compresses the economics of traditional agency work. Even a modest share of that redistribution builds a substantial business.

The bold prediction I’d add is that within two to three years, agencies will play a media-upfront-style role for clients in AI compute. Enterprise brands running AI-generated production in-house are going to burn through tokens at rates that make outsourcing to a partner buying at scale the rational choice. That’s a new revenue category nobody is currently pricing. We’re building for it.