Tim Ringel on AI in Advertising

Originally featured in AI Magazine.

We spoke to Meet The People's Tim Ringel about AI misconceptions in advertising, AI-assisted output and how human creativity and AI could be interlinked

We all know the familiar tale: everyone in advertising and marketing thinks AI will steal their job. Perhaps this is a justifiable concern – Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei told Axios: “AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.”

But the data isn't supporting this, at least not yet. In fact, much of the data we have suggests AI in advertising is becoming integrated into core workflows, with positive results.

According to Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe, 85% of companies already use AI-based tools for marketing.

And as for those deep compounding fears about job security, data from the Advertising Association shows only 10% feel their job function will be fully taken over by AI.

We spoke to Tim Ringel, Founder and CEO of Meet The People (MTP), who launched the global marketing and advertising services holding company in 2021. Since then, it's completed 12 acquisitions and grown to more than 850 employees across the US and Canada, serving clients including Google, IBM and Moët Hennessy.

The biggest misconception

There are many misconceptions about advertising. Like the idea that everyone drinks all day, smokes innumerable cigarettes and is a serial philanderer, as popularised by Mad Men. This is false. Probably. But what's the biggest misconception about AI in advertising?

“The idea that AI represents an existential threat to agencies,” Tim says.

“That view captures what's happening at the largest legacy holding companies. But it misses almost everything happening at the independents building for what comes next.”

Tim explains that AI does break the traditional agency business model: “Time-and-materials pricing collapses when software can produce work that used to take a team of humans a week. That reality is genuinely scary if you run a business with billions in overhead commitment and hundreds of thousands of employees.”

But it looks very different if you're an agile mid-market group that can move to outcome-based pricing, capture the automation gains as margin and use AI to unify client data that used to sit in silos, Tim explains. “Same technology, opposite consequences depending on the operating model underneath it.”

Between human creativity and AI

With AI adoption in advertising up, the line between what humans create and where AI steps in is blurred.

“Two patterns are emerging,” Tim says. “Some brands want highly differentiated, human-led creative precisely because so much AI-generated content is starting to look interchangeable. They're willing to pay for strategic creative direction that stands out from the noise”.

He highlights that other brands want to automate 70% to 80% of the production work and use human creative talent for the finishing touches, such as casting, editing, brand nuance and campaign architecture.

On whether AI could make any core industry role completely obsolete, Tim is careful about predictions because “they rarely age well”.

“Advertising has been declared 'dead' multiple times in my career,” he says.

“What I do think is that specific tasks within roles are going to be automated aggressively. First-draft copy, initial creative concepting, media planning basics, reporting, transcription, tagging. The roles themselves are going to survive but evolve.”

Speed as a differentiator

We are given narratives about “AI slop”. Low-quality, irritating outputs that increasingly flood the internet. But this is just one story about what AI is doing creatively.

Tim argues that for most commodity work, AI-assisted output already beats what a mid-tier creative team can produce on a compressed timeline. “The economics are settled there,” he affirms.

Tim explains great creative comes from strategic insight, cultural fluency, taste and the willingness to reject 99 ideas to find the right one.

“Those are human capabilities that AI amplifies without replacing,” he says.

“The more interesting question is whether top teams will use AI to raise their output by a factor of five or ten. That's the real competitive shift, and it's the one I'd watch over the next 24 months.”

So ultimately, this is about accelerating human creativity with speed, rather than replacing it entirely.

Earlier this year, Tim launched MTP Intelligence, a modular AI integrated platform where tools sit on shared infrastructure:
“What's different now is speed. We can bring three disconnected datasets together and generate recommendations in minutes, then execute against those learnings while they're still relevant.”