Freddie Georges, Freddie Georges Production Group Founder: ‘We are passionate creators driven to connect people through the power of shared experiences’

Consumers in the digital age are clear that, for the most part, commercials are not appealing and just won’t work anymore. Most of the brands have forgotten that ads are more about creating a personal experience for their customers. Experts are now suggesting brands to come up with the best experiential marketing strategies as the first step towards delivering an exceptional experience. Customer engagement is the key to any successful marketing campaign, and any business that is trying to build a positive image in the market must involve its customers in activities that are special, fun, and memorable. In simpler terms, experiential marketing is all about allowing customers to have memorable and tangible experiences.

Globally, there are various companies delivering excellent experiential marketing services, but Freddie Georges Production Group (FG|PG) stands out from the rest. FG|PG is a full service, live, virtual, and hybrid brand experience agency with a wide range of services— all under one roof, including strategy, creative ideation, 3D experience design, graphic design, copywriting and content creation, broadcast engineering, digital and virtual expertise, logistics planning, business leadership, and full fabrication and production capabilities. From conferences and tradeshows to gamer events and consumer pop-ups to virtual and hybrid integrated experiences FG|PG does it all. The company was founded nearly 20 years ago, and today it is one of the largest WBENC certified woman-owned experience design and production agencies in the US.

In conversation with Freddie Georges, Founder of Freddie Georges Production Group

Q. Marketing is highly effective when it is targeted and tailored toward an individual. How flexible are your services for customization?

FG|PG understands the lasting power a brand can forge when engaging with individuals on a more personal level. We look to create emotional connections between the brand and audience whenever possible by giving attendees the chance to create their own micro-experiences throughout their attendee journey. So even at the largest live or virtual events, we create, we look for ways to “drive intimacy at scale.” For us, that means looking at both the active and passive consumer or attendee— and ensuring every type of person has a way to engage with the brand in a way they feel most comfortable. As a result of our approach, the services we offer our clients are highly customizable. Having full in-house fabrication and production capabilities gives us the ability to customize even further for our clients and value engineer experiences to meet any need and budget while still providing experiences designed to connect with people on a personal level.

Q. Marketing is more than just a method of promoting a brand. Do you help your clients develop a strategic vision about leveraging on various marketing opportunities?

Marketing goes beyond brand promotion. It’s an opportunity for brands to create personal, lasting relationships with their audiences and keep them engaged for decades to come. We believe it’s a chance to be a part of a culture and help shape it. So, while our core capability is to devise and deliver strategies for live, digital, and virtual experiential programs, we take time to immerse ourselves in each brand, in their goals, in the competitive landscape, and in culture— and then look for ways to connect the dots between our work, the other facets of the brands’ marketing mix, and the opportunities we see that may not even be part of our brief. For FG|PG, every program we work on, whether it’s B2B or B2C, provides an opportunity to learn about the consumer/attendee behavior and how they’re responding to the promotions, marketing, and moments we create. We use those learnings to tweak our experiences on the fly, capitalize on opportunities, and find additional ways to spark loyalty and build tribes. In a sense, we become brand evangelists, and we are invested in the success of our clients beyond what we deliver.

Q. There are other reputable players in the market providing the same services. What makes you a better service provider?

What makes FG|PG different from others in the industry? For starters, when we opened our doors 20 years ago, we were one of the very first women-owned experiential agencies with full fabrication and production services all under one roof. Today, we continue to be one of the few women-owned, WBENC certified, independent experiential and fabrication agencies in the industry. We are a boutique creative “experience first, integrated marketing agency” where the executive team is involved in every project by design. That means we’re out to build brands, not just booths. Clients have direct access to our CEO, whereas, in most agencies, they might simply make an appearance in a high-level initial pitch meeting. Or show up at an event. To ensure we provide the right services for today’s client needs, FG|PG has continued to make strategic creative, marketing, digital, and production hires during the past year, and we have forged strategic partnerships with some of the most innovative digital/virtual agencies in the industry. This means, unlike some of our larger competitors, we can use the right partner, at the right time, to meet our client’s budget needs. It also means, without the weight and overhead of a holding company, we can be selective with the clients we work with and staff we assign— ensuring our clients get an up-leveled degree of service and attention to detail. Our agency is incredibly diverse. Since our founding, we have consistently tracked at 40-60% of our staff being minorities, people of color, and/or LGBTQ. By ensuring that every FG|PG employee is able to bring a diversity of talents to work, we’re increasingly capable of living out our mission and providing real insight to support our clients.

Q. How do you maintain the balance of exclusivity and attainability of goals for the brands through your strategies?

First and foremost, we believe we are brand stewards and our relationship with our clients is a partnership. Many of our clients have been with us for a very long time, and that longevity is built on our focus on creativity, innovation, fiscal responsibility, accountability, and transparency. Strategically, we believe our job is to ensure the unique essence of each brand comes through in how we engage audiences. That is manifested through the experience design of the things we create, the stories we craft, and our content. Simply put, no matter the size and budget of the ask - we don’t believe in cookie-cutter strategies or activations.

Lastly, to maintain the balance of exclusivity and attainability of goals for the brands we work with, we start with a deep dive strategic client/agency alignment. We outline the challenges, the goals, the budget— and then partner to ensure we are aligned right from the start.

Q. Do you have any new services ready to be launched?

FG|PG is always evolving, always innovating, and always looking to stay one step ahead of trends and culture. That said, as Covid-19 first hit, we quickly evolved our offerings to provide a new depth of digital and virtual offerings, built upon our “experience first” marketing expertise. This included working with the biggest off the shelf virtual platforms on the market, but more importantly, investing and launching our own FG|PG digital/virtual experience platform that was custom designed to fill the unmet needs of our clients from other platforms and provide a nimble, and scalable solution to serve audiences wherever they are – globally. After months of platform development, testing, and integration planning, we launched our bespoke platform in early 2021 and have since already customized it for five virtual events. We have also pushed other platforms such as 6Connex and Cvent to the limits of their potential through our unique mixture of digital, virtual, and broadcast engineering expertise. As we look to the near and long-term future, we expect to continue to meet our client’s needs by building upon the innovation that drove us to invest and design on our own custom bespoke virtual IP platform.

Q. What does the future hold for your company and its customers? Are exciting things on the way?

We believe we are headed into the next great experiential renaissance where the blend of physical, digital, and virtual experience is the norm, and creativity will be pushed. It will be the roaring 20’s of experiences, if you will. Coming out of Covid-19, we have all learned how much human connection, entertainment, and experiences mean to us as a people and for culture. For FG|PG, we look forward to the next 20 years and continue to help push the industry forward. Our future will be based on our past success of providing our unique mix of strategically grounded creative solutions, unparalleled client services, thoughtful experience design, and flawless production. With clients that are leaders in their industries and helping to shape new ones, we look forward to working with clients in emerging markets ranging from medical CBD, NFT, AI, AR and VR technologies, renewable and green energy, including electric vehicles, and of course, continuing our long-standing relationships with entertainment, technology, and gaming clients.

Meet the leader behind the success of Freddie Georges Production Group

FG|PG’s Founder, Freddie Georges, personifies her company in every way, tirelessly driven, motivated and fearless in pushing boundaries of growth and creativity at every possible opportunity, and an advocate for diversity and inclusion. If the first 20 years were not exhilarating enough in delivering award winning live experiential brand marketing events for clients like AMC Networks, Bravo, Sundance, Herbalife, Kestra Financial, Oculus, Facebook, Activision and Fortnite to name a few, the next 20 will be as she leads the company into the new era of virtual and hybrid experiential with expanded commitment to excellence in the pursuits of new market sectors.

“As marketers with plenty of time spent watching trends come and go, we at FG|PG have been anticipating the shift from live to digital events and setting ourselves up to be on the forefront of its integration.”