If you were at San Diego Comic-Con in July, chances are you saw experiential event and exhibit company FGPG all over the place and didn’t even know it.
From Netflix to FX to truTV, from the convention-center floor to the Gaslamp, FGPG was working hard behind the scenes to provide the best experiences for Comic-Con attendees on behalf of its clients.
FGPG was launched to help clients create, design and execute immersive and interactive environments. The Huntington Beach, Calif.-based company works on everything from large conferences to smaller corporate announcements to experience-based activations. Each event requires a personal, custom touch and that’s what Frédérique “Freddie” Georges founded the company to provide.
“If you are Warner Bros. and you need all disciplines, we have all of that,” says Georges. “If you are a creative agency and you are producing your own creative for a business-to-business client and you are only looking for fabrication, production and engineering support, we have that as well. That’s how we have thrived. It’s a constant pivot and our nimbleness allows us to keep up.”
Georges has been designing since she was a small girl, when her French mother and Armenian father would frequently return home to find a redecorated house. She began her career with a dream of becoming a museum designer, but realized she wanted to move faster than that field allowed.
That led to the launch in 2001 of the Freddie George Production Group (FGPG) and The Shop@Showready. Together, the two, as well as sister company Form Decor, offer integrated solutions for creative design and custom fabrication. That includes taking empty spaces and turning them into elegant spots decorated with custom furniture for intimate conferences or creating a fantasy landscape for pop-culture fans.
To that end, Netflix turned to FGPG when it decided to head to San Diego Comic-Con for the first time, mounting a booth on the crowded show floor and creating an activation at the Hilton Gaslamp.
“Comic-Con didn’t start out being entertainment based,” says Georges. “It started as comics. That has expanded because the general consumer has such a thirst for those different varieties of entertainment. People who love specific shows have become such huge fans that they feel they have a personal connection with the starts of those shows. Comic-Con is about saying thank you to the fans.”
The booth offered fans a walk through the world of Marvel’s The Defenders, which premiered on Netflix on Friday, Aug. 18, and allowed them to take pictures and shoot video while checking out Netflix’s many other offerings.
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At the Hilton Gaslamp, fans could stand in front of a wall of Defenders and take selfies of themselves among the superheroes. And they could learn all about Netflix’s upcoming movie, Bright, which stars Will Smith and Joel Edgerton and tells the story of a world in which orcs, elves and other supernatural creatures live intermingled with humans.
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But FGPG had more to keep its eyes on at SDCC than just Netflix’s two large installations. The agency worked with Here Be Dragons on FX’s activation for Legion that was part of the network’s annual sprawling outside exhibit and, together with creative agency Brand Connections, it put together truTV’s huge Impractical Jokers block party at Petco Park.
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RELATED: ‘Impractical Jokers’ Brings Brand Partnership to SDCC Block Party
While the activations themselves feel fun and new, FGPG’s real expertise shines behind the scenes.
“What we bring to the table is reality,” says Georges. “We tell the client, ‘if you want to accomplish this, you have to take into consideration union jurisdictions or weather.’ If clients had their way, they would bring the most amazing ideas to the table and deal with the consequences on site, which has the potential of sheer disaster. We’ve seen agencies go out of business because they aren’t thinking about all those factors that are just as important as the experience itself.”
While FGPG is always looking to protect the client’s interests, they also want to create the most boundary-pushing experiences possible.
“When you are sitting around a table brainstorming with a client, you want them to come up with the most crazy ideas and then we think, ‘that’s cool, how can we achieve it?’ No matter who we’re working for, we always ask ourselves ‘how can we do it better next time?’ We want to push ourselves. We don’t want to just recycle an experience.”
For more information on working with FGPG to create your company’s next amazing experience, head to www.FGPG.com.
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