As you may have read, this month was a big one for the team and clients at Impact Point Group—last week we announced our acquisition by Freeman, the global leader in events.
This is an exciting evolution for IPG and for me personally; an opportunity to blend the Impact Point Group perspective, team, and methods with the Freeman team, and to build on their deeply strategic and creative foundation. Together we’ll create the industry’s leading portfolio of event and experiential strategy solutions that help our clients shine while continuing to shape the exciting future of events.
Funny enough, I didn’t aspire to a career in events. I started as a journalist at the Denver Post in the ‘90s. With newspapers declining, and the tech industry booming, I made a career shift, finding my way to the world of corporate events. That’s where it all clicked.
Events felt like home. The deadlines, the relevancy, and the ability to deliver messaging to an audience at scale appealed to the journalist in me. Designing experiences, curating content and messaging, and bringing brands to life appealed to my creative passion.
Early on I saw the potential for events to be a strategic platform. And the lack of ability to tap into that potential when event experiences were misaligned with business and audience priorities.
Like any journalist, I began researching. Then I applied the fundamentals of strategic planning, business and team performance, measurement, and user-focused design into my work. I saw first-hand the year-over-year improvement in our event impact.
That early work helped me see the market opportunity that led to founding Impact Point Group, in 2008. For the past 15 years we’ve stayed true to our niche, partnering with Fortune 500 tech leaders to distinguish their event brands, build audiences, and drive business outcomes.
We stayed hyper-focused on long-term client relationships, evolving engagements as client needs changed. By focusing on client outcomes instead of our own, we earned the position of trusted advisor and the privilege of working alongside event leaders and teams early in their strategy cycles. In 2019, we became a nationally certified women-owned business and began garnering more attention, winning awards for our digital event research and client work through the pandemic.
More recently, we focused on making Impact Point Group event strategy solutions repeatable and scalable through a consistent method and approach. In 2022, the time felt right to look for ways to go to market in a bigger and more impactful way.
Which leads me to where we are today and our incredible opportunity to join Freeman.
It truly is an exciting time, marking an expansion of Freeman’s Agency methodologies and allowing our team to better serve our clients with increased continuity, from the upstream event strategy & portfolio planning phases, all the way through to experience design & implementation.
And through it all, our priority remains the same—to help you, our clients, succeed. To activate your brands with bold ideas, truly engage audiences, and to articulate and bring to life your brand promise in a way that also delivers business results.
Thank you to all of you for coming along this journey with us. Thank you to those who jumped on board early on when Impact Point Group was still taking form, and for those who helped us practice, learn and improve along the way, and to those who have been here through this latest transformation. It is these collective contributions that helped get us to where we are today, and we don’t take that for granted.
We can’t wait to see what lies ahead and what we’ll build together with Freeman, and with you.
