Freestyle Interactive is a digital agency specializing in marketing and corporate communications.

Working in digital is fantastic! It’s a very strong sector at the moment in spite of anything else that may be going on in the world. We are a strategic business, beginning with businesses’ whole digital strategy; we extend that into web design and build, digital marketing, social media, social networks and on towards digital asset management, hosting and the full relationship with our clients across their entire digital spectrum.

We are a broad service agency, we’re 16 years old and have about 70 employees in the UK. And now we are starting to expand into mainland Europe with our first office in France.

 

We chose to come to France for two main reasons. First, we have a number of clients who are already based in Paris, and it seemed a sensible step for us to come along and support them better on a local basis. The other main reason was to extend our portfolio: increasingly, we are dealing with global clients who work across all international boundaries and so it makes sense for us to try to work with more broader digital European and global companies. They tend to have a global culture, rather than a specific country culture, no matter where their headquarters are. So we are enjoying those relationships with people who are thinking all around the world rather than in just one specific country. I think that where there are organizations specifically within France then you notice that the cultural differences are a little bit stronger. But they’re never boundaries to working together. I think that’s a matter of understanding each other.

 

We had lots of helps from the various agencies. They are agencies in the UK which help with export and there agencies like the Invest in France Agency, which helps with import and investment into France. The assistance we have had has been fantastic. They helped us realize our plans, stopping them being just dreams and making them into reality. They helped us understand the processes, as well as the legislation, some of the culture, the network… all the things that when you first come into the country you don’t know that much about.

 

For 2012 it’s early days for us, so we’re still learning. We’re still finding out about the industry, the sector, the culture and how we can join in the networks. And the agencies, particularly the Invest in France Agency, are helping us a lot with understanding the networks, helping us join those networks so we can be a real player in France and particularly here in Paris.

By the end of the year, we would hope that we would have more people in our office in France that we recently set up. And by the end of next year, we would hope that it would have extended even further to have maybe small teams who would be able to fully service some of our clients that we have over here. So certainly the next couple of years we will be looking stronger in our offering in France, and potentially then looking to a wider mainland Europe development after that.

 

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