COMMPANY, Gesellschaft für strategisches Ereignismarketing (agency for strategic event marketing), was officially established in 1989 but its roots go back much further with its founder and general manager, Mario M. Flaschentraeger. The native Frankfurter can neither boast the entry qualifications for further education nor a university degree, but rather he has lived his dreams for almost the past 30 years.
The life stages of his passion are multi-faceted: as a young man he coordinated more than 1,000 live concerts at the Frankfurt "Sinkkasten", organised the "Summertime Programm" together with Dieter Buroch (today of "Mousonturm" fame) and ran his own record company. The workaholic also gained invaluable experience at "Ogilvy" in Frankfurt and "ARRI TV" in Munich. His most impressive time at the beginning of his career, he reckons today, was undoubtedly that at the Frankfurt City Department of Culture, where he worked on over 200 cultural events under the direction of Hilmar Hoffmann and his mentor Rudi Seitz until finally, around 15 years ago, he took the plunge into self-employment.
And his courage was well rewarded: COMMPANY is a success and surviving well in the "shark pool" of the now immensely professional sector, and has realised over 900 national and international events to date.
But Flaschentraeger, a passionate marathon runner, is not one to rest on his laurels. At the age of 45, and in tune with his company's anniversary in 2004, he set to work on two new challenges: first, and as one of the first event managers at all, he set up a subsidiary in Russia's capital city, Moscow, and second, he decided to relocate COMMPANY's headquarters away from Frankfurt to the countryside. Two locations that could hardly be more extreme - Moscow has 11,000,000 inhabitants, Sinntal-Mottgers around 742.
Mario M. Flaschentraeger always went that extra mile, even dedicating himself to seemingly "doomed" projects with money-back guarantees for his customers just in case. To this day, not one of his customers has claimed any costs for a botched event. On the contrary, the past two decades have seen the development of many successful and lasting relationships with companies like Axel-Springer-Verlag AG, BASF AG, DaimlerChrysler AG, Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG, Landesbank Hessen-Thüringen, TRUMPF and Volkswagen AG, to name but a few.
And now this perfect team player acts "trilingually" in the metropoles Frankfurt and Moscow and his homebase Sinntal, to put his customers and their products in the spotlight with the help of corporate events. And we await with baited breath which visions are to follow, as reaching for the stars is and always has been more of a challenge than a hindrance to Mario M. Flaschentraeger and COMMPANY.