Little Bird’s Becca Falborn Answers the Call
If you want to know about Becca Falborn, my recommendation is to make it over to Chelsea Piers in New York on an upcoming Wednesday night. That’s when the Madmen Bowling League takes to the lanes, commandeering half the joint for the night as dozens of advertising and production folks don borrowed shoes, hilarious team T-shirts and a sense of upbeat esprit to knock down some pins, some beers and some cocktails, in that order.
Of the six teams playing on any given night, Becca will be there, co-captain of the Glory Bowls (you have to see the logo to get the joke, but it involves a bowling pin sticking out of the hole on a bowling ball), doing what comes naturally to her: connecting people in a way that leaves them all with a win-win feeling. It’s a reflection of what she does in her all-consuming day gig as Founder & CEO of Little Bird, the repping and marketing communications firm she launched at the start of the year.
Within months of its launch, Becca’s reputation and wide set of contacts – gathered over the course of a ten-plus year career that started in reality TV and has since touched on production, post, music and audio – resulted in a jam-packed roster of clients. Collectively, they’re a cross-section of the advertising content and delivery food chain, from experiential and AR/VR producers to live action companies to post houses, audio post studios, VFX/Color/Finishing shops and more. She even represents an awards judging platform that provides the backoffice spine for such competitions as the AICP Show, the AMP Awards for Music & Sound and the International ANDY Awards.
How did a kid from Rockland County end up juggling a dozen roster clients, an expansive network of friends and contacts and a jarring schedule of commitments, while still finding the time to write press releases, manage social media accounts and keep up her own prolific posting and influencing? In a word, she’s driven.
It’s like when she landed at Sound Lounge, the New York audio post house. “They wanted someone who was out there doing stuff and had a good pulse on the industry,” Becca says. With a background strong on both sales and production, she was the perfect fit, reflecting what many in the production and post worlds are looking for now: a rep and sales magnet with a social media presence and an affinity for connecting the dots in ways that generate real ROI.
She’s quick to point out that her passion for doing this is not just to share good times – there’s a method to her approach. “I like to put people together who probably don't know each other, because you never know where people are going to end up or how they’ll move around,” she observes.
“If you think about it, everyone you meet is a potential client or a prospect, and so things like the bowling league are a way for people to meet each other in a relaxed way,” she continued. “And it’s kind of heartwarming to watch, to see people exchanging phone numbers and hopping on this email chain. Everyone was so excited. And I just love it.”
Little Bird is the culmination of Becca’s sum total of experience, and each job has in turn laid the groundwork for the next. As someone who found their passion when studying film and TV in college, she worked three jobs to pay her way through school before landing a gig as a P.A. on, of all things, “The Jersey Shore.”
That taught her quickly that being on set wasn’t where she felt most comfortable, and that being helping drive the wheels of production and post from an EPs or marketing standpoint was a better role. She landed as receptionist at Nice Shoes, and from there went on to work at Hogarth in the Business Affairs Department before joining Sound Lounge and working her way up the ranks from producer to EP. She later went on to join Lime Studios as an EP and their first East Coast employee. In 2023 she kicked off the year holding a dual role as EP of Business Development for both Lime and Assembly, New York's emerging color, VFX and finishing - before taking the plunge and opening Little Bird.
“I like to put people together who probably don't know each other, because you never know where people are going to end up or how they’ll move around.”
“From the time I started,” she recalls, “I was just really excited to explore all of these different nuances that make up the industry.” But going out under her own brand seemed to always be in the mix. As she wrote on Instagram back in January, “It’s time to make the jump I’ve always dreamed of. The sleepless nights, stressful days, wins, losses & all the hard work in between is paying off, but it’s time to work harder than ever.”
For Becca, her work at Little Bird runs a wide gamut, beyond what you might expect from someone on the representation side of the industry. Most notably is her model of mixing traditional sales representation with a robust marketing communications practice that sees her generating social media content, press releases, thought leadership articles and other missives designed to keep her clients’ brands in the industry’s view.
“Given my experience, as someone who has been a staff EP and producer on the post side, I kind of felt like there should be more of a return from your repping experience,” she says, adding that she’s not knocking how most reps work – it’s just that for her, there was always a desire to expand the zone, as they say in baseball. “And I feel like there's a lot of things you can do in this model that have intangible benefits, and sometimes don’t feel like they’re sales-based, but that ultimately pay off.”
This started when she first began working with Lime, and they asked her to take over their IG account. They saw my personal account, and they were like, ‘Okay, you know what you're doing, can you boost ours?’ They gave me free rein, and I started building out an organized way of creating social media content that boosted not just our posts but things like our awards-show entries and more.” Essentially, in the Becca method, all the relevant info for key jobs was compiled in a master document that could then be leveraged for everything from case studies to pitches to entries.
“For most companies, if their work is strong enough to post on social media and they’re proud enough to put it out there, then we're probably going to want to consider it for other promotional needs as well,” she continues. “To me, social media and PR and sales have always gone together. It's about putting out the right image of who you are and what you’re about. It’s like dating – you put out an image that conveys how you want to sell yourself. It’s the same when companies are courting clients.”
There’s a hidden message here, too; that when you work with a Little Bird roster client, you’re working with a studio that has a progressive view of promoting its work, and in turn, promoting their clients. “Everyone’s ego gets a bit of a boost,” Becca says. “The industry sees the cool stuff you’re doing, and the social media posts about it, and the press releases, and they see your name constantly popping up. And that’s an important way to stay relevant.”
She’s just back from her first jaunt to Cannes Lions under her own banner, and judging by her IG feed, her whirlwind tour was a smashing success. Looking ahead, she has plans to expand the Little Bird presence by adding an assistant or junior rep, someone who, like her, can use the experience of working there to explore their own way into the industry. “I'm very open to helping nurture someone that’s really dedicated and wants to grow and blaze their own path,” she notes. “Kind of like I did.”
