How Do You Keep People Engaged in Development? Keep It Fun, Innovative and Bite-Sized
The pandemic has resulted in many challenges for internal corporate culture everywhere, including how employees connect as a team and when they connect. At Real Chemistry, we experienced these same challenges. Our Integrated Media Team (IMT), which is comprised of media planners, social media gurus and activation experts, knew at its core that we needed to find ways to motivate, re-charge and remember why we push to make the world a healthier place every single day. Routinely, the Integrated Media Leadership team meets with staff at all levels to discuss needs, personal and professional development, and support across the board.
And that is how #IMTFightClub was born – that and a little pop culture love for the movie. This Fight Club serves as a forum to address the IMT team’s need to meet as a group, discuss industry trends and events, and leverage the brain power of the full team to address client needs. The premise is simple: we meet as a group every other week, receive a prompt at the start, split into teams to discuss our strategy and presentation for 15 minutes, and then present for 15 minutes. The hosts of that week's Fight Club then determine the winning team and give each member a gift card to the coffee shop of their choice.
As you may know, there are no rules in Fight Club. One session, the topic was Meta and what we would call the company if we had had the opportunity to rebrand the platform. Another topic was third-party cookies and the power of search, also known as “cookie-pocalypse.” One week we did an exercise using the least number of clicks to Wikipedia pages to celebrate Lunar New Year.
Of course, the IMT Fight Club HAD to discuss the ads at Super Bowl 2022. Four teams came together the Monday following the big game and were given the challenge of choosing the most noteworthy commercial, providing the rationale for their choice, and answering a bonus question – who from the halftime lineup of celebs should have directed it? All four teams unanimously selected Coinbase’s creative QR code as the most noteworthy ad. The code bouncing around the TV screen stopped people mid-conversation and/or mid-chip dip, pulling out their smartphones to see what the buzz was all about – so much so that Coinbase’s website crashed from the volume of activity. The IMT Fight Club deemed this ad effective in driving visits to the app based on the scans received, and they selected 50 Cent as the preferred director of choice.
The IMT Fight Club was created for the people, by the people. Our team came to leadership with a gap in professional development, and the new idea came to fruition within two weeks. This initiative has driven us to think quickly, find solutions and understand the digital landscape – all of which align with our principles at Real Chemistry. We are all about how we can #MakeItHappen for our teams and our clients through strategic thinking, understanding complex issues and working together as a team to find the solution. And in the case of this Fight Club, we DO talk about Fight Club!
