A Truly Painful Creative Briefing

Yesterday, we had an offsite meeting in order to be briefed on a big slate of upcoming Gatorade work. The briefing was held at Guy Mezger’s “Lion’s Den” Mixed Martial Arts academy. Mezger is a former Ultimate Fighting World Champion and has another, oh, thousand titles or so to his name.

In other words, he’s a true Billy Badass.

Not only were we there to have our briefing and hear Mezger speak about what it takes to be a world-class athlete, we were there so he could kick our butts.

And, boy, did he ever.

The plan, as envisioned by our Account Service team, was to have Mezger put us through a workout that would truly challenge us (in other words, possibly kill us) in order to crystallize in our minds what it feels like to push beyond our limits (hint: it hurts– it hurts a lot).

Mezger, being trained in the martial arts, put us through sixty minutes of fight simulation training.

The room was set up with a fighting “round” timer, so each sequence followed the rounds of a fight: a bell goes off and the timer begins counting down two and a half minutes. In the final thirty seconds, another bell goes off as a warning, then the final bell, then sixty seconds of “corner time” before the next bell signaled yet another two and a half minute “round.” In the final thirty seconds of each round, we were to redouble our efforts– pick up the tempo mimicking the furious final seconds of a fight before the bell.

And then our sixty seconds of “corner time?” Well, instead of resting on a stool, it was spent doing crunches, instead.

Our two and a half minute “rounds” were spent performing glove-to-glove and glove-to-heavy bag jab-cross-hook routines.

It was an hour of jab-cross-hooking, then really furious jab-cross-hooking followed by flopping onto the floor for a series of crunches. Step, repeat.

I was sweating almost 100% pure tequila and, from the way my arms felt at the end of our sixty minutes, I really thought I’d need to use a pencil clenched in my teeth to hit the keys needed to write this today.

But two hours spent with an icepack on my arm last night has me feeling like I'’m almost human today– almost.

One of the guys who went is having difficulty walking today.

Good times. Seriously, it was interesting and enjoyable (if only in a please-God-make-it-stop sort of way), and shows the lengths our Account Service team goes to in thinking outside the box (but not outside the boxing ring) for ways to get us energized for a new project– and something other agencies could probably take a lesson from.

[This post was recreated after a server crash; hyperlinks have been lost, sorry. –M.]

Email Article Tuesday, July 25th, 2006 at 10:10am Mack Simpson

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