To celebrate a great year in marketing, Switch: Liberate Your Brand is hosting its annual employee Field Day on Sept. 20, complete with hilarious physical and mental challenges, healthy competition, colorful costumes and a lot of teamwork.
Showing appreciation to the employees, the owners of the St. Louis-based agency have sponsored this Field Day event for the past seven years, spending $30,000 annually.
“We dedicate 364 days a year to making sure consumers are engaging with our clients’ brands, but one glorious fall day each year we ‘walk our talk’ and bring our own brand to life. As an independent agency, the day represents everything we’re about: smart, fun, engaging people working together toward a common goal,” said Mike O’Neill, CEO, Switch. “Field Day is a great way for us to interact in meaningful and fun ways with colleagues we don’t always get to spend a lot of time with on a daily basis. Everyone walks away from the day having learned something new about a co-worker and created lasting experiences, stories and bonds worth sharing all year round.”
Encouraging meaningful interaction between employees, 15 associates are appointed as Field Day commissioners and officials. They are in charge of organizing the day-long event and devising nine custom-designed, interactive and often-times hilarious challenges that fit the company’s brand, culture and employee personalities. This year’s challenges included names like: Make Your Margin; Picture Pages; Hi, My Name Is?; Switch Ball Sling; Unsinkable Blake and Chain of Foos.
“Creating a day-long event to appeal to our 130 employees with varying interests, abilities and ages is challenging, but we feel it’s critical to have the right mix of intellectual, physical and social challenges and a structure that allows everyone to participate in a meaningful way,” said O’Neill.
Building excitement several weeks before the event, employees pick their teams NFL draft-style, determine team names, themes, costumes, campaigns and create promotional materials to generate team awareness. Competing against each other, the winning teams are awarded for their efforts with gift certificates, cash, vacation days and attendance prizes.
In 2012, Switch hit a high note with employee appreciation and teamwork, reporting one of its best years in sales with $48 million in revenue. The company also increased its full-time headquarters and field marketing staff members to more than 1,300 nationwide that year.
