Facebook Olympics 2011
Instead of doing my nightly comics duty, last night myself and several of my co-workers went to participate in an annual event in Chicago for advertising agencies: The Facebook Olympics!
If you’re asking yourself, “What the heck are the Facebook Olympics,” well let me fill you in.
Every year Facebook holds a series of events for advertising agencies in Chicago to compete against each other for the top spot. The events tend to be college drinking games: Beer Pong, Flip Cup, Bags, and Trivia.
However, this year they replaced trivia with “Minute-to-Win-It,” which was my event and I’ll explain that a bit more below.
Since I’m not really a beer drinker, flip cup and beer pong hold no interest for me at all. However, if I can participate in another game of skill while consuming beverages that I do enjoy (rum and coke, for example), then that’s right up my alley.
My agency is OMG (Omnicom Media Group), and we were competing against some of the big giants in ad agencies including Draft FCB (two-year in a row champion of Facebook Olympics), OMD (our sister agency), Mindshare (my previous agency), and several others. We created our own t-shirt jerseys for the event with the tag line “OMFG,” where the “F” was the Facebook logo.
So what do we compete for? Little medals, a giant trophy, a prize of some kind (this year it was a Samsung digital video recorder)…and, of course, bragging rights.
For those of you unfamiliar with college drinking games, you’re clearly either not in college yet or haven’t ever been to a frat party.
I envy you.
You can youtube search what beer pong and flip cup are.
As for the Minute-to-Win-It categories, I’ll go into those details here, since that was my event. The first event was Stack Cup, which was performed by one of the assistants.
The idea is to take 36 empty plastic cups and within one minute, stack them in a perfect triangle and then disassemble them before anyone else. Below is the video example they sent out to us (sorry about the commercial before it).
This is a sick competition where people who’re great at doing it can do some amazing and mind-bending stuff. I mean, just check out what this kid can do.
After that was my event, The Breakfast Scramble. The idea is to take 16 square cut pieces of a cereal box and assemble them like a puzzle in under a minute. However, Facebook decided to change this a bit by cutting up the boxes into 32 pieces and award the winner whoever could do it the fastest.
Even after 4-5 drinks, I was still the best by far.
After this was the Face Cookie, which is the strangest event I’ve ever heard of. And while it is entertaining to watch (however briefly before someone drops the cookie), it’s a huge pain in the butt to do. I know, I tried it for a round and lost.
The idea here is to place a cookie on your forehead and, without using your hands, move the cookie to your mouth.
After that was the final event, Office Tennis. The object of this event was for two people to use clip boards and volley a crumpled up piece of paper across a stage and land the paper in a waste paper basket.
Suffice it to say, this is a LOT more difficult than it looks.
Ultimately Facebook pulled shenanigans and, even after we lost Tennis and Cookie, had us do another cookie round to place for either gold or silver. Since we lost it once, I wasn’t sure why we were doing it again – why not another round of stack cup or cereal puzzles? Ultimately the answer I received was “because we’d be here all night,” to which I replied, “well, who’s stupid idea was it to cut up the damn boxes into 32 pieces?”
Suffice it to say, we didn’t win Cookie round 2, and won a Bronze medal in the event overall.
Meanwhile, back in the other room, OMG had lost at bags and beer pong, but were still running strong on Flip Cup. Ultimately, they ended up winning a gold.
Since we were the only agency to get two medals, (and for other scoring methodology I’m sure I’m not aware of), OMG won the Gold medal overall for the event.
Overall it was an awesome night hanging out with the co-workers outside of the office and “building team pride” by drinking other agencies under the table. And this year, ours was the best agency at doing this! Rock on!
