Anomaly Toronto partner and CEO Franke Rodriguez spent three months cajoling employees to participate in a physically and mentally draining Tough Mudder event to raise funds for charity.
But while colleagues were slipping and sliding over some 20 kilometres of mud-covered terrain at Mount St. Louis Moonstone, tackling 25 military type obstacles that saw them slide through drainage pipes and clamber over mud-and-water filled trenches, he spent the punishingly hot August weekend in New York, “very shamefully” sipping on a margarita.
“It’s quite a sore topic [among staff] I’ll tell you,” said Rodriguez with a laugh. “I was very much the one rallying the staff, but at the last minute I ended up having to fly to New York for a big client meeting on Friday at 4 p.m. and having to be back in the city on Monday for a 10 a.m. meeting.
“My team has not for one moment let me live it down.”
You could say life at the top has its privileges, yet Rodriguez’s fellow partner, executive creative director Dave Douglass, was among the 20 agency staffers to compete in the Tough Mudder event.
They challenged themselves to raise funds for the charity Pencils of Promise, which works to build schools in impoverished areas. The organization has built 304 schools serving more than 33,000 students since its 2009 inception.
It costs approximately US$25,000 to build a school, so Rodriguez knew it would require something special – like a Tough Mudder event – to encourage people to donate. “We said to the team ‘It’s a lot of money, so we really need to do something to earn it.’”
With donations from clients including Labatt, Mini and Spotify, as well as industry personnel, friends and family, Anomaly has raised more than US$22,000 to date. It hopes to raise US$25,000 – “about $200,000 Canadian” joked Rodriguez – before the end of the month.
Two Anomaly staffers, one of them office manager Dalyce Chomick, will travel to Ghana to dedicate the Anomaly School of Learning and meet with future students. “It’s not a passive ‘Here’s our cheque’ type of thing,” said Rodriguez. “It makes you feel like you’re part of the process.”
Rodriguez said education is one of the cornerstones of Anomaly’s charitable efforts. The agency also has an ongoing partnership with the Oasis Skateboard Factory, an alternative high school that helps at-risk youth earn high school credits by running a skateboard business/professional design studio.
“When we first opened in Toronto, we thought ‘If we’re going to put a stake in the ground there are a lot of great things to get behind, but we’re really going to get behind education,” said Rodriguez.
“It becomes ever so easy to just get stuck in the ad world, and always be thinking about the work, the clients and the awards,” he said. “Every now and again you have to pop your head up over the top.”
With its slogan “leave no Mudder behind,” the Tough Mudder event places an emphasis on teamwork, as well as both physical and mental toughness – all things that Rodriguez said could be helpful in Anomaly’s day-to-day operations.
“It sounds silly to compare our professional challenges to incredible physical and mental challenges, but I do think they’re related,” he said.
“If Jonathan Daly, our 6-foot-7 strategist, was able to pull Nikki Milligan, our creative services director, over a 10-foot wall, what on a [client] brief can’t we accomplish if we put our minds together?
“There’s a level of trust when you’re literally in the mud with someone and digging and grinding and bleeding together, and the same person carried you 300 metres because you rolled your ankle.”
