the barbarian group
The original. The pioneers. The Barbarian Group is a digital services and creation company that delivers the best possible experience for the consumer through the integrated and disciplined use of the best possible practices, good ideas, people and technology. Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as fear, surprise
, art direction, design, technology, content creation, strategy, gaming, viral marketing, an almost radical devotion to Internet culture and nice red Swedish Fish™. In short, all skills in service to providing the best interactive marketing possible. To wit:
Art Direction
Oh yeah, man. Art direction. Boy, can we art direct. Oh ...
Design
Design. Graphic Design. Shaken, not stirred. We get asked ...
Strategy
This whole site, really, is a testament to the kind of ...
Games
Game design. We love games. Games are everywhere. And you ...
Viral Marketing
This is an old article I wrote. But it’s good for ...
The GE Show
About a year-and-a-half ago we set out on an adventure with General Electric. Over the course of a few months we explored GE and blogged our observations and ideas. As we explored the different business units we started to realize that one of the things that ties GE together is that everyone works on problems that touch a lot of people but can be so large or abstract that it’s hard for even nerds like us to really comprehend the scale of what they are up to. It’s pretty hard to get your head around trillion dollar infrastructure projects, but it is really interesting, and its really important, and as we dug in, we started thinking about a new context to talk about this stuff.
While we were on the road we spent a bunch of time batting around ideas for how to solve this problem. One of the thoughts we had was to launch a “show’ for GE that explained the big problems they were out there tackling. Slowly, as we added more meat to the bones, what has become The GE Show began to emerge.
When we were thinking about a show we knew that we weren’t interested in doing it the way everyone else does (take what would be 30 minutes and fit on the big screen and make it three minutes in a small box). We spent a lot of time thinking about how to make a truly web-native show, creating modules with various types of interaction, in place of the segments that normally make up TV shows.
It’s with that approach that we’re super excited to announce the first episode of The GE Show is live and on the web. Our first episode tackles the world of healthcare, specifically hospitals, helping to illustrate the size, scale and complexity of these incredibly important institutions. The episode is made up of five different modules which take you from introducing the problem with an infographic to a game that helps show just how hard it is to allocate resources inside a hospital to a video segment that shows off some of work GE is doing in the space.
We’re hoping to launch a new episode every few weeks, with our next installment covering electric vehicles, so make sure to subscribe to stay updated when new ones come out (you’ll notice the button in the upper right corner on the episode). Awesome.
Colin Nagy
Hello! Today we are ridiculously excited to announce that Colin Nagy has joined The Barbarian Group as our first Executive Director of Earned Media. Colin joins us most recently from the MDC-backed Attention, where he was a partner.
Not too long ago, our friend Brian Morrissey over at AdWeek wrote a longish article about digital agencies expanding into the reams of earned media and PR, and it started out with some quotes from me. We said then we were looking to hire earned media specialists, and getting Colin to head those efforts is a real stroke of luck for us.
Many earned media services we have offered, in the past, in an ad hoc fashion. We are now looking to formalize that and bring in some expertise not just in earned media tactics (which we’ve been handy at already, given our history of viral marketing on the web), but also experience in departmental organization, communicating with clients and fostering the discipline throughout our company. With Colin joining us today we are formalizing our earned media offerings into their own department.
So join me in welcoming Colin on his first day, and if you have any social media or PR assignments, give us a call! ;)
Benjamin
Hi everyone,
Check out Benjamin being interviewed at Cannes this year for AOL Advertising’s ‘Voices’, a series profiling industry leaders and their thoughts around marketing and creativity. Here Benjamin talks about TBG and offers insight in to social media, marketing and…The Internet.
And here’s an excerpt of Benjamin’s latest column for Adweek, ‘Take A Walk on the Client Side’:
It’s hard to sell a client new ideas—especially digital ones. While I’m sure selling traditional ideas isn’t easy either, at least the medium is consistent.
In the digital world, things change so quickly that anything innovative can be vastly, categorically different from one thing to the next. And while new ideas are hard enough to pull off on a regular basis on the creative/agency side, it’s important to remember that it can sometimes be an even taller order for clients.
Click here for the full article.
The Latest from PR
Hope everyone had a great weekend! Here’s the latest round-up:
Creative Director Phillip Stockton recently participated in YouTube Show and Tell as an expert commentator on content featured on the site.
Additionally, Tim Hwang was recently featured in Rob Walker’s New York Times piece ‘When Funny Goes Viral’, which explores web culture and ROFLCon’s increasing popularity. Awesome job Tim!
Benjamin was also included in the Financial Times article ‘A Real Mad Man’, profiling Jerry Della Famina, whose career inspired the series ‘Mad Men’.























