Well well well. Happy new year! I hope you all had an excellent holiday. And for those 5 people in the ad industry that didn’t take January 2nd off, welcome back!

Let’s start the year out with a bang! Advertising Age just released their Top 5 Ads of the Year list. This isn’t a digital list, this is the top 5 “ads” of 2008, in any medium.

And we are totally psyched, surprised and thrilled that our CNN Shirts campaign is in the list.

Let’s think about that. Advertising Age has said that our wonderful CNN campaign is on par with the Nike “Fate” spot and the FREAKIN BARACK OBAMA CAMPAIGN. Um… That is seriously humbling.

Obviously we’re proud and thrilled about any and every recognition we receive, but to receive something so unqualified, from a publication as prestigious as AdAge, in a list that’s not just confined to digital – that is something else.

Congratulations, everyone, and thank you Advertising Age.

The Barbarian Group is seven years old today. (note, well, actually, yesterday. I wrote this yesterday but didn’t get a chance to post it)

Seven years. Wow.

The date was sort of picked arbitrarily. We already had work. We had a check in hand from our first client, the estimable Wieden & Kennedy. What we didn’t have was a bank account. Or a business license. So we couldn’t cash the check.

So on December 11, 2001, Brian Costello, our lawyer and an early partner in the company, went down to the offices of the State of Massachussetts, and filed our dba licence. He was also kind enough to loan us the $500 – the only equity stake we’ve ever taken, so far – since the partners were, shall we say, experiencing some liquidity issues. He then wrote us:

And with that, The Barbarian Group was born. The company consisted of its founding partners – Benjamin, myself, Keith, Robert, Jay and Brian – and our soon-to-be additional partner, Aubrey Anderson, who served as our first CTO.

We were already working on our first two projects, the Nike ACG Go site and the VW Design minisite.

Today we opened up job number 1048. We now stand at 70 or so full time employees and partners, with a host of associates and contractors (though not nearly as many as you’d think for a company our size). Our most recent hire was Jen Jonsson, our new director of production. We’ve been so insanely busy that I haven’t had a moment to write a welcome email for her. We’re that busy.

I’m in the New York office today, and the energy is amazing. The projects are… unbelievable. I’m wandering around from room to room and there’s ground breaking work with amazing teams being done for a major consumer packaged goods brand, a major entertainer, and one of the craziest projects we’ve ever had to work on for an large asian transportation system. Discussions are flowing around the future of interactive marketing and the music industry. I’m watching another team bring Benjamin’s vision of branded utilities come true on a massive scale. On another conference call, Amazing discussions are going on between Noah and Shelby and the creative team on Kashi and what it means to be a responsible brand in the world of social media. Every day, serious, intense process conversations happen between the directors hammering out different nuances of our sales, production, concepting and strategy processes. Ideas brandied about about how to buffer the new biz machine as we going into this horrible economy. Interviews with more amazing people, left and right, even as we all fret about what a company like this means in an economy like this.

And there’s that, of course. Layoffs are happening left and right, around us. Not so much at our clients’ companies, but of course at some of our agency clients. And we’re pretty integrated into the ad worlds of the cities we operate out of. Friends are losing jobs left and right. It’s hitting our friends at the tech companies in the valley, of course, are feeling it too, though not as much as last time.

It’s pervading the atmosphere, of course. We’ve not gone without feeling it here, just like everyone – especially on the payments front

Talking about the economy is a ridiculous exercise, fraught with missteps. Everyone’s so afraid to talk about how they’re doing. There’s all this “perceived wisdom” about how you should make no promises, no prognostications, leave every door open, etc. etc. We’ve had no layoffs, we don’t plan to. It’s weird saying that, even. Like you’re tempting fate, or somehow making it worse. But it’s the truth. It’s interesting, though. I feel a heady thrill even saying it, just like I felt a rush of excitement just coming out and saying a week before the election that Obama was gonna win and we should all calm down. I feel free!

I’m thirty-six years old. I went to school as an economist, and I graduated in 1992, in the middle of a pretty hellish recession. There wasn’t a job to be found in economics, or international relations (one of my minors). I did many of the things people do in recessions – took the foreign service exam, contemplated grad school – but in the end, my actions and career paths inextricably set me on the course to be where I am today. In 2001, in the middle of the dot com downturn, we founded this company. It was a crazy time to start, but it had its advantages – good talent was easy to find. The agencies needed reliable partners to work with since they’d trimmed staff. That feeling is back, of course.

There are a lot of kids here who have never been through it before. We’re watching the pennies like everyone else – we managed to keep our famous holiday party, though seriously cut back, and sadly couldn’t fly the entire staff to Boston for it this year. There’s a palpable sense of concern about the economy, of course. Before every company meeting, we take a poll and ask the employees what they want us to talk about, and the economy is looming large, of course. But this is in our DNA. We’re good at recessions. We’ll be okay. I can feel it. We’re breaking every rule in the book – completely at odds with the conventional wisdom. I find it horrible and scary that so many people are so quick to lay people off. I don’t really know what the purpose of a company is if it’s not to be some sort of benefit to the people who work in it. I’m sure if I brought NIck Denton in here to consult or some person from Bain they’d tell us we were the worst business managers in the world. But fuck it. We own the company, profits come and profits go and I just feel it was right to keep everyone here. And I think they’re happy for it. Two minutes ago, while writing this paragraph, Ashley just came by and said “oh hey thanks for not laying anyone off.” That felt good. That made it worth it.

It’s helped, of course, that we recently won a large global client, and other clients are doubling down. We provide quality services, and it’s heartening to have our clients see value in it. But i also think it’s a belief. In the people here. In what we’re all doing.

I have this working theory that this company follows the logic of economics, not business. We pursue the ideal, what’s right, the broad trends, what makes sense in theory. I often wonder how different we’d be if Ben and I had MBAs instead of economics and physics backgrounds. We come from the world of the empirc, the theoretical, the logical. It’s an interesting contrast.

Seven years of massive technology change. What did we do in 2001? We made cool flash websites, and there was so little content on the web, that was the marketing. People heard about them, and they came there. Viral videos? A far off dream. Viral Marketing? The purview of people like Neil Stephenson and William Gibson. YouTube wha? I remember when Google Maps came out and I thought “oh my god, we are fucked.” Mike Rubenstein the other day was hosting a design class in the Boston office and he was rattling off watershed events in the history of interactive marketing. He got to Friendster, which was, of course, a major moment in the viability of social networking and its marketing implication. The kids looked blank. They hadn’t even heard of it. (And I was so proud when Wired’s first article on friendster featured my picture. Ruby on Rails, AJAX, Processing. Facebook apps. The iPhone. I hit upon the theory this summer that there have been 2-3 disruptive events in interactive marketing every year since we started. It’s been hell accommodating for them all, especially with no funding. But we’ve done it. And it’s been awesome and fun as well.

Seven years. Seven years of constantly trying to reinvent advertising, to push the limit, and to reshape what communications mean in the modern era. Seven years of doing it without any money. Seven years of 100%ish growth each year. Seven years of thinking, every year “oh, it’s gonna get easier” and having it get harder, even as the opportunities and the resources get better.

It’s to the point where I can’t imagine doing anything else with my life. And it warms my heart that I know I’m by no means the only one here that feels that way.

So thank you, Barbarians, for all your hard work. And happy birthday. And thank you, all of our amazing clients, for working with us.

So a while back, The Barbarians had the good fortune to meet one Dorothy McGivney. An ex-Googler, it turned out that Dorothy was working on a new project, and it sounded interesting! It’s a travel-related e-newsletter for New York women. And it’s really well done. And Dorothy is one of the nicest people in the world. And the content is unique, and we like how it markets to a really unique, almost nichey marketing segment, except it’s a really large one, if you think about it.

So we took a few weeks and we helped Dorothy out and built Jauntsetter.com and the associated CMS and emailing capabilities. It’s a really elegant little site and an awesome idea. We congratulate Dorothy on her launch, and her recent second successful jauntsetter party in Brooklyn.

Check it out!

Barbariangroup.com passed 1 million page views this week. 220,000+ unique visits. For an ad “agency” website. That is totally insane.

Hello all!

We’ve been sorta lax about updating our portfolio. The blog makes it so easy to dash off entries when we launch things like CNN shirts, or Hello Health, or Dove. But I wanted to drop a line and say that we’ve updated the portfolio with some really awesome recent projects, including Waking up Hannah, for Ogilvy Toronto and Dove, CNN Shirts for CNN, Hello Health Branding and Web Presence for Hello Health, and Moodstream for Getty Images. We’ve also updated the Plainview software page, and added helpful information, in case you missed it, about the fate of Magnetosphere. How exciting is that?

There’s a nice writeup today in Adweek today about the upsurge in sales CNN is getting on their T-Shirts site today and yesterday, thanks to Obama’s victory. Awesome!

So, Ben and I were talking last night about the recession and where you’d park your money if you had a lot. And we sort of got to talking about “what’s a good buy right now.” Like in the “olden days” when a recession meant you would buy certain kinds of stocks, because they performed well in a recession.

A couple things struck me why this was different this time, and I find them frustrating. I also can’t help but wonder what sort of impact their reality will have on the stock market, our nation’s perception of that as a barometer of the nation’s financial health, and the economic recovery in general.

First, so goes the theory, certain “comfort” and “blue collar” products, and thus their stocks perform well. We kept thinking of good, solid, blue collar brand names – like Jim Beam or Bud – only to realize that in fact these brands were products in highly-diversified portfolios. Is diageo a good buy? People might buy more Red Stripe in lean times, but less Bushmills. More Smirnoff but less Laguvalin. But who the hell knows what their sales/portfolio mix is, and the increased sales in low cost brands may well be offset by declining sales in their luxury brands. If you take companies like SABMiller or Anheuser Busch/ImBev or LVMH or Diageo, I just have no way of knowing, really, without being an analyst, whether they’ll perform better or worse in a lean economy.

We spent a lot of time trying to think of holding companies whose brands were primarily, definitively made up of less expensive products, and we could only think of a few – Frito Lay, Pabst, and maybe Procter and Gamble.

The other, newer, more interesting thing is, I think, that, really, in these economic times, that sort of thinking is pretty much over. The stock market is doing some seriously insane things. The ups and downs it’s having as investors wrestle with their portfolios, and hedge funds wrestle with withdrawals and banks wrestle with their balance sheets is totally eclipsing the ups and downs of any solid stocks.

I’ve heard people like Fred Wilson talk about how Google’s a solid company and he’ll buy when it goes down to 400 and of course everyone’s talking about Apple’s solid earnings. A gambling man would gamble, in the old days, that Apple’s a solid company, and after watching its earnings for 15 years I can tell you straight up that this recession won’t impact it very much. But will it’s stock go up? I don’t think so. Not much. Because the market’s working out kinks that have nothing to do with individual stocks.

What I’d be doing as an investor – as opposed to someone who freaked out and liquidated everything earlier this year – would be watching and waiting not for some mythical low point on a specific stock. What I’d do is identify my targets – the ones who looked good in the old days – but not buy them until I start seeing consistent evidence of the market actually responding to individual stocks and company news. I’d wait for these lurching 500+ ups and downs to be over, let it settle a bit, and after a week or two of seeing individual companies go up and down, based on earnings or news, then I’d dip my toe back in.

But I do find it interesting that the market, while comprised of individual companies’ values, is really not reflecting that right now. It’s another sign of the sort of cancerous spread of this credit crunch. Housing bubble burst -> CDOs -> Credit Markets -> Stock Market along with who knows what else?

So, Ben and I were talking last night about the recession and where
you’d park your money if you had a lot. And we sort of got to talking
about “what’s a good buy right now.” Like in the “olden days” when a
recession meant you would buy certain kinds of stocks, because they
performed well in a recession.

A couple things struck me why this was different this time, and I find
them frustrating. I also can’t help but wonder what sort of impact
their reality will have on the stock market, our nation’s perception
of that as a barometer of the nation’s financial health, and the
economic recovery in general.

First, so goes the theory, certain “comfort” and “blue collar”
products, and thus their stocks perform well. We kept thinking of
good, solid, blue collar brand names – like Jim Beam or Bud – only to
realize that in fact these brands were products in highly-diversified
portfolios. Is diageo a good buy? People might buy more Red Stripe in
lean times, but less Bushmills. More Smirnoff but less Laguvalin. But
who the hell knows what their sales/portfolio mix is, and the
increased sales in low cost brands may well be offset by declining
sales in their luxury brands. If you take companies like SABMiller or
Anheuser Busch/ImBev or LVMH or Diageo, I just have no way of knowing,
really, without being an analyst, whether they’ll perform better or
worse in a lean economy.

We spent a lot of time trying to think of holding companies whose
brands were primarily, definitively made up of less expensive
products, and we could only think of a few – Frito Lay, Pabst, and
maybe Procter and Gamble.

The other, newer, more interesting thing is, I think, that, really, in
these economic times, that sort of thinking is pretty much over. The
stock market is doing some seriously insane things. The ups and downs
it’s having as investors wrestle with their portfolios, and hedge
funds wrestle with withdrawals and banks wrestle with their balance
sheets is totally eclipsing the ups and downs of any solid stocks.

I’ve heard people like Fred Wilson talk about how
Google’s a solid company and he’ll buy when it goes down to 400 and of
course everyone’s talking about Apple’s solid earnings. A gambling man
would gamble, in the old days, that Apple’s a solid company, and after
watching its earnings for 15 years I can tell you straight up that
this recession won’t impact it very much. But will it’s stock go up? I
don’t think so. Not much. Because the market’s working out kinks that
have nothing to do with individual stocks.

What I’d be doing as an investor – as opposed to someone who freaked
out and liquidated everything earlier this year – would be watching
and waiting not for some mythical low point on a specific stock. What
I’d do is identify my targets – the ones who looked good in the old
days – but not buy them until I start seeing consistent evidence of
the market actually responding to individual stocks and company news.
I’d wait for these lurching 500+ ups and downs to be over, let it
settle a bit, and after a week or two of seeing individual companies
go up and down, based on earnings or news, then I’d dip my toe back in.

But I do find it interesting that the market, while comprised of
individual companies’ values, is really not reflecting that right now.
It’s another sign of the sort of cancerous spread of this credit
crunch. Housing bubble burst -> CDOs -> Credit Markets -> Stock
Market along with who knows what else?