The Barbarian Group - Projects Feed

Digg Labs 365

The Barbarian Group — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:20:15 -0400

To celebrate Digg's five year anniversary, we helped them create a new addition to their Labs project. Digg wanted something that would encapsulate five years of the internet’s most popular stories, allowing them to be sorted and filtered easily, all within an attractive package. Introducing Digg 365: a convenient and stylish repository for all five years of Digg’s most popular stories in one place. Sorting by year, month, day or category means finding the top story from your birthday last year, the biggest entertainment news stories of 2005, or just settling a bar bet about the relative popularity of Obama vs. Megan Fox in 2009. Also, you can check out past stories all the way from Digg's beginning (something that hasn't been available until now).

Elephant Odyssey Game

The Barbarian Group — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:24:23 -0400

Here's a nice little game for the San Diego Zoo's new Elephant Odyssey exhibit. It teaches us a lot about Columbian mammoths, Asian elephants, and the kinds of animals they crossed paths with in their day-to-day travels. It's lovely to look at and a lot of fun to play. We took a few liberties with reality here and there (time travel and anthropomorphic critters), but for the most part it's full of interesting facts about the animals featured in the exhibit. It's our first game you could call educational. Not that the giant lobster game was not educational.

Modelinia.com

The Barbarian Group — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:10:44 -0400

Just as sports stars are the arbiters of trends for men, supermodels are for women. Modelinia will serve as the much-needed bridge between supermodel deities and the real world. This was our challenge. The Barbarian Group was given the task of creating an online content-driven destination for the fashion conscious and beauty obsessed, offering exclusive access to the models behind the trends. Modelinia.com offers full screen videos, slideshows, timelines, and articles for over 100 supermodels. Sort, browse, and organized all of these models in our model visualizer. Get all of the tips and tricks from the beauty professionals, comment on them, and share with your fashionable friends. From High Heel Bootcamp to Fashion Week to taking a peek inside Heidi Klum's closet - this site pretty much has all your supermodel needs covered. In addition to the site itself, we also built a powerful CMS for our client to manage all of their video, imagery, and text-based content - allowing the site to be constantly updated with the latest and greatest from the fashion world.

GE Shared Discovery

The Barbarian Group — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:05:48 -0500

Our first project with GE is not so much a blog as it is a "marketing journal." What we are up to, more or less, is working with GE on how to express themselves better online, and we are doing it live. So far, we are visiting places like their Global Research Center, hospitals, climbing wind turbines, and documenting it all, while simultaneously coming up with marketing and storytelling plans, all in public.

JustinTimberlake.com

The Barbarian Group — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 22:33:02 -0500

The new JustinTimberlake.com: finally a central location for all things JT. In an unprecedented move to break away from the traditional fan club model, we teamed up with Justin Timberlake (Yeah, we know. We're pretty cool.) to create a place for fans to find songs, videos, photos, articles, and exclusive content online, for free. And this is just the beginning. Strategizing around the launch of the new JT.com was only a part of our laying the groundwork for a much larger vision for the Justin Timberlake brand. We're pretty excited about it. In fact, it's gonna be awesome. We did the design, "Particle":http://www.particlebrand.com did the build.

Ful Website

The Barbarian Group — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 18:27:52 -0400

Ful specializes in bags, backpacks and travel gear, and they are real serious about it. Their inspiration? Music. Good Music. We are talking Memphis here after all. So here we are. The new ful.com. A place for a great line of products and the culture that inspires them to live together harmoniously. That was a music reference, not bad right? Do take a look, browse the bags, read their blog and get a small slice of the inspiration that goes into making this awesome product. Also buy one. We did the design, "Particle":http://www.particlebrand.com did the build.

Adobe Photoshop Express Photo Hunt

The Barbarian Group — Wed, 21 May 2008 12:35:43 -0400

A fun viral marketing job we did for Adobe Photoshop Express. With facebook integration! Good times!

Sheraton NCAA Challenge

The Barbarian Group — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:24:44 -0500

In celebration of March Madness® we helped our friends at Sheraton out with a little site they called the NCAA® Challenge. The goal here was to give friends the opportunity to face off against one another by picking the teams they'd be rooting for throughout the tournament and then allowing them to pick a little something they'd do if their teams lose. Maybe it's doing a few cheerleader moves in favor of the winning team, maybe it's doing your opponent's laundry. Whatever you think is worth the risk. We built the site using Facebook Connect, allowing us to use both Facebook's authentication and friend network as the foundation for bringing fans together and spreading the word.

WGBH The American Experience

The Barbarian Group — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 11:54:54 -0400

Television's most-watched history series _American Experience_ has been hailed as the "most consistently enriching program on television‚" (Chicago Tribune), and "a beacon of intelligence and purpose" (Houston Chronicle). On air, the series brings to life the incredible characters and epic stories that have shaped America's past and present. The Barbarian Group was given the challenge of bringing these documentaries to life online. With over 200 documentaries under their belt, American Experience needed a way to organize vast amounts of content and bring the full length films to a wider audience online. The revamped site needed to resonate with educators and movie-fanatics alike, tackling a wide range of content from photo galleries to timelines to behind the scenes footage. To accomplish this, we built a hybrid HTML and Flash site with an extensive CMS to manage all of the site's video, imagery, and text based assets. We added a handy scheduling widget to see upcoming films, built a video player to stream the full length videos, and added some nice interactive touches to promote specific films throughout. Overall, the site has been extremely well received and is a huge step in the right direction for American Experience's online presence.

Jauntsetter.com

The Barbarian Group — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 11:26:28 -0400

We built this little web app and CMS for our friend and ex-Googler Dorothy McGivney. Jauntsetter is a weekly e-newsletter centered around women who love to travel. Each newsletter features an inspirational female jauntsetter as well travel deals and choice trips. To continue this conversation online, we created jauntsetter.com, where users can browse current and past editions of this helpful newsletter and explore an extensive blog full of travel musings posted by the jauntsetter.com team. Members can sign up to receive the newsletter and create and online profile to share their travel stories with others. A custom content management system allow the jauntsetter team to write blog posts on the fly and send out newsletters with just a click of the mouse. Not a real mouse. I mean that would be weird. But like a computer one.

Dove "Waking up Hannah" Interactive Experience

The Barbarian Group — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 11:36:36 -0400

Because we believe that most great ideas start in the shower, we teamed up with Ogilvy Toronto to create this interactive video experience for Dove's new GoFresh line. It presents a glimpse into the life of Hannah, a woman in her 20s dealing with familiar 20-something pressures: an over-demanding boss, a stuck-up sister, a drained checking account, and a highly anticipated blind date. In this Sliding Doors meets Bridget Jones's Diary adventure, the story unfolds across three different story lines—each featuring a different version of our main character in a different product-inspired mood (energized and work-focused; cool, calm, and beauty-focused; and refreshed, flirty, and socially focused). Along the way, users are invited to switch personalities for a realtime attitude adjustment. Through this interactive narrative and a few fun extras along the way, users experience the subtle (and not so subtle) differences in her day that eventually end in a successful blind date.

Bergwood.net

The Barbarian Group — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:00:10 -0400

Meet Bergwood- a man who loves college football, grilled meat, and a fine day of tailgating. And what better place to hold a virtual tailgate than a virtual parking lot? We certainly couldn't think of one, and so that's just what we whipped up, complete with green grass, blue skies, and basically an unlimited supply of computer-generated meat products. There's also plenty of online goodies there for folks looking to find an Allstate agent, score some free stuff, or just pick a good rivalry-based fight with their friends. So fix yourself a brat and check out bergwood.net. Go goats!

Hello Health Marketing Campaign

The Barbarian Group — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:49:48 -0400

Hello Health came to us with their great idea: Use the internet and communication technologies to restore heathcare and wellness back to the foundation: the doctor-patient relationship. The dream project, right? Selling a great idea that fulfills an almost universal need, one that when you tell people about it, they instantly ask where to sign up. What they lacked was the way to spread the word. What was the face of the brand - what was the experience? The attitude? The presence? They didn't have a whole lot of time before the first clinic opens (there's always a catch, right?) so we set out not only to create a great site for them to get the message out, but an entire identiy that they could rely on for years to come. Deliverables: Brand Identity Brand Guidelines Information Site Subway Advertisements h2. The Challenge: Healthcare sucks. Hello Health came to us with a great business model: Bring healthcare back to the days before the HMO, by providing personal levels of service with your doctor through technology. But besides the idea and the infrastructure, they had no identity, no web presence, and no visibility. So, in a very short amount of time, we needed to create a brand and launch a site to complement the opening of their very first office. h2. What We Did to Make it Awesome: The Brand: We wanted to create a brand image for Hello Health that was at once both friendly and authoritative, the qualities you'd look for in a physician. It also needed to be fresh and convey a sense of modern technology awareness without coming off as glib or trendy. After several rounds of exploration, we landed on the H Shield, combining Health to the power of conversation (because, at its essence, the brand is about communicating with your doctor, and technology merely is the conduit to that goal). We also chose the voice bubble because it conveyed IM and other online forms of communication. The logo, wordmark, and colors are strong enough to stand alone, and harmonious enough to exist in various combinations, whether it's online, on a sign, or on a vespa. The Site: Once we had settled on our identity, we set out to create a site to inform those curious about Hello Health about how it works and why they should consider signing up. This site is similar to a brand like Netflix™ or Zipcar™ in that way, in that the goal is to educate the new consumer on how the system works, what its benefits are and direct them to join. Very early on, we decided that the site should also be a showcase of our members. The Hello Health brand, at it's essence, is about the community it serves, and since its nodes are all local to their neighborhoods, we decided that the backdrop of the homepage should be photos of actual members. The rest of the site fell into place once we made that decision. We decided to use a lightweight, slim HTML back-end in lieu of any flashery, since we wanted to focus on delivering the information in a clear and concise way, with minimal barriers to entry (especially on mobile browsers). The Advertising: Hello Health, being such a new brand, didn't need a ton of above the board advertising at launch. We believe in the market, and the Internet, and both would be far more reliable vehicles for getting the word out about the brand than a massive campaign. Also, we want to inspire trust in our new members, and they happen to a be a lot that are exceedingly wary of advertisements. So we decided to foster the brand's development through blog posts and other non-traditional means. One of those was a subway ad that ran, briefly, in the local Williamsburg stations. This was our first attempt at creating a subway ad, and we definitely applied what we know about interactive advertising to the problem. You can read about the whole experiment here, and why we think that it was a success. h2. The Result: On the day of launch, Hello Health received a tremendous amount of web coverage on area blogs. The brand became an instant neighborhood fixture, owing as much to the brand identity being present at the clinic as to the blog coverage. Part of the interest stemmed from the controversy from our subway ads, which certainly got people talking, but they still remained an introduction point to Hello Health as a whole. The brand continues to grow, taking on more members daily, and Hello Health is already eyeing new locales.

Getty Images Moodstream

The Barbarian Group — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 16:11:01 -0500

Whenever a creative is handed a brief for a new project or sits down to work on an idea for the first time, they often become paralyzed by the white screen or blank piece of paper. To overcome this problem, one of the first things we do as creatives is turn to the web and begin searching for sources of inspiration. We realized it would be awesome if Getty Images created a tool that creatives could use to assemble a virtual moodboard. To accomplish this we designed a Flash interface that allows a user to set their desired mood through a series of sliders. As the user determines the degree of happiness and seriousness they are looking for, the backend pulls together the appropriate assets. Once the settings are finalized, the application delivers a steady stream of video and images set to short pieces of music. After conquering the technical challenge of seamlessly streaming video, audio, and imagery, we thought we'd take it one step further and let users assemble their own stream. As the moodstream unfolds, users can click on individual assets and add them to their board. Once assembled, they can play their moodboard as a full screen stream, save it for future viewing or bounce over to Getty Images and Pump Audio to license the content in their moodboard. h2. The Challenge Getty Images had long been known as the go to resource for beautiful, still imagery for print advertising. But as more marketing initiatives shifted towards online, Getty Images found that they were often being overlooked as creatives felt they were too expensive and did not have web ready assets. Instead of utilizing Getty Images, digital creatives were sourcing their content from microstock providers and UGC sites like Flickr. While they may have been the less expensive option, these creatives were missing out on quality images and were unaware that Getty also offered video and audio assets through Pump Audio. The challenge for this project was to reach out to the audience of digital creatives and make them aware of Getty’s $49 image offerings, their extensive library of video and audio assets through Pump Audio. The added twist is that as a member of this very specific target, we were all too aware that they are very skeptical all marketing. They can smell a phony campaign from a mile away and are not interested in being sold to. So instead of selling them something we decided to give them something for free, something they would actually want to use. h2. What We Did to Make It Awesome Whenever a creative is handed a brief for a new project or sits down to work on an idea for the first time, they often become paralyzed by the white screen or blank piece of paper. To overcome this problem, one of the first things we do as creatives is turn to the web and begin to conduct searches for sources of inspiration. This can be a frustrating process as you need to play around with the keywords you enter in order to find assets that evoke the mood you are trying to hit. We realized it would be awesome if Getty created a tool that creatives could use as a source for inspiration allowing them to bypass the web search. To accomplish this we designed a Flash interface that allows a user to set their mood through the use of sliders. As the user determines the degree of happiness and seriousness they are looking for the, the backend pulls together the appropriate assets that will be returned. Once the settings are determined the application delivers a steady stream of video and images set to short pieces of music. After conquering the technical challenge of seamlessly streaming video, audio, and imagery, we thought we'd take it one step further and let users assemble their own stream. As the user watches the moodstream created by adjusting the settings, they can click on individual assets and add them to their moodboard. Once assembled, they can play their moodboard as a full screen stream, save their it for future viewing or bounce over to Getty Images and Pump Audio to license the assets in their moodboard. h2. The Results: Moodstream was unveiled at the 2008 Webby Awards and was quickly picked up by bloggers and top advertising publications like Creativity. When bloggers wrote about Moodstream it was as if they had been handed the brief for the project, clearly stating the functionality and how it can be used as an inspirational tool. One individual was such a fanatic that he wrote a poem about Moodstream. The 4th week after Moodstream launched there were 132,000 Google search results for Moodstream + Getty Images. In those 4 weeks, over 147,000 people had visited Moodstream across the 8 different localized sites. Not too shabby. We enjoyed working with the entire Getty team on this project and based on the following quote from our client it sounds like they share the love: bq. We selected Barbarian from a highly competitive pitch process as we felt their ideas best aligned with our objective to raise awareness about Getty Images entire product portfolio of stills, footage and audio amongst a target audience, which we termed “digital creative”. A group who, traditionally, we had found hard to reach.

However, it was only when we really started to work with Barbarian and develop the Moodstream site concept that we truly appreciated the value of that decision. At all stages, the Barbarian team challenged our thinking and the final result is very much a product of the vision they bought to the project, witnessed by the unprecedented levels of traffic to a Getty Images’ campaign microsite. The highly flexible and responsive development process they worked to enabled this iterative approach, both by adapting to and driving the evolution of our thinking as the site was built.

- Richard Soar, Global Senior Marketing Manager h2. Internationalization Moodstream rolled out in the US and across Europe simultaneously, and is live to this day in several languages. We handled the entire concepting and development, in coordination with Getty Images' IT department.

Plainview

The Barbarian Group — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 18:32:18 -0400

h1. Introducing Plainview. The Barbarians are excited to share with you our latest software offering, Plainview. It's a little something we've been kicking around based on a need we had internally. Once we found a good solution, we figured it'd be useful for other digital professionals, so we figured we'd offer it up to you. bq. Al Gore invented the internet, that was pretty cool, thanks Al. Steve Jobs invented the Cinema Display, boy did he make my internet look good. The real question is, how the hell did I make it this long without browsing icanhascheezburger in full screen glory? Thanks Barbarians, this is how it should be. - Josh Spear, founding partner, Undercurrent

CNN.com T-Shirt Headlines Project

The Barbarian Group — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 11:09:20 -0500

h2. The Challenge CNN had recently re-launched its website with lots more video content. As part of that effort, they unveiled the tagline “I just saw it on CNN.com.” in an attempt to draw attention to and help people uncover the newly reorganized and video-rich content on CNN.com. While the tagline was resonating, they were looking for a bit more oomph behind the marketing efforts. CNN needed to increase buzz, awareness and most importantly traffic to these new videos. They launched a search for an agency that could help them in their task. The Barbarians responded with just the kind of thinking they were looking for and were selected for the assignment. h2. What We Did to Make it Awesome The premise of our idea was simple. We wanted to add a t-shirt icon next to video-related headlines in the Latest News section of the front page of CNN.com. We made no real mention of the t-shirts other than adding this little icon. We knew that the massive amount of traffic would ensure that a good number of people would click on the icon out of pure curiosity. We planned to play off of this curiosity two-fold. Once a regular CNN.com user was intrigued by the t-shirt icon they would be simultaneously informed about the videos. Clicking on the icon would lead them to a custom t-shirt shop, which we created in partnership with Spreadshirt. Here you could purchase a t-shirt with the headline on it. The shirts were emblazoned with the “I just saw it on CNN.com” tagline, along with the date and time of the headline. You could also seamlessly launch right into the video on CNN.com at any point in this experience. Not only would this sort-of-unprecedented marketing effort be sure to get people talking, but it would also tap into a secondary viral marketing effect as people wore the shirts out and about and shared them with their friends or broadcasted their purchase on their Facebook News Feed. People could choose shirts with headlines they were happy about, appalled about, found surreal, or just whimsical. h2. The Results The program rolled out in full on April 21, 2008 with minimal industry PR. In the next six weeks, we’ve had almost 2 million pageviews, and tons of blog mentions, including leaders such as TechCrunch, PSFK, and 37 Signals, as well as a write up in the New York Times. We’ve also sold a lot of shirts, weirdly, though that was never the real goal. The goal, as we said, was about awareness, and we’ve succeeded roundly on that front.

FritoLay.com

The Barbarian Group — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 12:08:37 -0400

We teamed up with Juniper Park and Frito Lay for a new, more consumer-focused version of Frito Lay's corporate site.

Frito Lay Flat Earth Website

The Barbarian Group — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 16:58:19 -0400

Website we made with Juniper Park for the Frito Lay chips Flat Earth. Flying pigs! Woo!

Adobe Photoshop Express Landing Page

The Barbarian Group — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 21:20:00 -0500

The first of several projects with Adobe Systems, Inc., around the "Adobe Photoshop Express launch":http://www.photoshop.com/express. We helped out with the landing page, tutorials, branding, imagery and they even let us offer some insight into the user interface design. Adobe is a fantastic client, and we've loved working on PX.

Internet Week Website

The Barbarian Group — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:52:01 -0500

We partnered with the City of New York, and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences to make a nice little home for the first annual "Internet Week New York":http://www.internetweekny.com. It is going to be a good time.

TAP Project 2008

The Barbarian Group — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 12:00:55 -0400

The second year of the Droga5/UNICEF/Barbarian collaboration, this year expanded to a dozen-plus cities and agencies throughout the United States.

Motorola Dojo

The Barbarian Group — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 18:33:23 -0400

3 Directors, 3 films, one script. The Barbarian Group teamed up with Ogilvy and Motorola and a few up and coming directors to create a series of films which showcase the sleekness and sharpness of the new Razr 2. All of the films were divided up into separate scenes and users could mix and match scenes from all directors to create their own unique film.

Take TV Site

The Barbarian Group — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 16:03:03 -0400

This is a funny little site we did with Eleven, Inc. for Take TV. It's kinda awesomely over the top. The bombast is a joke. Seriously.

The New Museum Website

The Barbarian Group — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 18:33:18 -0400

We made a really awesome website for our friends at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Located in the Bowery, it's the first new-construction museum in Manhattan in ages. The New Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA with Gensler, New York, serving as Executive Architect, is a seven-story, structure located at 235 Bowery between Stanton and Rivington Streets, at the origin of Prince Street in New York City. The first art museum ever constructed from the ground up in downtown Manhattan, the New Museum will open to the public on December 1, 2007, coinciding with the institution’s 30th anniversary. We are honored to be the New Museum's web partner.