This is, of course, an area for any entrepreneur. And the founders of this company are, of course, entrepreneurs. There’s so much activity in this space. Advertising. Entrepreneurship. Startups. Equity stakes. Our friends over at
Anomaly (and nice job at finally winning the Google battle and being first, by the way) are, of course, the kings of this. They’ve done some really innovative stuff around what it is to be an agency, and an agency partner, and even an entrepreneurial partner.
And what’s our take on it? Well, perhaps it’s a bit too soon to give away the house completely. But yes, of course, we wrestle with this. What person in advertising hasn’t been stuck brainstorming for a pitch thinking “the problem here isn’t the message, it’s the freakin’ product.” We think it too. Does that mean we can make a better product? Probably not. Do we want to go into business with our clients? Most of the time, no. Do we plan on starting other businesses with potential partners? Of course. And we already have.
We’re not a rich shop. We’re independently owned. We finance our own growth. In a perfect world, perhaps, we’d be so rich we could go into business with everyone we meet with a great idea, and build awesome products and web marketing and websites together and get rich. But we don’t have that luxury.
What we do, have, however, is an amazing, proven ability to attract a large audience and online attention to a particular subject. 99% of the time so far, that subject has been a brand. But does it have to be? Are the tactics that different for other entities that need help getting noticed on the web? No.
This, we think, is the key insight into our different approach from other “ad agencies” toward entrepreneurship. We have a different skillset at the outset. Someone might go into business with our friends at Anomaly because they have a special insight into large consumer trends and a canny ability to design products accordingly. Someone might go into business with The Barbarian Group because we can build an amazing website, we can build amazing web tools, and we can build amazing web buzz.
As we grow the company, this will be, more and more, where you start to see the Barbarian Group diverging away from the ad agencies and interactive agencies it has been lumped with in the first five, six years of existence. We spent the dot com bust, and these last six years, researching, learning, and wrestling with the nature of advertising, interactivity, the internet and the internet population. From what we hear from our San Francisco office, there’s a lot of activity and buzz around this whole “internet” and “advertising” thing. We should really check into that.
The last comment worth making on this stub of a page for our as-yet-unannounced entrepreneurial activities, and the fascinating blog posts we will no doubt write to go here is this: The Barbarian Group is not in it just for the money. It never has been. We’re in it for doing it right. We’re in it for doing it ethically. We’re in this with our employees. We’re in it to win it with style and some semblance of our ethics intact. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: if we wanted to sell out, we would have done it years ago.
on November 16, 2011 at 06:47 PM
