Anthony Dines's Barbarian Blog

Happy Holidays from TBG/SF!

Anthony Dines — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 13:52:52 -0500

I decided to come home a week early for the holidays this year and spend some time with the San Francisco office, and luckily for me, my visit coincided with their holiday party. This is now my second Barbarian Group holiday party of the year, and while the Boston one had a ton more dancing, the San Francisco one had a ton more GUNS! That’s right, we went to a GUN RANGE for our holiday party. It was basically brilliant and we are now madly in love with shooting things that make really loud noises. In the above photo, David Wicks is shooting a .357 Revolver, which is basically completely epic and the most awesome gun we shot that day. (I nicknamed it the vaporizer.)

Next year, grenade throwing party? I’m crossing my fingers!

Interactive (IRL) advertising

Anthony Dines — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 23:48:28 -0400

Caught this on the way home a few nights ago, I could have sworn I have seen something similar to it somewhere.

I’d like to see where other agencies and clients decide to further push the idea of interactive advertising living in the real world. I enjoy the act of asking the user to engage with the ad itself, something the internet has been doing for years and it’s no surprise that other media markets are beginning to take notice. Another interesting ad buy that I saw last night in Times Square, another one based around the current election, was a large video billboard bought by the Obama campaign where in which you text in a short message to a number, and that message is then broadcasted to the screen. Check out a demo of it here.

Satellite offices are (sometimes) awesome!

Anthony Dines — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 16:49:06 -0400

The Barbarian Group, like many growing companies in our field, has found that having offices in a number of major cities has done nothing but good. Satellite offices allows us to have a staff that isn’t limited by where they live, and furthermore we aren’t by what we can do, because we are free to hire creative and super smart (and awesome!) people from more locations.

I found a downside to this practice today. Erin Snyder and myself have been working on the same client together since I arrived here in March. Together we basically rule non-stop. So earlier today, when the we checked in to see what the other was working on, we found that we were both madly in love with the work the other was creating, and thus I proclaimed “I WANT TO HIGH FIVE YOU SO BAD!”. Problem is, Erin is in Boston office and I am in the NYC office. NOOOOOO!!!!!!! I can’t high five Erin if she is not here. After a moment of desperation and wishing we worked in the same office, I totally saved the day with this little gem: The virtual high five.

The virtual high five is like the web 2.0 of office life. No longer must you be in the same room to connect to a friend a personal (and completely epic!!!) level. Sorta like how Craigstlist can be used to buy a car AND get you laid, we now have a glorious way to give someone the ultimate compliment! This is only to be trumped by the virtual jumping high five, which can only be used when someone proposes marriage to you online or something off-the-charts awesome like that.

She then totally one upped me by posting on Twitter about it. Check it! I then proclaimed that “I am totally gonna blog about it!” We are now going to back and blow each other minds some more, and hopefully, after client approval, blow the users mind.