Let’s give you a little background on who we are, and how we got here. There’s often a lot of confusion around this – are we an ad agency? Do we only do marketing? We find that a walk through our history is often very telling and helpful in explaining exactly who we are and what we do.
The Early Years
Our past gave us some insights into the merging worlds of internet and advertising. When we were young, the founders of the company were, at their heart, nerds, not marketers. Yet even before the dot com bust, they had already shifted from the heady world of dot com startups, stock options and flame outs for the world of marketing and advertising. Maybe we did this because we lived in Boston at the time and weren’t seduced by the likes of eBay and Google. Maybe we did it because we also viewed ourselves as artists and creatives. Maybe we did it because we wanted steady paychecks. Maybe we saw advertisers as a cheaper form of startup capital for our new company than venture capital. But for whatever reason, years before the world of Web 2.0 came around, and the internet economy started running on ad dollars, we had been playing with advertising and the internet.
We were founded in December of 2001 – not a particularly auspicious time to start an Internet company. Advertisers were skittish in general and had just been very burned by the web specifically. Still, though, we saw some opportunities. First, we saw that there was, even in the downturn, a high demand for a new type of individual – a creative thinker who could also code. We saw that these people were in very high demand by ad agencies, since they could hire them to make awesome Flash sites (think the Turbonium site our Co-Founder Robert Hodgin made). We also saw that these people, despite their prodigious technical know-how, were creative. That meant that they didn’t want to keep doing the same thing every day. That meant they were a bit precocious, and that they wanted to be challenged and respected.
We saw that in the advertising industry of 2001, this wasn’t widely recognized. All the agencies were trying to build up in-house interactive departments, separate interactive advertising firms. They were trying to keep these people on staff. It struck us that they were going to have a difficult time with that.
We also saw a curious dichotomy building up in interactive advertising. On the one hand, you had these huge companies – 500 person interactive shops, building massive websites like IBM.com. On the other hand, you had these brilliant little nuggets of interactive advertising, birthed from the idiosyncratic mind of a single creative, and touching people on an emotional level. Again, we turn to the example of Turbonium here: sites that were creatively loved from beginning to end. Sites that emotionally appealed to the users. Sites that got them excited about a product and helped them connect with it. Sites that were, in effect, advertising.
We realized that marketing and advertising on the web were being treated a little differently. IBM.com is about CRM, it’s about marketing. What can it do for you if you have a new product, and a big new TV and print campaign? Well, you can change the home page, but then you’re changing the home page to put an advertisement on it. Advertising on the web is not the same as having a web presence.
We also saw that there was a ridiculous amount of creative and technical nurturing needed to make a truly top quality site. We recognized that it was almost impossible to make a site that pushed technology and creative as far as possible. Finally, we saw that not only was it ridiculously hard, it didn’t scale well. Larger sites were gonna be harder to do in this model. Sure, you had the dot com shops making big web sites, but you didn’t see anyone making a Turbonium times ten. It was too much for one person to undertake. And the production models didn’t exist yet for making it a team effort without sacrificing the emotional appeal or the creative quality. Agencies were scaling up, but in the scaling up, they’d lose the creative geniuses on whom they were relying, because they’d get bored, or lured away by a company withy a foosball table that was making video games instead.
Finally, it struck us that this problem had been solved once before, and the solution was right under our noses: broadcast. Directors, cinematographers, editors. We don’t expect to keep the best of these in the world in-house at our major advertising agency, do we? No, we worked out a nice system to solve this problem. Let’s apply that to the web.
NikeACG.com
There were companies out there that did this of course: we’re not pretending we were the first or that brilliant shops like Heavy Industry and WDDG didn’t exist. What struck us, though, was that most of these shops were either design shops or Internet shops, and they took work from ad clients secondarily. Like we said, we love marketing, and saw having advertising clients as a benefit – bigger brands! An army of account service people between you and the client! Budgets! What could be better? We set up a company specifically geared to helping them out. We didn’t entirely realize it at the time, but this proved to be quite the prescient move.
Right as we were thinking all of these high falutin’ thoughts, a job fell into our lap. Well, into Robert’s lap, actually. And wouldn’t you know it? It was more than he could do on his own. And wouldn’t you know it, it was from a renowned, forward-thinking agency that didn’t see the point in trying to hire people for this sort of thing. Presto, our case was validated, and off we went.
Things kept hummin’ along, gradually picking up pace for a year or two. Projects got better, we got more clients, we learned a lot as we forged ahead with a whole new production process. We got an office. We got more people. We started paying ourselves a salary (that was nice). We bought new computers.
Along the way, we realized a few things. First, that the Internet is a culture unto itself. This sounds so obvious now, but back then, man, lemme tell ya. Ground-breaking stuff. We had the realization that the Internet populace has a certain set of sensibilities, of humor, and you could create advertising that caters to this. Secondly, we realized that the Internet surfers who are susceptible to marketing are a subset of Internet surfers at large; the same way there are only certain people for whom television advertising works. When you’re on the Internet researching nuclear fallout patterns or looking to procure logistics for 15,000 palettes to get from Shanghai to Toledo, you may not be a target for Internet advertising. But when you’re sitting at your desk in some office, and it’s 4:30, and you’re done for the day and your boss is gone, but it’s not quite acceptable to leave yet, so you’re surfing the web? Bang. When you’re sitting on your couch with your laptop, and you’re IMDBing Neil Patrick Harris’ career to find out his first film (Clara’s Heart, 1988), we’re golden.
Viral Marketing, Web 2.0 and YouTube Force us to Change and Grow
We weren’t the only ones to realize this, of course. There are a bunch of “internet citizens” in advertising. Many of us were thinking along these lines all at the same time. And, of course, the cognoscenti were all blathering about “Viral Marketing” at the time as well. Everyone was developing a picture of something kind of interesting and new – slightly weird, slightly obscure advertising content, developed specifically for the Internet culture, on a low budget, delivering results without relying on paying for a bunch of online media (we’ll get back to our thoughts on online media later).
And lo, on April 7, 2004, the was born.
Subservient Chicken
It was a pretty awesome idea, really, and Crispin, Porter & Bogusky was genius in getting it sold to their clients. But more than anything, we think, what it did was validate these lines of thinking: you can “talk to” the Internet populace. You can take risks with your message. You can get the word out without necessarily blowing a lot of money. And that you can utilize the relationships – electronic and personal – between people and groups to spread ideas and messages, and it can still work even if the message is, at its core, commercial in nature. Sometimes.
Of course we didn’t dream it up. And of course we don’t claim credit for inventing viral marketing or word of mouth or making stupid shit for the Internet. We were simply fortunate enough to have been involved in the phenomenon that proved all of the theories correct. Lord knows we’ve had lots of theories that didn’t pan out. But this one did. In a big way.
It’s caused some fallout – the year solid we spent with companies calling us and literally asking for a subservient this or that. The way the phrase word “a viral” has crept into our lexicon, and how awful it is, and how even though you hate it you still accidentally find yourself using it from time to time. And, worse, the literal-minded approach to it all. The concept of the “viral video.” The idea that something can be, at its outset, a viral. The strange insistence of some people that, when trying to achieve this sort of success, they are promised that it definitely WILL work, regardless of how funny it is, regardless of whether or not anyone would actually care.
Let’s focus on the good for now, though. The Chicken made the cover of Business Week (maybe we’re imagining that but it was definitely in there). It got everyone agreeing that there were different approaches to be tried. It got everyone to understand the power of the Internet as an advertising medium. And yes, yes, it sold a lot of freaking chicken sandwiches. It did. Please stop saying “sure, it was great, but did it sell chicken sandwiches.” That’s the old you. The new you believes it. It sold a lot of chicken sandwiches.
It kicked off a shift in thinking from our advertising clients. “We need people not just to build this or that banner or website, we need people who understand the Internet. We need people who can help us speak to this audience. Who can help us translate our brand for this audience.” Well, maybe we were just hoping they started thinking like that. Regardless of the veracity of that sentence, by mid- 2004 our clients were looking for a deeper level of thinking from us. And we stepped up to deliver. Because we love the Internet. And being creative. And we want to see the Internet stay the fun place it is.
In years 2 through 5, we navigated a rapidly changing world. In the old days, we could throw a well-built, awesome minisite up onto the web and assume people would find it, and that it would have a marketing impact. As the web evolved, this became less and less true. We were partially responsible, of course, as the Subservient Chicken showed viral marketing’s impact. Other forces conspired to make us change and adapt as well.
Milwaukee’sBest Light
There was the insane, rapid growth of YouTube, and the rise of viral videos. As interactive geeks, we had always assumed that the web would see an inexorable march toward higher interactivity, higher levels of engagement – and the rise of MMOs like World of Warcraft and social networking in general have validated this. But viral videos came out of left field for us. Luckily, we have always kept our fingers on the pulse of internet trends, and we struck an early home run in the world of YouTube and marketing with the Beer Cannon for Milwaukee’s Best Light. A whole practice was developed at the Barbarian Group to deal with this sort of thing – video production, viral seeding, viral strategy and the like. Another forced change.
Then came social networking. Another challenge. Not so out of the blue, of course, as we have been avid users of social networks since the beginning (and indeed, Wired magazine’s first article on Friendster showed Rick’s smiling mug, right there in the magazine, as he was a friend with an employee of Friendster at the time). Learning to navigate the tricky world of social media and brands became a whole new discipline and pursuit at The Barbarian Group as well.
Then there were the technical changes. New development frameworks that have powered the Web 2.0 technology sector. Ruby on Rails. Django. Drupal. When we started, we were a whole bunch of Flash guys. Now all of the sudden we’re hiring hard core coders and computer scientiests out of Carnegie Mellon and Rochester Institute of Technology.
Kashi.com
Lucky for us, we’ve always loved the internet, and we loved the challenges that came our way in terms of maintaining a best of class internet marketing and technology company. With each new change, new skills, new disciplines arose. Looking at our marketing from 2007 and 2008, such as the Kashi site, at left, you can see a radical expansion of our marketing tools and talents from the beginning. We’re incredibly proud of this. We have strived, for six years, to be able to bring every important interactive marketing skill, tool and tactics in an effort to constantly seek to improve our client’s relationships with their audience. This will never stop.
Growth beyond advertising
So, then, we turn to the present. And this is where the company really, truly, becomes a unique operation. As we were growing and expanding our practice, we could easily have started to become a “full service interactive agency.” We could have, in short, gone the way of RGA, AKQA, or Schematic. That sort of thing. And in some ways, we have mimicked their growth -without the equity investment or a holding company funding the growth. We have client service executives like they do. They call them “account” people, but as we said, we’re not predisposed toward having “accounts.” We have planners and strategists and everything else they have.
But we realized two things along the way: first, the world already has a bunch of RGAs, AKQAs, and Schematics. And while there could clearly always be a few more great interactive agencies, we’ve thought maybe there was something else useful we could do.
Secondly, we had an amazing insight: advertisers are not the only people who have a brand or image they need to extend and support online. They were first movers, obviously, but they’re not the only ones. Hollywood has the problem. The television networks. Content Producers. Periodicals. Web startups.
The skills that we developed through six years of perfecting the art of interactive marketing have a wider need than just consumer brands. This was our revelation, and what we have since started pursuing. Now, our work is roughly equally divided between four or five types of organizations that need help navigating the internet on behalf of their brand or image: brands, media and creative advertising agencies, television networks and periodicals (“the media”), hollywood, technology companies and internet startups. These are our core client bases.
We love it because it keeps us intrigued and always challenged. And our clients love it because we can bring the best practies from each of these worlds to bear for the other ones. Our technology clients like Adobe love our marketing approach and that they are dealing with tech savvy marketers. Our startup clients love not having to develop a whole in-house team of developers, marketers and content creators to get it off the ground. Hollywood loves us because we’re not afraid of the internet. It’s a virtuous circle.
