Alcoholic Beverages

posted 02/24/08 by Rick Webb

We’ve had these weird phases through the course of the company. Automotive. Fast Food. Alcoholic beverages. We think we’re entering into a beauty phase now, but we’re not sure.
What we do know, however, is that we know an awful lot about marketing alcoholic beverages online. You can infer from this that we like to drink, and we wouldn’t too strenuously strive to disabuse you of that notion. We should say, however, there are more than 2 Barbarians that don’t drink at all.
Anyhoo, Alcoholic Beverages are an interesting marketing challenge on the web. They’re not the traditional “big purchase” items that people spend a lot of time considering on the web. Our efforts need to be more broad, more entertainment based. They need to focus on slightly adjusting the customer’s perception to your brand and making them slightly more positively inclined. We’ve had a lot of luck with this through the years, for a wide variety of alcoholic beverages. So we thought we’d share some of them with you.

Here are some recent posts from our employees about Alcoholic Beverages:

Fuck Yea Friday: Non-stop awesome!

The NYC office has Formal Friday. Boston has Grill Friday. As of today, the SF office now has FUCK YEA FRIDAY!!! It’s a pretty high concept thing: end the week with high fives, high class clothes, booze, delish food, loud music, chest bumps and true love. Basically ending the week with an exclamation point! ETERNAL RADNESS!!!

Shotgun Friday

Last Friday, Pfeffer and I engaged in a back office battle in order to decide who was entitled to the shanty in the back room. The first part of our battle involved shotgunning a beer, a ritual I had never participated in before and one that Pfeffer claimed to be a touch too messy for his liking.
The next Monday, as I was unpacking my belongings in the shanty and watching Pfeffer sulk while he drank his coffee, we chatted about the previous Friday’s shotgunning event. We decided it was nice way to end a hard week at work. A great stress reliever if you will.
So we decided to make it a tradition and this Friday celebrated the end of the week on the roof. We were joined by our lovely Mayor of The Barbarian Group, Nick Bonadies. Nick had extended an invitation to all offices to join us in celebrating Shotgun Friday but after opening up the video conference line all we found was one Anthony Dines asleep on the couch in SF. Oh well, to the roof we went and Sabih joined us and captured the event on video.

Formal Friday Intern Beer

Two of our interns Alex Kaminsky and Frank LeClair were kind enough to get some beers for the office, imagine that! It also happens that I kinda did a formal friday thing today. Thanks guys!!!

In honor of Kevin Chan, our fearless Formal Friday leader!

Kevin Chan is off dashing through the snow somewhere in Canadialand and we here at The Barbarian Group NYC miss him terribly. Nemo, our fantastic intern, was truly carrying the formal( and patriotic!!! USA!) torch in Kevin’s absence. Way to be an inspiration to us all! In addition to looking fly we decided to feature just a fraction of our holiday liquor selection. Yum! Yum! Per usual, hand sanitizer was there to keep thing bacteria-free. Have a fabulous and formal Friday!

Celebration, Barbarian Style

So as many now know, Creativity Magazine named The Barbarian Group “Digital Company of the Year”. This is pretty amazing news and obviously we were all super psyched, so we did what Barbarians do best—we celebrated! (with beer and photos of course). Here, in order of arrival, are the lovely celebration pictures that started flooding our inboxes from all offices…

Our IT guys are better than yours.

Just now I was trying to unleash some fine brown liquor from its foul prison of a bottle. But there was a problem. It seems this brown liquor is so fine that it comes with some waxed seal business over the cork, which makes for difficult opening.
See:
Any time I have difficulty with something, I reach out to the IT department for help – like when I broke Hotbot. In this case I bothered Mr. IT Manager Ian.

The Most Dangerous Game

Good news everyone.
We drink a lot and sometimes that happens at bars. While at these bars, we often play a game called Photo Hunt. It’s a game in which drunkards try to find five differences in two (somewhat) identical photos while drinking and spending too much money. It looks like this:
Based on that bit of computer entertainment, we made this sweeeeeeet game. It’s for Photoshop Express and it’s called Identifive.

oooshiny meetup at tbgsf


Last night, we had an informal get together in the San Francisco Barbarian office. Pizza was eaten, beverages were enjoyed, and a lot of ridiculously cool work was shared.

Videos, photos and links to some of the work shown are being aggregated on the oooshiny log .