Wow. Amidst all of the hubbub, we’ve forgotten to let you know that with the new year, our Boston office has moved to a new, improved location! Near a major commuter stop! No rats! No smelly perm chemicals! A proper server room!

The new address is 129 South Street, second floor. Above Les Zygomates.

We’re super excited. Here are some photos of the new digs

So, the 2000’s are coming to a close – without us ever actually agreeing on a name for them! – and AdAge and Adweek have some good retrospectives of the work of the past decade.

First up, in Adweek’s best of the 2000’s, the Subservient Chicken won people’s choice for best digital campaign of the decade. Holy moly. We’re psyched, and congrats, of course, to our partners @ Crispin, and to Nike and R/GA for the winner of the judged result, Nike Plus. Awesome.

Next up is AdAge’s Book of Tens – Best Non-TV Campaigns of the Decade where two campaigns we worked on were recognized: The Subservient Chicken and The Tap Project. Wow. That is excellent.

It’s sort of crazy. We started in 2001, so we’ve been at this for the bulk of this decade. Eight years. Man.

ANYWAY, congrats barbarians, and thank you readers of Adweek, and AdAge!

So. Today is December 11, 2009. This means today is the eighth birthday of The Barbarian Group. Eight years ago today, a slightly strange gentleman named Brian Costello went to some mysterious governmental office and filed a certificate, so that we could get a bank account, so that we could deposit a check we had received from Wieden+Kennedy, our first client, and, thus, start our business.

It was three months after 9/11. Benjamin and I had quit our jobs, and Keith somehow managed to start a company with us even though he was working full time at another digital shop. Kind of impressive. Robert had been working “freelance” for a while, and Jay and Brian were at, get this, a consultancy that specialized in the oil and gas industry (ironically, Dawn worked there as well).

The check was for $10,000. Our first payment on a $20,000 job. At the time, it seemed like more money than we could possibly imagine.

We worked out of Benjamin’s loft, and we could all smoke there. Because we all smoked back then. I actually wrote actionscript, I think for the last time. It was a zip code validator. Everyone wanted to talk to Keith, who was the only one really making anything, and so we wrote on a little piece of wood that became the “Keith Pass.” You had to be holding the Keith Pass to talk to Keith. Otherwise you had to leave him alone. In hindsight, we really should have kept that up. I think ultimately Keith’s girlfriend (now wife!) stole it. A wise move.

Oh oh! Also! Benjamin made his first executive decision as CEO. I don’t remember what it was, but we were all like “woah.”

Oh and Keith claimed if he ever had to work a weekend again he would quit. HAHAHAHAHAHA!

I’m super proud of all we’ve accomplished in this time, and super proud of the people who work here. They are the best. They are awesome. We’ve grown and evolved so much, but the one thing that’s stayed the same since the beginning is that the culture has stayed amazing, and the people here have kept it that way. Thank you.

And happy birthday, Barbarians!

So today The Barbarian Group is excited to confirm that Cheil Worldwide is acquiring a majority stake in the company. The co-founding partners myself, Benjamin and Keith will still be leading, and partners in the company, along with Cheil, and we will remain in our roles: Benjamin as CEO, myself as COO and Keith still overseeing creative, tech and user experience, now as our Chief Experience Officer, or CXO. This is still The Barbarian Group, we’re still called The Barbarian Group, and we are still committed to making things awesome. This is the next evolutionary step in our adventure towards making things awesome.

For a while now, we’ve felt that we may have hit a point in our DIY evolution where we started thinking that the next step for us would be a big one. Our industry is growing, and the needs of our clients are growing, and we’ve been growing too, but we want to be bolder and more capable, and we are excited that Cheil can provide that opportunity for us. With our creative leadership and their global network (over 1,500 employees in 25 countries), we’re setting the stage for the next great phase of this company. Increased potential for greater R&D. The ability to really delve into solving marketing’s difficult problems. More capabilities for our clients.

Benjamin made a comment the other day that we are excited about fighting the battles of the future, and not the battles of the past, and Cheil offers us just that opportunity. We’re not one of a billion digital shops on their roster, and we’ve truly gotten along great with everyone from Cheil we’ve met.

This is about growth and the future. We started this company with a borrowed $500 and have never had an investment to grow from. We’ve managed to grow and expand our services over these last eight years, but we want to do more. We know we want to do even more for our clients. With this deal, we’ll be working to extend our services into the areas we have yet to offer, strengthen those that we’re already working in, and geographically expand so we can meet the demand from new clients. We’ll be looking at other regions, over time, as well. As ever, we want to be able to offer any brand, company or entity that needs digital marketing services the best. This will help us in that quest.

Anyway, yes, super exciting. I’d like to take a moment to thank all of our wonderful employees and our awesome clients, who have truly helped us and rocked it out through this challenging year. This company is nothing without you, and we are forever in your debt.

Happy holidays.

I believe I posted the trailer when it came out, but I just wanted to mention that James Othmer’s Adland comes out today. The book is a great survey of the changing world of advertising, as told through the experiences and travels of James, who did his time in the trenches at several prestigious agencies “back in the day,” and then left to write a great book called The Futurist This, incidentally, is how Benjamin and I got hooked up with James – over a year ago, he wrote to us talking about his next project. The Futurist was a book that Benjamin had read and then passed on to me – this happens from time to time (other works in the past have included Alex Garland’s A Coma, Tibor Fischer’s The Collector Collector and Max Berry’s Jennifer Government, for those who are literarily curious) and so we were excited to talk to him. We’ve checked in on him and he’s checked in on us as the year progressed, and he sent us an advance copy at the beginning of the summer, so we’ve had a chance to read it.

It’s a great read, and James makes us look wicked smart, which we especially appreciate. Even if you excised the entire chapter about us, though, I’d still strongly recommend this book – it’s a great survey of the changing landscape of advertising. For those of us in “the biz” this is all stuff we know, but James does a great job capturing it with wit and clarity. It’s also a cathartic read, since we all wrestle with our profession with some regularity, and it’s a topic not often touched upon outside of depressing blog comment areas. And I’m sure all of our significant others are sick of hearing us talk about it. James lends us a sympathetic ear.

Anyway, check it out. I say this in an entirely complimentary way when I reassure you that it’s not a deep theory book, it’s not a prognostication of the future or yet another pundit looking to “establish expertise” so they can become a consultant. It’s from the heart, and it shows.

You know that Red Bull makes an energy drink. You may even know that Red Bull puts on those wild events where people drive shit off a dock into water. BUT did you know that Red Bull invented it’s own sport (Red Bull Air Race) or a helicopter that can do a back flip? Has two Formula 1 teams? Hosts a Cliff Diving world series? Could definitely take your dad in a fight? Throws the biggest world wide break dance competition? Made downhill full contact ice hockey racing a real thing? Probably not.

That was the problem for Red Bull online: diffused presence, minimal cross-pollination of their awesome properties, poor search, and no clean way to show off and share their sickness. The truth is, Red Bull is everywhere, and they wanted to show everyone who has ever taken a sip of their magical beverage what they mean by “Red Bull Gives You Wings”.

We spent the last few months working with Red Bull and just launched the new Redbull.com! It’s pretty fabulous really. We took all their different properties across the globe, housed them within one awesome CMS, made the site content driven, and got out of the way of all the sick content that you really want to see. Oh yeah, and it’s built in HTML (unlike their previous sites that had heavy use of Flash) so it’s now search friendly and easily shareable and trackable. Bitchin, right?

Take a look at the homepage. It’s built to be modular and highlight the best of the best. It even has a feed that is sortable by media type.

Two weeks ago, The Barbarian Group had a special guest: Adam Rasheed, a member of GE’s Global Research’s Advanced Propulsion Advanced Technology Program. There Adam works mainly on pulsed detonation engines. I referred to Adam as a rocket scientist (and do in this interview), though he informed me that it’s not really what he does (he was kind enough to humor me in his answers). This interview took place in person and over email, so hopefully it hangs together. For the first half of the week, Adam joined us out in Wisconsin, where we were visiting GE Healthcare as part of our GE Adventure project.

Noah: So, what do you do?
Adam: I’m a research scientist working for GE’s research center on Pulse Detonation Engines.

N: Can you explain what a pulse detonation is?
A: Pulse detonation engines, or PDE is a technology we’re looking at to improve efficiency of airplane engines by 5 to 10 percent. We plan to do this by changing the way we burn the fuel in the core of the engine. It has a potential impact of saving more than $7 billion a year in fuel costs for the airline industry.

N: And, what about this project you’re working that brings you here?
A: GE has a program for researchers called Technical Career Path, or TCP. Each year, a number of researchers/technologists are presented a TCP Excellence Award. As part of that recognition, we are encouraged to broaden our experience by studying something out of our core research area… I chose to study how organizations innovate and create, and I wanted to do this by embedding myself with a company known for being creative in a field very different from GE.

N: What’s your favorite book?
A: I really like reading – so I have lots of favorite books. The aerospace part of me really liked The Right Stuff (Tom Wolfe) – it’s an awesome book. I also really liked Life of Pi (Yann Martel) and A Suitable Boy (Vikram Seth).

N: Are people impressed when they realize you are a rocket scientist? [Note: Again, rocket scientist is a bit of a misnomer, but Adam humored me.]
A: Well… no. I don’t know that anyone cares – but maybe because I tend to meet lots of other engineers and scientists – and everyone is working on really neat things. I am usually more amazed by stuff that other people are working on. The truth is that I am a bit of an idiot – most of the things I do don’t actually work – but eventually something does. I guess, also, I am not really a rocket scientist. My interest as an aerospace engineer does tend to be in shock waves and high-speed flows, so my focus during grad school was in orbital reentry and hypervelocity aerothermodynamics – which is just a fancy way of saying I studied how things like the Shuttle heat-up when reentering the atmosphere. I did experiments for the air force and for NASA – it was a lot of fun. Now at GE, I am part of a team of folks working on Pulse Detonation Engines which also has a lot of gasdynamics and shockwaves, but the application is aerospace propulsion. Its all plenty of fun – but it’s not really rocket science.

N: Why does rocket science have the reputation it has?
A: Probably because it’s hard! Seriously, modern rocketery is relatively new and the technology was developed very publicly with lots of media footage during the early years of what became the Apollo program. The nation and the world watched as an entire fields of science and engineering were almost started from scratch. When things worked, it was great, but when things failed – it tended to result in a spectacular explosion – and everyone can understand an explosion. It isn’t really any more complicated than other fields of science, but it is unforgiving and small errors lead to pretty big and bad consequences in a very visual manner. Sometimes, I think the perception of rocket science is unfortunate, because people then think its really hard – and it discourages students from pursuing engineering as a career. It’s a lot of fun – people pay you to break things.

N: What are your views on Innovation?
A: I am really still figuring this out. Innovation is good. Everybody should do more. The thing I find odd is how the term innovation is not really well defined, but everybody wants be innovative. And contrary to popular belief, its not new – human beings have been innovating for a long time. I would say using fire was a pretty good innovation. Also wheels… I really like round circular wheels. Square wheels are not so good.

N: What are you looking for on this trip?
A: I am specifically looking to understand more about the creative process and more importantly, how to transform an idea into a useful widgets, services, products – whatever – anything that adds value to a customer, or on a bigger scale to society. I figured by hanging around folks in a completely different industry, I might learn something different. I live in a really cool world of engineers and scientists – but we’re all trained to think in very similar manners. For this trip, there’s a few sort of key questions I am interested in. The first is how do you empower people to develop their ideas. It seems there are certain ingredients – part culture/environment, part access to tools, part necessity/urgency. The second is how do you know which ideas to pursue further. In certain industries, its easy to just try a whole bunch of things and see which one works. This can be done if each trial is relatively cheap and can be done quickly. Unfortunately, that’s not really practical for large-scale infrastructure – like a powerplant or a new jet engine. This kind of ties into my third question – is how can any of this be embodied in large company like GE. We’re committed to technology and spend a lot on R&D – the question is how do we get the best ideas out to help society.

Memphis, Tennessee.

Population: 677,272
Climate: Humid, subtropical
Nicknames: The River City, The Bluff City, M-Town
Water Area: 15.4 sq mi
Backpacks: Awesome

Ask any great Memphian (preferably Booker T. Jones) what their city means to them and you will illicit the same response – Music and Backpacks. You can imagine our excitement then when we were presented with the opportunity to work with fūl.