Hasta La Creative!

Today Shareen Pathak of Digiday ran a rather unflattering portrait of The Barbarian Group, taking a look inside its recent “meltdown.”

The Group has seen something of a leadership exodus in recent months, changing CEOs for the second time in less than a year last week. Back in December, Sophie Kelly left the agency to be replaced by Peter Kim, who has since been succeded by interim CEO Aaron Lau. In March, co-founder and chairman Benjamin Palmer left the agency after 14 years, with chief strategy officer Ian Daly part of a wave of executive departures two months later. Owner/CXO Keith Butters, CCO Edu Pou, head of talent/HR Michelle Prota and head of account management Sherri Chambers also left the agency in May. 

“The fact that it’s still around at all is a testament to its heritage, since right now it is literally being run into the ground,” Barbarian co-founder Rick Webb told Digiday. 

The publication pointed Barbarian’s relationship with Korean holding company Cheil Worldwide, “a company with a culture at odds with its own.” For example, one veteran of The Barbarian Group told us that Cheil didn’t want to pay full price for its in-house talent, especially on the technical side of things.

This party also pointed to clients not knowing quite what to make of the organization, saying, “We were in limbo between production shop and full-service agency. And while the middle was interesting, a lot of clients didn’t know how to engage.” At a certain point, Barbarian spent significant amounts of money pitching new business alongside more traditional shops — and this investment largely failed to pay off.

Agency veterans also claim that certain members of the leadership team “checked out” well ahead of Cheil firing Kelly.

“When they fired [Kelly], an account person, who personally owned the relationships with every major client, out of the blue without telling the clients in advance, the fate was sealed,” Webb told Digiday. “They’ve been play-acting since December, and they never had a chance.”

Lau, currently serving as interim CEO says finding permanent CEO for the agency is his next order of business. “I’m not here to change history,” he told the publication, “I’m here to shape the future.”

It would seem that certain media outlets also got a little overexcited about The SuperDesk, which would turn out to be a symbol of Barbarian’s ambitions despite the fact that — according to our sources, at least — most employees liked it.

Jill Applebaum, a self-described “happy cynic” and creative veteran of many big-name Manhattan agencies, has taken her talents to The Barbarian Group, where she will help run creative on the Pepsi account.

We last heard from Applebaum in late 2012 when she moved from FCB to JWT.

At the time, tipsters claimed that she would be working for Smirnoff and Skinny Cow among other clients, though today she’s primarily credited with running the Tylenol and Nestle Toll House accounts as well as the work of PSA-focused JWT Ethos. Those names aside, Applebaum’s single best-known campaign is Oreo’s “Daily Twist,” created while she was SVP/GCD at then-AOR FCB and led the client’s “cross-agency Integrated Marketing Communications team.” We would tell you that the campaign swept all major awards shows and scored coverage via the dearly departed Stuart Elliott, but you already knew that. The release even claims that Applebaum’s work indirectly led Barclay’s to lend its name to Brooklyn’s most annoying concert venue/basketball stadium for the super-reasonable price of $400 million.

Prior to joining JWT, Applebaum spent more than a decade within the Y&R organization; she was promoted from ACD to CD in 2004 and, during her tenure, created work for such clients as Burt’s Bees, Jaguar, Dymo, Sharpie and LG. Earlier positions include copywriting gigs at DMB&B and Ogilvy New York.

In addition to overseeing work across Barbarian’s PepsiCo portfolio, Applebaum will also join the agency’s new business team.

No word on whether her new position will include a seat at The Superdesk.

These agency tours of The Barbarian Group are pretty impressive. But you know who’s not that impressed? Fellow New York agency Barton F. Graf 9000.

When Barbarian Group released its Vimeo video showing off its giant, snake-like, resin-poured “Superdesk,” Barton F. Graf responded with its own video about its own enormous piece of continuous furniture—called the floor.

Last week, Adweek went into the Barbarian offices for a closer look, and got to see the agency’s waterless hot tub (see below). But once again, Barton F. Graf ups the ante with a waterless kiddie pool. Look at how childlike and playful it is. Clearly it must produce better ideas than the hot tub does.

Obviously Barbarian is cool, but it will never be the coolest.

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After spending the last 18 months at The Barbarian Group, where he last served as account director of business development, Maximillan Kislev has moved on, joining up with 72andSunny as brand director on the agency’s Google biz. During his career, Kislev has worked on the account side at the likes of Grey and Anomaly. No word from the TBG camp if there are plans to replace,

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We’ve received confirmation that The Barbarian Group, they of recent “Superdesk” fame, has had to cut a handful of staffers. While the tips make the situation seem somewhat dire (what else is new), we’ve been told that TBG actually had to let to go of four staff members due to a small section of Samsung business being absorbed into parent company Cheil’s headquarters. We’ll of course keep you posted if anything else develops.

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L’agence The Barbarian Group a demandé à Clive Wilkinson Architects de concevoir un bureau avec une plus grande cohérence entre les 125 collègues. Réinventant la fonction de mobilier, Superdesk est une initiative, proposant un seul bureau géant circulant dans l’open-space, créant ainsi un environnement de travail unique.

You may not have known that shipping containers can dance.

To promote GE Transportation, agency The Barbarian Group teamed up with Reuben Wu of British electronic band Ladytron to create a song and video featuring the company's intermodal products—which help choreograph millions of containers of freight being carried by railroads, trucks and boats—at work at the CSX Intermodal Terminal in North Baltimore, Ohio. Wu recorded some of the sounds in the song at the terminal itself, a trick we've already seen applied to athletes by brands like Gillette and Coca-Cola. The GE video, part of its "Brilliant Machines" campaign, though, is basically industrial-grade technophilia, struggling to make freight logistics anything but incredibly boring. At its heart, the idea is a little silly, but the result itself actually ends up being pretty hypnotizing.

It's especially nice given the subject matter. Creating any kind of emotional connection to complex, dull-at-first-blush technology is a perennial problem for GE. This, at least, creates some interest. But its got some pretty stiff competition in machines you didn't know were powered by GE—especially Marty McFly's DeLorean.

We know, our intern reports from the trenches have been sorely lacking this summer, but as we wind down the season, we’re glad to give you some quick perspective from one such person who shall remain nameless but offers some thoughts on their time at The Barbarian Group. We’ll have more from 4A’s interns on Monday as we slowly say goodbye to summer. In the meantime, it appears that this particular intern enjoyed themselves while at TBG’s summer “program.” We asked for a recap and we basically got it. Read on if you’d like.

I’ve had my fair share of internships. Fresh out of college, I interned at an arts-and-culture webzine—I fact-checked, I made coffee, and lunch-runs. I stuck around in editorial for a few years, and after burning out hard on the whole writing thing I decided
to go back school for graphic design. Which brings me to this summer, which I spent in a creative internship at The Barbarian Group. Once I got over the initial stomach butter?ies of being an intern once again, I found myself pleasantly surprised: Barbarian gives its interns a full crash-course in the advertising industry, trusting them with an uncommon share of real responsibility.

continued…

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Todo mundo sonha em ter mais horas no dia, seja para dar conta de todo o trabalho que tem para fazer, seja para se divertir. A Pepsi Next resolveu dar uma ajudinha para estas pessoas – pelo menos aquelas que moram em Boston, São Francisco, San Antonio, Austin, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Orange County e Nova York – com The Extra Hour.

A campanha é o resultado de uma parceria da Pepsi com a startup TaskRabbit, que disponibiliza pessoas para ajudarem os usuários a concluir tarefas (aliás, uma ideia muito legal que poderia chegar por aqui).

The Extra Hour conta com um hotsite, que ficará no ar até 12 de novembro. Ao longo deste período, a Pepsi irá oferecer 50 ajudinhas com tarefas do cotidiano para que os consumidores ganhem uma hora extra em seu dia e usem para se divertir. São 12 alternativas, que vão desde esperar na fila de um restaurante até a ida ao supermercado, passando por uma faxininha básica e organização de caixas de fotos.

Os escolhidos de cada semana terão um TaskRabbit para executar as tarefas selecionadas por uma hora e uma Pepsi, claro.

A ideia é dos criativos do The Barbarian Group.

Post originalmente publicado no Brainstorm #9
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