About a year-and-a-half ago we set out on an adventure with General Electric. Over the course of a few months we explored GE and blogged our observations and ideas. As we explored the different business units we started to realize that one of the things that ties GE together is that everyone works on problems that touch a lot of people but can be so large or abstract that it’s hard for even nerds like us to really comprehend the scale of what they are up to. It’s pretty hard to get your head around trillion dollar infrastructure projects, but it is really interesting, and its really important, and as we dug in, we started thinking about a new context to talk about this stuff.

While we were on the road we spent a bunch of time batting around ideas for how to solve this problem. One of the thoughts we had was to launch a “show’ for GE that explained the big problems they were out there tackling. Slowly, as we added more meat to the bones, what has become The GE Show began to emerge.

When we were thinking about a show we knew that we weren’t interested in doing it the way everyone else does (take what would be 30 minutes and fit on the big screen and make it three minutes in a small box). We spent a lot of time thinking about how to make a truly web-native show, creating modules with various types of interaction, in place of the segments that normally make up TV shows.

It’s with that approach that we’re super excited to announce the first episode of The GE Show is live and on the web. Our first episode tackles the world of healthcare, specifically hospitals, helping to illustrate the size, scale and complexity of these incredibly important institutions. The episode is made up of five different modules which take you from introducing the problem with an infographic to a game that helps show just how hard it is to allocate resources inside a hospital to a video segment that shows off some of work GE is doing in the space.

We’re hoping to launch a new episode every few weeks, with our next installment covering electric vehicles, so make sure to subscribe to stay updated when new ones come out (you’ll notice the button in the upper right corner on the episode). Awesome.

Hello! Today we are ridiculously excited to announce that Colin Nagy has joined The Barbarian Group as our first Executive Director of Earned Media. Colin joins us most recently from the MDC-backed Attention, where he was a partner.

Not too long ago, our friend Brian Morrissey over at AdWeek wrote a longish article about digital agencies expanding into the reams of earned media and PR, and it started out with some quotes from me. We said then we were looking to hire earned media specialists, and getting Colin to head those efforts is a real stroke of luck for us.

Many earned media services we have offered, in the past, in an ad hoc fashion. We are now looking to formalize that and bring in some expertise not just in earned media tactics (which we’ve been handy at already, given our history of viral marketing on the web), but also experience in departmental organization, communicating with clients and fostering the discipline throughout our company. With Colin joining us today we are formalizing our earned media offerings into their own department.

So join me in welcoming Colin on his first day, and if you have any social media or PR assignments, give us a call! ;)

Exciting news late on a Friday!

We are super excited to announce we hired Jay Zasa as our first Executive Creative Director. You can read all about it over at Adweek too! Jay is joining us from R/GA, where he’s been an ECD for a goodly while. Frabjous day callooh callay, yo.

Hey remember that awesome site we made for HBO and BBDO? Well it got nominated for a Webby and is a finalist in People’s Choice! You can go vote for it here! Pretty please? With sugar on top? Thanks!

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!