| Barbarian | |
| Type: | Creative Agency, held by Cheil Worldwide |
| Foundation: | 2001 |
| Location City: | New York, New York |
| Location Country: | United States |
| Locations: | 1 |
| Industry: | Advertising, Marketing, Digital media, Technology |
| Parent: | Cheil Worldwide (Samsung Group) |
| Homepage: | www.wearebarbarian.com |
Barbarian is an advertising agency specializing in digital and technology, headquartered in New York City. It was founded in 2001 in Boston. Past campaigns include the Subservient Chicken for Burger King, Crystal Pepsi Returns, GE Droneweek, and the Reimagine VR Experience for Etihad. In late 2009, the company sold a majority stake to Cheil Worldwide, a publicly traded South Korean holding company.
In 2010, Barbarian’s in-house team built Cinder, an open source coding language for the creative community to program graphics, audio, video, networking, image processing and computational geometry. It was built for their Samsung Centerstage project, which allows consumers to interact with Samsung appliances in an immersive retail experience. Cinder won the inaugural Grand Prix for Innovation Lion at Cannes in 2013.[1]
In 2018 Barbarian reprogrammed an Amazon Alexa Echo Show to act as a receptionist tool, and the developer team then open sourced the code for public use. The reprogrammed Alexa, renamed Barb, is used to help visitors search for, identify and communicate with employees in the office using their internal messaging tool, Slack. Barb was named one of Adweek’s Most Important Tech Stories of 2018.[2]