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“Don’t fuck it up,” he said.

B.C./A.C.

October 2007

My first visit to Barbarian’s new office on Broadway in lower Manhattan, on Halloween, began with my sitting on a lobby couch a little too close to the receptionist, who was coolly trying to locate the co founder and COO, Rick Webb, who had apparently vapor-locked and was late for our appointment. Just to make sure I wasn’t the one who vapor-locked, I opened my laptop and checked some of the lively e-mails we’d been exchanging over the past few weeks, including one from the night before:

ME: We still on for tomorrow?

WEBB: Totally. And I will totally rock.

Not exactly the type of terse online dialogue one would expect from one of the principals of a company that’s a frequent cover story in the marketing trades and has won every major advertising award for work above and beyond Subservient Chicken, including Creativity magazine’s Interactive Agency of the Year (even though Barbarian doesn’t consider itself an interactive agency) and the Cyber Lions Grand Prix at Cannes. Then again, the theme line beneath the logo on TBG’s Web site reads: “It’s gonna be awesome.”

All of which is why I didn’t mind waiting. I was content to hang out and observe details that I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I’d been fully engaged in conducting an interview with someone who was one of the best in the world at something about which I had little understanding. Details such as the work permit posted on the first-floor entry door, or the scrap of tape on the lobby intercom with “Barbarian” penned on it, which denoted that, at least in New York, the Barbarian Group was very much a work in progress. And then there was the young man in the blue tights, cape, and red flower-speckled mask of a superhero whose powers I was not familiar with who rode up in the elevator with me but, alas, got off to fight crime, or pollinate flowers, or make pop-up ads on another floor.

Barbarian’s interior decor was similar to that of so many of the newer agencies and production companies I’d been visiting: open floor plan, lots of long, shared worktables covered with Macs and iBooks, conference rooms flanking the sides of a stark communal kitchen tucked into a corner in the back, all somehow projecting a vibe of being progressive, cool, important, socially transparent, and totally perishable, all at the same time.

My second visit to Barbarian began on a better note, in large part because this time my interview subject was actually in the building. When Webb came across the room to meet me, a mop of curly sandy hair, dressed in a baggy black T-shirt and jeans, looking not unlike the actor Seth Rogen in the film Knocked Up, he decided that our first nonelectronic communication should be not a handshake but a hug.

A group was brainstorming in the main conference room, so Webb took me into a smaller “conference room” that was curiously furnished with two white plastic Ikea chairs that happened to be facing a video monitor with an Xbox 360 and two gaming controllers. Twice while we spoke, twosomes of young employees walked in on us, then pretended they were looking for something other than a gaming fix before glancing longingly at the idle controllers and leaving.

When Webb and the Barbarian cofounder and president, Benjamin Palmer, discuss their company’s beginnings, they’ll occasionally frame it in terms of B.C. and A.C. Before (Subservient) Chicken and After Chicken. Because, while the Barbarian Group was a viable and emerging young company when it created the chicken work for Burger King, Webb and Palmer are the first to admit that the chicken changed everything. So, in the year 2½ B.C. (November 2001), barely two months after the attacks of September 11, while most of the American business world was hunkered down, trying to figure out what to do next, six talented, disgruntled, and potentially visionary young men, several of whom had been working on the digital side of the highly acclaimed Volkswagen account at Arnold Communications in Boston, decided to open a digital production