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“We were all fed up with our jobs,” Webb explained to me, fondling a gaming controller. “I loved Arnold and VW. They did great work and were the reason I wanted to get into advertising. But we became bored working on one account, just doing the same site over and over again. We had a lingering malaise we couldn’t identify, then Ben said: ‘This is the wrong model for this work. [The commercial and feature-film director] Michel Gondry isn’t bored or sitting at an agency. When he’s needed, he’s called by the agency and has the freedom to do work for anyone.’”

At first, they worked out of Palmer’s loft in Roxbury. Three days into the new venture they got their first assignment, from the Portland, Oregon, agency Wieden+Kennedy, to create a site for its Nike client. On their first company trip the entire staff of seven went to Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton. The night before the meeting, they prepared by attending a Motörhead concert. The next night they went as a group to see Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.

Doing work for Wieden+Kennedy and Nike gave Barbarian instant credibility. Also, having Robert Hodgin, one of the most talented people in the country working in the emerging medium of Flash animation, as one of their co founders helped. The Nike job also validated Barbarian in the eyes of Webb and Palmer’s former employer, Arnold, who began to feed them work. This begat an assignment from another elite agency, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco, to create a site for General Motors’ Saturn business. Soon they were getting calls from digitally savvy art directors at the most creative agencies in the country to work on premier accounts.

The Barbarian Group had become successful enough that a decision was made to upgrade its office space. So, post-9/11 economy be damned, in April 2002 the staff moved out of Palmer’s loft in Roxbury and into Webb’s apartment in Allston.

“Actually, the economics in 2001 made the uncertainty of having all of these digital people sitting around an agency very manifest,” explained Webb, who had worked as an economist before turning to advertising. “In some ways the downturn helped us, because this whole outsourcing of interactive creative production the same way you do broadcast [television and radio] happened because agencies realized they had to do some belt-tightening.”

In many respects, the B.C. years at the Barbarian Group were idyllic. The group was working with a creatively and technologically enlightened cadre of clients and agencies, all of whom “got it”: the technology, the Internet, and, most important, the possibilities of the medium. Plus, their new model, which sometimes meant fleshing out an interactive element that complemented an agency’s traditional idea for its client and sometimes meant creating an entirely new interactive idea, was working.

Coincidentally, at the same time that Barbarian was seemingly breaking new digital ground every day, on the eve of the chicken that would change everything, I was working at an agency that was not yet getting it, for a client that barely had a Web site, my face pressed against the gates of retail chicken hell.

Don’t Be Blaspheming the Colonel

July 2000

For my nephew Joey, this was a special time. Not only had he gotten himself out of a summer in the sticks mixing cement for my brother, but he was working in Manhattan and being paid $350 a day to write silly songs about poultry.

For me, it wasn’t quite as special.

We had sold a campaign idea, but we hadn’t finalized the individual executions. So this meant spending many hours circled around a speakerphone debating the concepts and the semantics of sweet and tangy and hot and spicy and the difference between crispy and crunchy. Every call began with the lead client telling my team that even though we’d been on the account for a little more than a week, sales were down and the franchisees were getting restless. Every call ended with the head of the account