The CEO and co-founder of The Barbarian Group (link) has been awarded the November Snake Oil Award for his tireless pursuit of phantom achievements, tactless self-promotion and clueless ability to waste client money on ineffective stunts. All of course, whilst remaining truly obsolete in the digital world by incorporating everything we ridicule about postboomers.

However, our attention isn’t the only news garnered with this approach. It was recently rumored in the media that The Barbarian Group was being sold to Korea’s Cheil Worldwide for a mere quarter of its valuation. Good luck to Palmer on getting out while the getting’s good -- or before he turns any older and more clueless in the world of digital advertising.

We first became aware of Benjamin Palmer, as he slouched in a chair during a panel discussion at New York Ad Week, doing his best impersonation of a K-hole. Though not wearing a bedazzled Ed Hardy shirt, he still communicated the requisite off-the-shelf  “Bad Boy Look.” Salon sculpted disheveled hair? Check! Vaguely S&M leather wrist-cuff watch? Check! Dropping the occasional f-bomb? Double-check. All these flashcard points are further enforced by his blog page (see above self-portrait), posting dated rockstar images for no apparent reason…

We get it. He’s a “rebel.” Nothing wrong with that paint by numbers branding approach… Only his rockstars all date from decades ago. Dude… You overshot coked-up bad boy and ended up at the Hard Rock Cafe’s ‘boomer brunch. Perhaps you should choose something carbon-dated AFTER the internet was invented, if you want to seem edgy (or at least competitive) in digital media.

At Ad Week, Palmer was being lauded by other panelists for TBG developing the HBO Imagine (link) campaign. This stunt, from what we gathered, was in the vein of site specific video projection. This form of advertising has been popping up with more regularity in public spaces, most notably in Europe…

Palazzo Moretti from Claudio Sinatti on Vimeo.

Considering that automated video mixer applications like Isadora are being used now to create fully responsive, interactive environments at concerts- we had high expectations for this HBO Imagine installation. Especially considering that in NYC, video advertising is usually just a guy sitting on Houston and Lafayette in Soho, projecting a logo loop on a building.

So, what did Palmer and crew get up to? Well after a year developing the project, they were able to take the idea of watching HBO on a regular screen and -- get this -- project content on a cube! I know, that’s insane. They built a multi-sided cube installation, put it in public and projected videos on it. They must have had to use four projectors! Ahh… Further proof that snake oil salesmen are out there hustling dollars for questionable digital advertising.

After trumping this phantom achievement on their site for months, The Barbarian Group just unveiled their new gimmick days ago. They created something that requires you get in the postboomer time machine and head back to the lad magazine heydays of early 1999 -- with Esquire Magazine’s Dec. 2009 Edition containing…

“Augmented Reality“

Remember the stunt from a decade ago, where magazines printed up special “digital” issues that required that you buy a barcode scanner to “unlock” content? You were supposed to hook this thing up to your computer, scan a barcode printed next to the article you were reading and this device would… direct you to the magazine’s site. True, browsers already existed -- but this was more hi-tech than just typing in a URL. So, The Barbarian Group took this idea and modernized it. Now… Rather than go to the magazine’s site, you need to hold your issue up to a webcam, which will read a barcode printed on the pages and then… direct you to the magazine’s site. In terms of blog traffic Esquire is set to overload servers with this crafty stunt, in that people cannot stop complaining over how pointless it is… I’d look into it, but I’m too busy masturbating to OMNI magazine using my Super-NES glove and telling everyone how great music was two decades ago.

When it comes to hollow stunts that “wow” no one, The Barbarian Group is king. Yet last we read, their buyout was rumored to be around $10 million dollars. For what? A crap idea think-tank? Does that include a free ticket to see Avatar? Because, if you want to experience more on cyber-emo, pointless charades and watered down virtual reality -- we commented on Avatar earlier. I wonder if Benjamin Palmer already bought his ticket to James Cameron’s boomer take on the future of media -- circa 1999.

Tags: AVATAR, Benjamin Palmer, Postboomer, Snake Oil, The Barbarian Group
Posted in: Snake Oil Award