Barton F. Graf’s Staff Collaboration Tool Puts Marcel and R/GA OS to Shame

Whenever an ad agency introduces something fancy, you can always count on Barton F. Graf to raise the stakes with something better. Or at least, something more snarky.

Following the news that R/GA has branded its own internal operating system as R/GA OS, and also following this summer’s announcement by Publicis Groupe that it’s building a network-wide AI-powered professional assistant platform called Marcel, Barton F. Graf has revealed its own internal collaboration tool.

It’s called S.H.O.U.T., and it seamlessly connects all 87 employees in Barton F. Graf’s single office in New York.

Seems legit.

The video’s claim that S.H.O.U.T. allows Barton staff to “connect,” “collaborate,” “operate” and “inform” is a direct swipe at R/GA, whose CEO Bob Greenberg used just those words to describe R/GA OS (which he said has been up and running since 2007, just not branded in any way).

Barton’s parody videos are something of a tradition, amusingly undermining the self-importance of agencies everywhere—most notable, in its spoof (below) of The Barbarian Group’s superdesk.

Tim Nudd

@nudd

Tim Nudd is a former creative editor of Adweek.