Barbarian’s acquisition of g-Innovations boosts their digital expertise, benefiting clients and shaping the future of digital marketing.
Barbarian, a digital agency focused on creativity, innovation, and experience, announces the acquisition of digital transformation company g-Innovations. Headquartered in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park with an offshore presence in Hyderabad, India, g-Innovations is globally recognized for providing digital marketing technology, development, and implementation services with a specialized focus on Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). This move creates a powerful synergy, combining the g-Innovations expertise in development and implementation with Barbarian’s existing creative and strategic capabilities — empowering the agency and the entire Cheil Worldwide Network to lead in the digital space as it shifts its mindset to deliver clients end-to-end customer journey experiences that can evolve and scale.
“With the recent expansion of Barbarian’s leadership team — appointing Joe Maglio to CEO and Jeff Blackman to managing director — this acquisition marks a period of continued transformation for the agency as it further enhances its existing capabilities,” stated Minsoo Kee, CEO & regional head of Cheil North America. “Building on Barbarian’s digital expertise, this partnership strengthens the agency to deliver multi-dimensional experiences for clients — offering even greater value as we extend these capabilities across the Cheil Worldwide Network.”
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Founded in 2008 by president and chief architect Gourang Mehta, g-Innovations was built on three pillars: ensuring technical excellence, staying laser-focused on client success, and never compromising integrity. Through its end-to-end development and testing services, the company has successfully guided its clients on digital transformation — ensuring that every customer touchpoint is digital. In 2022, Gourang was selected for the inaugural class of the AEM Champion program, last year Gourang and g-Innovations colleague Patrick Lu were both selected for the program, only Accenture, Deloitte Digital, and T. Rowe Price also had two members in this prestigious group. Alongside its expertise in AEM and being an Adobe Bronze Solution Partner, g-Innovation’s strengths lie in Amazon Web Services (AWS) technologies and front-end development. g-Innovations experienced 53% YOY topline revenue growth from 2022 to 2023 and is on track to outpace that growth rate in 2024. Growth has come from clients in the healthcare, financial services and tech/eCommerce sectors.
Gourang will join the Barbarian leadership team alongside newly appointed managing director Jeff Blackman, who will report to the agency’s CEO, Joe Maglio, as they oversee technology, marketing, creativity, and innovation. In this role, Gourang will be responsible for implementing g-Innovations’ expertise in technology and digital marketing into the existing offerings of the agency and the larger Cheil Worldwide Network — to enhance the network’s customer experience development and implementation capabilities. With this integration, Barbarian can offer clients an end-to-end suite of services for all their customer and digital experiences, shifting from treating work as temporary projects or campaigns to viewing work as an evolving digital product that can adapt and scale. The g-Innovations brand will be folded into Barbarian.
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“We were drawn to Barbarian’s rich history of innovation and early adoption of emerging technologies,” said Gourang Mehta, managing director. “By joining forces, we can offer clients a comprehensive suite of services, from ideation to execution, ensuring that cutting-edge marketing technologies are seamlessly integrated into effective marketing campaigns, while constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the digital landscape.”
The acquisition will add g-Innovation’s network of 90 people to the agency and its three largest clients: Samsung, a top 5 pharmaceutical and Fortune 100 company, and a Fortune 300 financial services company.
