Cheil Worldwide

In 1973 when the company was established by Lee Byung-chul, the Korean entrepreneur who founded Samsung Group, the official name was Cheil Communications. It began conducting Korea's first nationwide lifestyle surveys in 1977; set up a joint venture with Bozell in 1989; and set up Hakuhodo-Cheil in 1999. The company changed its name to Cheil Worldwide in 2008.

Cheil Worldwide opened its first international branch office in Tokyo in 1988 and established Cheil USA 4 years later. From the late 2000s, it began to acquire stakes in overseas agencies. It acquired a stake in London-based agency Beattie McGuinness Bungay in 2008 and New York-based digital shop, The Barbarian Group in 2009. In order to gain further foothold in the US and China, Cheil bought two more agencies in 2012, McKinney and Bravo Asia, respectively.

Most recently in January 2019, it opened a new office in Buenos Aires, Argentine, increasing the company's global footprint to a total 44 countries. As of May 2019, Cheil has 53 offices and 9 affiliates across 44 countries.

In November 2014, it announced that it had signed a deal to acquire a significant initial investment in the UK-based agency iris worldwide. The deal will potentially rise to 100% of the business over the next five years. In 2016, it acquired Founded, a creative agency with offices in London and San Francisco.

In December 2017, executive vice president Jeongkeun Yoo was appointed to president and CEO after the resignation of Daiki Lim.

In June 2020, Cheil Worldwide has announced the purchase of ColourData, a social media data analytics company based in China. The Agency Network stated that the acquisition helps strengthen its data-driven marketing skills.

The Barbarian Group

Barbarian is an advertising agency specializing in digital and technology, headquartered in New York City, and now owned by Cheil Worldwide. It was founded in 2001 in Boston. Past campaigns include the Subservient Chicken for Burger King, Crystal Pepsi Returns, GE Droneweek, and the Reimagine VR Experience for Etihad. In late 2009, the company sold a majority stake to Cheil Worldwide, a publicly traded South Korean holding company.

In 2010, Barbarian's in-house team built Cinder, an open source coding language for the creative community to program graphics, audio, video, networking, image processing and computational geometry. It was built for their Samsung Centerstage project, which allows consumers to interact with Samsung appliances in an immersive retail experience. Cinder won the inaugural Grand Prix for Innovation Lion at Cannes in 2013.

In 2018 Barbarian reprogrammed an Amazon Alexa Echo Show to act as a receptionist tool, and the developer team then open sourced the code for public use. The reprogrammed Alexa, renamed Barb, is used to help visitors search for, identify and communicate with employees in the office using their internal messaging tool, Slack. Barb was named one of Adweek's Most Important Tech Stories of 2018.