• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, March 26, 2015

Want a cool job where you get paid to have a lot of fun? Get one creating content for a giant industrial marketer. That’s more or less how Colin Nagy, Executive Director, Media and Distribution, The Barbarian Group, described the role his team has had developing content for GE. A lot of it is fun and games, literally.

One of his first examples was a game Barbarian created to help GE market its hospital management systems.

“You have to manage a hospital,” Nagy said of the iPad and Web-based game platform, adding, “You realize you actually have to manage the doctors, not the patients.”

Speaking at the Content Marketing Insider Summit in Scottsdale this morning, Nagy’s next example was involved building a virtual “Edison Tower” in popular virtual world Minecraft. He noted that one of his colleagues basically go paid by GE to play with Minecraft for a week.

But the “biggest boondoggle” his team worked on for GE was a photo shoot one of his colleagues did in Norway that Nagy described as a “James Bond” shoot involving helicopters. “It’s very otherworldly and very beautiful,” he said of the shoot which was a way for Barbarian to bring GE to life on Instagram.

Nagy gave other examples involving sound, video, film and even peer-to-peer network BitTorrent, which all underscored the point that distribution is no longer the challenge for brands using digital media, the content is.

He described GE’s content initiative as targeting “information omnivores… people online who are interested in science, technology and education.”

He said the effort is more like “public diplomacy” than conventional industrial marketing, and that a main focus is simply to attract the best talent to GE.