Barbie fever hits the world

This week I want to talk about a campaign, that by now you have likely seen pop up every time you pick up your phone for a mindless scroll.

It has something that has captured attention from all sides of the globe, people with very different backgrounds, within different subgroups and communities get involved with.

I am talking about Barbie.

And the digital campaign that was released to support the launch of the movie trailer.

If you’ve not seen it, it is a digital activation yesterday, which allowed you to superimpose your face on a Barbie background, with a message showing what kind of Barbie you are. I’ve ‘work in progress Barbie’, ‘likes to party hard Barbie’, including ones with political statements, and some brilliant parodies. 

This mechanic is not new, this is something similar that I worked on with Coke back in 2011- hello fresh-faced me. But that’s one of the reasons that makes it even more brilliant.

The campaign taps into nostalgia. If you think back 10-12 years, we were constantly updating our photos for profile pictures.

These overlays were everywhere, the digital equal to the face in hole at fairgrounds.

Barbie could have, and most likely would have had the budget to allow you to design your own complex avatar, but what makes this so beautiful is the simplicity. It cues a time when things were simpler, which is also the main emotion that the film will hook people in on. This is not for the people who know and play with Barbie now, but the people who knew and played with Barbie in their childhoods many moons ago.

The second most important part was the participatory element- shareability was baked into the mechanic. The gameplay meant that you were sharing the campaign on their behalf.

Whereas many brands would have tried to limit what people were able to write on their poster, Mattle kept it open. I am sure there have been a few that would have made them very uncomfortable, but the freedom is one of the reasons that so many varied people got involved and the campaign was spread far and wide.

The app was initially seeded out with all film cast (it’s one big celebrity lineup) sharing their images and the media snapped it up.

What kind of Barbie are you?