Barbie, a success of Branded Content and film marketing

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CEOs are turning to the power of movies to squeeze more value out of their businesses' intellectual property, but will it work?

It’s nearly impossible to escape the bright pink posters that point to Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Barbie movie. The film represents the Mattel doll’s first live-action movie appearance, and has successfully captured the cultural zeitgeist of millennials posting their best Barbie-inspired outfits on TikTok (videos with the hashtag Barbiecore have more than 570 million views).

The buzz the film has generated is no coincidence: Mattel's Barbie division has spent $100 million on marketing this year, according to Media Radar. It also marks the first major step in the company's business transformation from a toymaker to an intellectual property-driven outfit.

This new vision for the business was set by Ynon Kreiz, who became Mattel’s CEO in 2018. The previous year, the company had made an operating loss of more than $339 million, and the bankruptcy of Toys “R” Us was cited in Mattel’s financial results as having had a “significant impact” on its revenue. In response, Kreiz’s long-term strategy shifted away from retail and toward capturing the “full value of Mattel’s intellectual property through franchise management.”

In essence, Mattel set out to breathe new life into its qatar phone numbers list popular roster of brands, which along with Barbie includes Hot Wheels, Thomas & Friends and Uno. And it wants to do this by translating them to the big screen and in the process capturing a new audience.

Brands are realizing that if they can get people to spend 90 minutes with their IP while watching a movie, this could have a very positive effect on sales.
This Barbie is a marketing machine
The idea is hardly revolutionary, as Sharon Price John, current CEO of Build-A-Bear Workshop and head of Mattel’s Barbie division from 1994 to 1999, points out: “The intersection of entertainment and the toy industry has been going on for years.” But a quick look at the slate of upcoming blockbuster releases suggests that this strategy is making a comeback.

Mattel alone has 45 films based on its IP in development. These include a horror-themed Magic 8 Ball movie, a “surreal” project based on the purple dinosaur Barney, a heist film based on the game Uno, and a Hot Wheels movie produced by JJ Abrams. Lego is working on a third Lego movie, and following the box office success of Dungeons and Dragons, Hasbro has films based on its GI Joe, Beyblade, Monopoly, Action Man, Furby, and Cluedo brands in development.

“The intertwining of storytelling and toys is pretty fundamental,” says John, who also worked at Hasbro in the 2000s when the business first went through a similar turnaround with the release of the blockbuster Transformers. “But one of the things that has created this recent resurgence is the decline of traditional methods of toy advertising.”

Where toy companies could once reach a guaranteed audience through TV ads during Saturday morning cartoons, the attention of younger audiences is now split between video games, social media, YouTube and other video-on-demand services. “The industry is looking to create that one-to-one relationship with kids and one of the few ways to continue to do that is through creating their own content,” he adds.