This summer, we’ve all been living in a “Barbie” world.
The fizzy and inventive movie transcended entertainment silos to become a genuine cross-cultural phenomenon. And its ubiquity is reflected in the numbers. In addition to crossing the $1 billion mark at the global box office, “Barbie” is now the highest-grossing domestic release in Warner Bros. history.
As a partnership between iconic toy brand Mattel and Warner Bros. Pictures, it only makes sense that the movie’s marketing has focused on collaboration. The campaign has featured more than 100 brand partnerships across industries.¹ From the obvious to the unexpected, we’ve seen pair-ups with brands ranging from Microsoft to Progressive Insurance to Neiman Marcus to Crocs. The campaign smartly went beyond paid media to product integrations and limited edition drops.
These partnerships haven’t just played a starring role in keeping the movie in the spotlight––they’ve managed to broaden its reach. In fact, Roku users who searched for Barbie content over-index on multicultural audiences by 35%.² The campaign’s success demonstrates the power of ambitious partnership strategies and holds numerous lessons for both marketers and entertainment brands. Below, we dive into a few of these key takeaways. For brands, the benefits are clear: by helping boost the film’s visibility, you can share in that success, becoming part of a unique cultural moment.
In this era of brand identity, most companies maintain tight control of their voice and their assets. But for the “Barbie” campaign, Mattel has gleefully loosened the reins on their most iconic IP, allowing for partnership campaigns that are as irreverent and surprising as the movie itself. In turn, participating brands have taken a similar approach.
The campaign has included integrations with companies like AirBnB, Burger King, Joybird, and Bumble. Rather than thinking of Barbie as just a doll company, these brands have tapped into every facet of the movie rollout.
Reconsidering brand adjacency and leading with creativity can yield powerful results. As mentioned in our earlier blog post, Roku partnered with Barbie by transforming Roku City into our very own corner of Barbie Land, and streamers showed their surprise and delight by posting on Instagram and TikTok.
Dynamic activations like these that reach users outside of traditional marketing channels are increasingly vital in a multiplatform world.
In the streaming era, viewers grapple with more entertainment choices than ever before. Dropping a trailer a few months in advance and hoping your movie rises above the competition is no longer enough. The “Barbie” campaign started in earnest 18 months before the film’s release, with Warner Bros. spending a reported $150 million on marketing — more than its production budget.
That extra lead time allowed Mattel, Warner Bros., and their many brand partners to craft surprising concepts and develop meaningful products that wouldn’t play like gimmicks. Careful, long-range planning and rollout was integral to building the “Barbie” hype without exhausting the public. The scope and breadth of the campaign will be a model for many theatrical releases to come.
As advance promotion of major theatrical releases extends from months to well over a year, streaming plays an increasingly critical role in the moviegoer’s journey. Not only is streaming a highly engaged media experience, generating an average of 105 minutes of watch time a day, in contrast to 75 minutes for social apps, but it also drives longer, more qualified engagement.³ While someone may discover a film on social, they’re more likely to watch the trailer on Roku.
As the release of “Barbie” approached, the building anticipation produced a halo effect that reached the entire franchise. While this was the first live-action theatrical Barbie movie, an earlier animated series from 2012 was thrust back into the spotlight. “Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse” entered the Netflix Top 10 in the weeks preceding the movie.
We’ve previously discussed the benefits of marketing an entire franchise when new installments or related properties are in the zeitgeist. While reboots seem to have the biggest impact on whole-franchise success, among the titles we looked at, we found that in the case of any new title release, week-over-week searches for the franchise rose by an average of 218% during the week of the new title release.⁴ Promoting prior releases when preparing to launch a new title can create a positive feedback loop, keeping your franchise in viewers’ minds and giving a boost to every part of the catalog.
While digital media allows for marketers to gain more measurable insights today than ever before, not everything is quantifiable. This becomes truer the more touchpoints a single campaign has. A movie marketing campaign as large as “Barbie” will inevitably spin up impact that can’t be measured.
Launching some brand experiences that feature specific calls-to-action can be vital for marketers to understand a campaign’s reach. For this reason, Roku’s “Barbie” collaboration allowed viewers to directly purchase movie tickets. By creating a trackable moment, the “Barbie” team was able to drive users down the funnel and see the impact in real time. More importantly, the campaign gave both Warner Bros. and marketers on Roku a window into how audiences might respond to CTAs tied to future releases.
In our increasingly noisy world, successful theatrical release marketing will require brands and studios to bring the “Kenergy”. That means a greater focus on partnership opportunities, a flexible approach to IP, and a willingness to do the early planning that will build excitement and “franchise halo” in the weeks leading up to a release.
¹ "The ‘Barbie’ Marketing Strategy: Let’s Go Party”
² Internal Roku Data, 2023
³ Insider Intelligence | eMarketer, June 2023
⁴Select reboots and prequels from 2021 and 2022; Roku Internal Data 2022