We set out to increase awareness of the release of the new Barbie DreamHouse in a memorable content piece for our kid-targeted YouTube channel by partnering with the popular family content creator, A for Adley. Adley was animated into a character to organically integrate her into the visual storytelling of our music video. Performance was nearly 3x the benchmark for the video, earning 11M views on the Global English Barbie channel in 2023 alone, with an additional 4 million views across the 11 local market channels, where localized versions of the video were published. The execution was a smashing success, garnering the top most viewed video spot in 2023 on the Barbie YouTube channel.
The strategy for this activation was to draw awareness to the launch of the new Barbie DreamHouse release in July 2023 by partnering with A for Adley, a relevant content creator in the girls 5-8 target demo, who could help extend the reach of the music video to her 7M cumulative followers. Understanding the outsized impact of combining the audiences from Adley and Barbie for this video, we created an omnichannel marketing approach to generate awareness of this campaign. In addition to the catchy song and music video developed by the Barbie Mattel team, Adley’s team created and shared companion content across Adley’s YouTube and social channels, and the song was made available across all streaming music services. The video was then localized in 11 different languages and posted across Mattel's local Barbie channels for an additional 4M views across those channels. Adley did her own singing for the video, and the production spanned two countries and multiple states due to Adley’s busy schedule as a creator.
This activation was a synergistic partnership across several different divisions at Mattel including Influencer Marketing, Brand Marketing, Product Marketing, and the Short Form Content Strategy, Creative, Production, and Channel Management teams, as well as the A for Adley working team at Spacestation Integration. The final product was a fun, imaginative, and inspiring music video that introduced the new Barbie Dreamhouse to kids everywhere in advance of being able to purchase it and see it featured on the big screen in the Barbie movie.
The music video became a huge hit, over-delivering views by +175% on the campaign with over 15M views across the global and local channels. It became the biggest video of the year for the Barbie on YouTube.
