Barbie's global domination: Exactly how Mattel pulled it off
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Welcome to Most Innovative Companies. I'm your host, Yasmin Gagne, joined by my producer, Josh Christensen. Hey, Yas. Oh, so I have a question for you today. Okay. What was your favorite toy growing up? I will say I was more of a Bratz girl than a Barbie girl because the leader of the Bratz pack was a girl named Yasmin. Was it really? Yeah, because I think the creator was Persian or something. Okay, that's cool. And I was like...

Damn. And then they made a brass movie and they cast a blonde girl as her. And I was like, oh, that's erasure. Is that the first time you saw yourself in culture? I think so. But she was significantly sexier than I was. You were a child. Those dolls were way too hot. It was weird. Yeah. Terrible body image and standards to live it up to. I mean, not that Barbie was great, but like.

We'll get to it. What was your favorite toy? Oh, my favorite toy. This is super nerdy, but also actually a toy. And maybe someone listening remembers an anime TV show in the 90s called Ronin Warriors. I watched on like Saturday morning, but they had these really awesome toys.

figures off of these. They were like basically these samurai-based characters. And you had like snap-on armor and helmets for all of them. It was super cool. I loved these toys. They were really terrific. Let's hope that our guest is coming on soon and has had more normal childhood than either of us. I do.

I just want to give a couple quick housekeeping things before we get to our guest today. We get off on a tangent with toys. But just two quick reminders that you can subscribe to Fast Company Premium. So go to fastcompany.com and do that. We'll also put links in the show notes. And that the MIC, Most Innovative Companies, applications are open for next year's list, which will be bigger and better than ever before. We'll also put that link in the show notes. And that's all I've got for housekeeping.

Later on today's episode, you'll hear one of my favorite interviews where I talk to Human Rights Watch Executive Director Tarana Hassan about how the organization is using technology to push back on misinformation and disinformation. But first, the biggest story of the week, the month, the year, by far, is the Barbie premiere. And here to help us understand why everything these days is Barbie-themed is Fast Company Senior Staff Editor Jeff Beer. Hey, Jeff. Hi. Hi.

I've got a whole pile of Barbies with me today. Yeah, please take us through them. I go through my daughter's bucket of Barbies in preparation for this interview. My wife saved her Barbies from like early 90s and they really, I don't know if they age well. We've got like kind of weird business, maybe suit Barbie, drunk haircut Barbie. I got plastic surgery Ken. Yeah.

I do not. This is like realistic. This is actually branded. Oh, and my wife, she's half Indian. So she has South Asian Barbie. Yeah. And I don't know how many of these are knockoffs, but I do have branded moped, Barbie moped from...

That's cool. My daughter mostly just like treats them like action figures and then my little ponies beat them up. But yes, Barbie. There's a presence in my house. Let's get into it. What has the Barbie movie done that stands out from other movie marketing strategies? I mean, I feel like I've seen this thing everywhere.

Yes. Well, the thing about the Barbie movie is that saying those three words together just seems inherently ridiculous. And I think one of the best things Mattel has done is really kind of lean into that. There's the people who, when you hear those words, the Barbie movie would be incredibly excited. Then there's the people who are incredibly cynical. And I think that

From the outset, they really leaned into both in a way that

both parallel and complement each other. And by that, I mean, even from, I think it was last summer, the set photos they leaked, it just looks like super technicolor shots of Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. And it got people like, whoa, they're really going for it here. And then I guess earlier this year, the poster campaign came out where they just made the poster look like the front of a Barbie box. And each character had that, but then they unleashed it onto the internet in a way that was like,

go for it. Like put yourself in that poster, put anything in that poster. And people really did. And I think that really started the enthusiasm and the momentum that has led to a ton of product tie-ins that are both kind of

makes sense, but also a little counterintuitive. I talked to Mattel president, Richard Dixon, and he talked about how you need this back and forth with the audience. You need to give them something that they can have fun with almost like the toy itself, like give them sort of marketing materials that they can make their own in a way that involves the fandom, involves the community. The one thing that strikes me is that this movie is,

and all the marketing around it, they really kind of lean into Barbie's place in culture. I mean, we look at the trailer itself. I wasn't actually sure they were going to do this, but in the trailer, it makes it pretty clear. Like Mattel is kind of like a character in the movie. Like it's part of the whole thing. Like the brand was very involved from the very beginning. So Jeff, I went to Target last night and I noticed a whole bunch of Barbie merch and it seems like every company is collaborating with the brand. What are some of the collabs that stand out to you? Oh,

Oh man, there's a laundry list of products. Well, my favorite is the Xbox console. It does not look like an Xbox console at all. It's not like they just took an Xbox and sort of painted it pink. It's a whole different setup. They put the Barbie Dream Car in the video game Forza Horizon 5, the car racing game. Oh, that's

cool. That's yeah, really cool. It's not exactly a product tie-in necessarily, but they kind of put flow from the progressive insurance ads like they've done crossover ads with progressive. One of the cool ones was with Airbnb. They listed a Malibu dream house on Airbnb that you could rent. I don't think this is going to be like a joke movie. I think this is probably going to be a good movie, like a mainstream movie, but they put 140 something million dollars into production. They've got

a lot of very good actors. And Greta Gerwig directed it. They put money not just into the marketing, but into the production, which I think adds to the marketing itself then. It's not just like, oh, this is some silly Mattel movie. Like, this is legit. Also,

Mattel announced that it was planning on basically using its IP to make a whole bunch of other movies. And Mattel also owns, what, like Hot Wheels, G.I. Joe. I am curious, Jeff, whether you think they could roll out a similar strategy for those brands or whether this is kind of a one-off cultural event.

He said this in other places too, but again, my conversation with Richard Dixon, and they're looking to tap into the fandom and tap into the potential of that IP. He has said that they're looking at themselves less as a toy company and more as a pop culture company, which I think is interesting. And I think Barbie was the best place to start here. This is a brand that was...

definitely like lends itself to narrative storytelling and to Josh's point, like you get the right people involved, you can have fun with it.

I start to get a little cynical when I hear like about the Hot Wheels. But I mean, I think there's a larger point to that that we're making where there's no other brand quite on par with Barbie. And what I think they've successfully done with this marketing campaign is this is something that if you listen to the last Culture East's podcast, they talk about a lot. It's like achieved monoculture, like in the sense that we have like

super niche things now. There's nothing that quite achieves it because we just have so much stuff, so much TV, movies, products across culture where you can kind of choose your own adventure. To achieve something that is truly a cultural touchstone or something that everyone knows about is really difficult to do. But there's an interesting thing. I was talking to someone who framed it like this. Barbie, obviously, it's been big throughout the decades. And there was a period, I want to say almost...

Oh, man. From like late 90s till very recently, I

Where it was seen as just generally like a bad expression of girlhood. I was going to ask you about that. Like, you know, I know kids still have Barbies, but like, I feel like they must have diminished in popularity. Oh, they definitely did. I'm sure we could find dissertations on the impact of Barbie on female self-image and all that stuff, let alone the sort of cultural representation and all kinds of coinciding circumstances. But again,

I think in the three years leading up to 2015, they had gone through about three to four years of sales decline. And in 2015, they came out with an ad. It was a really cute ad. Like a little girl walks into a university lecture hall and starts writing.

teaching the class. A guy who brings his dog into the vet and the vet is a little girl. And she starts asking like the craziest funny questions about what's wrong with the dog or the cat. And it flips at the end and

those girls who were like the adult occupations, they're doing all this with their Barbies. They're creating these worlds. And it hit a nerve. It went viral. But that wasn't just an ad. They were doing a lot of research. They were talking to a lot of people and sort of really digging into what was wrong with the image of the brand and not just the brand, the product itself. So I think that same year, they came out with

new Barbies with 24 different occupations. And then less than a year later, a whole bunch of different body shapes and cultural representations across the product line. And yeah,

Sales went up.

They really look at this movie as not like a random sort of, oh, look, wouldn't it be fun to do a Barbie movie? They look at it as like a culmination of something that they've been trying to build towards for the better part of the last decade. Do we know how much they invested in marketing behind the Barbie movie? They didn't give me a specific number. Let's just say that. But for a $100 million movie, it would be very significant. And I mean, we didn't even scratch the surface on the branded partnerships.

But you got Aldo, you got Progressive, you got Ruggable, Pinkberry, Homesick Candles, Forever 21, The Gap, Target. These are all major brands with media presence of their own that they want to promote that as well. So to put a number on what was spent on marketing or what was the promotional outlay for the film will be a really interesting exercise a couple months from now. Well, they've also like they've started a flywheel. So I was reading on TikTok, the hashtag Barbie Outfits now has more than...

56.5 million views with users just sharing Barbie-inspired outfits.

Barbie core, that's also a hashtag that's millions and millions of views. And that's like, you know, earned media. They have not paid for that at this point. They've just sort of made it ubiquitous enough that it's sort of taken off on its own. Yeah, absolutely. I wonder if, is this a media strategy, Jeff, that you've seen applied or tried to be applied to other movie brands or other TV brands? I don't think I've ever seen anything like this.

Not to this scale, certainly. I think I could piecemeal together like Frankenstein, all the pieces this is bringing together. And you have the participatory social aspect that we've seen with movies more recently with movies like Megan and Cocaine Bear with the social stuff. But I think what Barbie does is brings it together in a way that it hasn't been done before. And it's a ubiquitous thing.

heritage brand that's doing it. So I'm not sure if there's like a strict play-by-play strategy book to take out of this. If anything, I think it's more about really having a vision of what you want it to be and then really committing to it, but then also really involving the fan base and the community through

throughout the process. So I think this is a good place to wrap up. We're going to take a quick break, followed by my interview with Human Rights Watch Executive Director Tirana Hassan about how the organization is using AI to help their investigations. ♪

This conversation is actually a little bit tough because Human Rights Watch works around the world in more than 100 countries, tackles so many issues. But I guess before we even dive into some specific work, can you tell our listeners a little bit about what Human Rights Watch does and the mission and a little bit about how you ended up running it? Sure.

Sure. So Human Rights Watch is an international human rights organization, and we document human rights abuses all over the world. We have 600 staff distributed around 80 countries in the world, and we cover everything from conflict and crisis, everything from Ukraine to Sudan right now, which are top of our tickets.

through to human rights issues that emerged during COVID through to the threats of technology. We work on children's rights, women's rights, LGBT rights. We work on some of the most challenging human rights issues around the world, and we've been doing it for nearly 40 years. And our goal really is not just to do this documentation and say that bad things happen. It's to say what happened, where it happened, how it happened.

Who did it and what the world needs to do about it? So the next step in our work is really we engage with governments, policymakers, anyone that has their hands on the levers of power and that can actually make a change that will mean meaningful impact in relation to human rights and the lives of people.

Obviously, the Ukraine and Sudan are top of your ticket. And I knew about your work in Yemen. I don't think I realized until I was prepping for this interview that you all have a pretty big presence in the States, that you work on tackling issues related to COVID-19. You work on tackling issues like police brutality. Tell me more about that.

We have a lot of work in the US, actually. Most of our work is actually centered around racial justice, including how that intersects with the criminal justice system. But also, you know, in the aftermath of George Floyd's killing, HRW was very active in documenting excessive use of force by police forces around the country, but

One particular case was here in New York, in the Bronx, where, you know, we were able to document how the police had used against unarmed protesters a technique called kettling, where they essentially surround groups of protesters, push them into a confined space and then launch attacks.

tear gas and crowd control instruments into those crowds. And it had a dramatic effect on not just suppressing people's right to protest, but actually health impacts on individuals who were there. And getting engagement from the government on a situation like that is quite hard. So what we did in that situation is we actually did a 3D recreation of

taking all the photos and videos that the protesters themselves and journalists had put out on social media, we were able to get like hundreds of videos and photographs and stitch together minute by minute what happened and

actually do a 3D recreation of what happened and take that to the police who had said they had done nothing wrong to actually ensure that there would be a full investigation, which there was, and there was accountability. That's obviously a great example of using technology to advance human rights watch's work. And I'm curious about other technologies that you've been using. We have

been using different types of technology for a really long time, but it feels now more important than ever because, as you're well aware, the landscape has changed so much. And this idea that we live in a post-fact world, basically, means that facts are up for grabs. So we use technology for a lot of verification to push back on misinformation and disinformation, for example. So in concrete terms, HRW...

has been using satellite imagery, for example, or remote sensing technology, as we call it. That helps us incredibly, particularly in conflict and crisis situations when we have to look at large scale. And it's also when it's too dangerous for us to get there. What you'll find about human rights abuses, Yasmin, is that they generally don't like to be watched. Sure. And so...

They block out journalists. They block out human rights investigators. Often the tactic is to throw local journalists and local human rights activists in prison. But for us, even if we can't make it into the country, we can use things like satellite imagery to actually see what's happening. And then we triangulate that with our methodology of speaking to eyewitnesses. But now with the use of social media and the fact that everybody has essentially a sensor in their pocket that

And they're uploading constantly photographs, videos in real time. And we can take those. We can run digital forensics analysis over them to make sure that they aren't doctored. We can even draw out the location of where they were taken. Or we can actually track back and find out who actually posted the video and get their eyewitness testimony. And all of a sudden you go from saying, we're not just about saying bad things happened

We're able to stitch it together with the photograph, with the video evidence, making sure that we can verify it to say that it hasn't been doctored. We can actually find that exact location. We can then go to the satellite imagery provider, get the geolocated spot that we need.

and get an image of it, we can see a photograph from space of these abuses taking place in real time. When you use technology to put together all of those different facts, that's when you can really engage with people in power to say, you need to be doing something differently. This is what happened. What are you going to do about it? Recently, we saw Amnesty International get criticized for using some AI-generated images to show rights violations in Colombian protests. From your perspective, how...

AI and its sort of growing prevalence has changed your work. And how can human rights organizations use it without undermining the credibility of their reports? It's a little bit of a Pandora's box, you know, when it comes to generative AI. You know, as we were talking about,

We live in a world where disinformation and misinformation are one of the biggest threats, not only to democracy, but also to human rights. And so making sure that we are constantly verifying images and using facts always, centering facts is very important to Human Rights Watch. And that's what we do. We take the facts, then we verify them, then we put them out to the world and we make recommendations to governments.

Now, generative AI, you can mock up a politician who is giving a speech that all of a sudden there's spew

spewing hate speech. It's our job to be able to sift through that, to run these verification techniques that we are increasingly becoming skilled at, to ensure that we are calling out misinformation and disinformation and promoting the truth. You know, I think the use of artificial intelligence, particularly when it comes to distorting or putting out fake images or videos, content in particular, poses a real risk to human rights.

But that said, you know, there are also opportunities that come with artificial intelligence. For example, you could develop an algorithm to go across thousands of videos and photographs to actually verify which ones could be useful to an investigation. Whatever it is, when you're using artificial intelligence, you do have to have a human component in there to do the final stage of verification.

You know, at Fast Company, we're constantly talking about tech and violations of privacy or tech and surveillance. You know, from your perspective, what is something that you think is misunderstood or kind of underestimated pretty widely when it comes to technology and human rights violations? Sometimes we overthink what the solution might be. The fact of the matter is that we need...

more comprehensive regulation of technology and big tech in particular to ensure that we are putting in some sort of guardrails around us so that it's

technology cannot be used. Let's take social media platforms just as one example. There needs to be human rights due diligence. There need to be frameworks and guardrails in place to stop these platforms being used to perpetuate human rights abuses. And I can give you a concrete example. Without content moderation, for example, on a platform like Facebook,

We saw in Myanmar back in, I think it was 2017, there was a violent campaign by the military against the Rohingya population. And they ended up being targeted and driven out. And the language was very, there was a lot of hate speech and it was genocidal in nature. Without any sort of content moderation, people within the government, the

the military, and just the general public was about to perpetuate it. And we saw that inflame racial tensions and cause massive conflict. And actually, it resulted in death and attacks on the Rohingya population. So that's just one example where content moderation is incredibly important. I mean, what do you do once you have that information? Do you go to governments and ask them to regulate it? Do you talk to those companies? It's like you work for Human Rights Watch, Yasmin. That's exactly what we do.

We engaged directly with governments who were promoting and using this technology. And we were writing and speaking with the companies who actually developed the technology too. And we saw, you know, it was a mixed bag of results. We're talking about dozens and dozens of companies all over the world.

In Australia, for example, the Department of Education called in the companies that they were buying their education technology software from and actually started looking at these issues around privacy and making sure that they were more compliant and protected children's privacy and rights.

So that was from the government introducing legislation and working with the corporations. In other instances, we have some corporations, of course, who are pushing back saying we didn't do anything wrong. We present them with the evidence. In some of the most constructive scenarios, we actually had corporations saying, thanks for letting us know. We're going to take a look at this.

And it's been a combination, but slowly we're seeing countries all over the world and corporations taking their responsibility around children's privacy more seriously. So it's a mix of both. I always find it funny when companies are like, wow, thanks for letting us know. We had no idea. Guys, I find that one a little hard to believe. I mean, that's interesting that we do that with everything.

at Human Rights Watch. It's actually, so we don't operate from a gotcha model. Got it. We operate from a model where we're saying, these are the facts and something has to change. And this is why it's a human rights violation. And this is why you're obligated to change it. Because human rights aren't a nice to have, right? Yeah. They're actually law. And if you aren't human rights compliant, then you are operating outside the law. You are breaking the law. Yeah. Nobody wants to be on that side of history. So we send them our findings. We even speak to, you know,

warlords and dictators, but we will send them our preliminary findings. Sometimes they write back and say, this is true, this is not true. Rarely do you get a dictator writing back and saying, thanks for letting us know, I'll be honest.

But it gives us an opportunity to engage with them. And if they want to push back and they have evidence of the country, we will publish that. But it's an important part of delivering human rights change is to engage with the perpetrators and engage with the justice system, for example, to make sure that they're held to account.

All right, we're back with Jeff and it's time to wrap up the show with our segment, Keeping Tabs. In case you haven't listened to us before, this is where each of us shares a story, trend, or company that we're following right now. And Jeff, since you're our guest, what are you keeping tabs on? I?

I am keeping tabs on, I'll preface this by saying a lot of people are familiar with the Saudi-backed Live Golf Tour. Yeah. Fascinating stuff. With the PGA Tour. And that sparked a lot of conversation around Saudi investment in sport and their public investment fund and all that.

That's not what I'm keeping tabs on. What I'm keeping tabs on is, so anyone who pays attention to international football or soccer knows that the summer is basically the transfer window opens and that's where players are bought and sold and switch teams in different countries. In the last like month, there's been a...

Huge shift of all these stars, established international football stars like N'Golo Kante, Karim Benzema, who's the reigning Ballon d'Or winner, who went from Real Madrid to a Saudi team. There's Steven Gerrard, English footballer.

Legend, who has been coaching in England for a few seasons, is now managing a team there. So there's this influx of talent. The public investment fund and the Saudi sort of investment is going from buying foreign teams and things like Manchester City and the City Group, which owns New York City FC, to

Bringing it home, trying to bring that world to Saudi itself. And I just find it absolutely fascinating to see the impact that's going to have. It's kind of making the sports business side of football as weird and exciting as the game itself. It's just fascinating. Josh, what are you keeping tabs on?

Oh, I'm keeping tabs. I'm going to be lighter today. I'm going to talk about some television that I'm keeping up on. One, always a plug for one of my favorite shows, What We Do in the Shadows is back on FX and Hulu. Love the show. It's terrific. But there's one show that I liked the first season of and I started watching again called The After Party with Tiffany Haddish and Sam Richardson. I really liked it. I felt like that was the

Super underrated show. Super underrated show. I think it's really good. Sam Richardson is an absolute treasure. But season two started, and there's a reason behind this that's Fast Company specific, because in the second episode, Fast Company gets name-checked in a joke that they do. Basically, Zach Wood's character plays this

rich tech Zuckerberg-esque character, socially awkward. And in this joke, he's talking to the woman that he's proposing to. He makes a joke. I'm butchering it. But it's something to the effect of next month, Fast Company's most eligible bachelor's list comes out and I don't want to be on it, which I thought for an audience of me,

Great joke. It's just such a specific reference because it's like there's two modes. Either you don't know Fast Company or you know Fast Company. Like you're an avid reader. There's no in between. So it's just a good joke. And I really loved the reference there. So I hope there's more Fast Company references throughout. Nice.

Yeah. Yas, what's your keeping tabs? Today, there is an IPO of an Israeli AI and makeup company called Oddity. And going public has not been an option for many companies for the past few months. I think this one is going to be a true bellwether of whether things can recover or pick up. And I'm really interested to see how it does. And by the time this episode comes out, I will have written an article about it. So...

Read that. It's also like what's going on in the world. So that company has AI involved. So it feels like there's exactly. Exactly. So it's like, yeah, that's a that's a hot topic. I read about that. That's it for most innovative companies. Jeff, thank you for joining us. Thank you. Enjoy the Barbie movie, everybody. Yeah. Yeah.

Our show is produced by Avery Miles and Blake Odom with additional support by our intern, Mariam Keparidze. Mix and sound design by Tad Wadhams and our executive producer, our very own Ken, is Josh Christensen. Remember again to subscribe, rate, and review, and we'll see you next week.