How the ‘Barbie’ movie has leveraged AI and design to become a pop culture powerhouse
Niall O’Connor, Designer, Design Council and Katie Hamilton, Marketing Manager, Design Council
The marketing of the Barbie movie is one of the best recent examples of using design to create engaging, playful, and user-generated content. It’s a perfectly oiled machine fuelled by the budgets of Warner Bros and Mattel, hyping us all up for the sparkling release. You can’t escape this pink, plastic and fantastic trend — after all, it’s a Barbie world and we’re just living in it.
The AI generator
Millennials grew up discovering and exploring the internet, they’re often referenced as digital natives. Online they discuss media in terms of considered character studies, all whilst they socialise, learn, network, read news, argue, laugh, but most importantly — share. This is where the genius of the AI Barbie Selfie Generator comes in.
The trailer of the film clearly presents the extensive and diverse cast of celebrities, with many of them playing a version of Barbie or Ken, alongside other familiar characters from Barbie lore. Following the trailer, it was a genius move for character headshots to be presented onto socials on a saturated graphic template, utilising y2k colourful glitter-soaked stars, with a blue sky background and short tagline. It’s succinct and fits the tone of the film effortlessly, whilst being relatively easy social content for the media team to produce. But the real genius of this presentation came when users could create their own Barbie or Ken toybox headshot using AI. It graduated from a punchy visual, reinterpreting the y2k packaging that the target demographic cherished in the 90s and 00s, to a 2023 meme. We’ve seen our friends being a ‘tired Ken’ and learned that our pet dog is a future Oscar-winning Barbie.
Strong colour psychology
Another example from the campaign is the use of colour psychology within the movie’s billboards. Simply a flooded pink canvas and the words that read ’21 July’ in that glamorous 70s-esque rolled serif, reminiscent of Cooper, it’s a small reminder of the strength and power that colour can bestow on a brand.
Iconic Barbie residences
Barbiecore has well and truly permeated the world of interiors and architecture, a good point of reference being videos from Architectural Digest of Barbie historian, Whitney Mallett, breaking down the evolution of Barbie’s Dreamhouse and Margot Robbie taking us on a tour of the movie set designed by Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer. The videos have racked up millions of views, and the trend continued as articles and listicles by Forbes, The New York Times, Dezeen and even Rightmove.
But daydreaming clearly isn’t enough for Barbie girls — the real-life version of Barbie’s Malibu Dream House has crept back onto AirBnB after its original debut for the doll’s 60th anniversary in 2019. This time it’s been given some ‘Ken-ergy’ by the team at Mattel. It’s a great marketing stunt, but architecturally, we hope it can be repurposed into something meaningful such as a museum (it’s giving Simpsons Nevada home giveaway circa 1997!)
The success of this campaign has ensured that you can’t have been socialising, checking the news or searching for bathroom renovation ideas without having to learn the new visual language of the Barbie film. What teachings can we take from Barbie? Despite the economic boost and hive of social activity around the movie, what we know is that ‘good’ design is sustainable, and ‘life in plastic’ certainly is not.
Seeing big brands such as Mattel taking some small steps towards designing for planet (note the ‘Barbie Loves the Ocean’ release), it certainly is a pink stiletto in the right direction. But at the root of all product, it comes down to designers of all industries to create responsibly, and that means with planet at heart. Now that the planet has almost officially run dry of ‘Barbie Pink’, it’s time for us all to focus on the green!
