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🧠 Brain Food

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How Barbie Used Generative (Gen) AI To Go Viral?

Barbie has had a blockbuster summer so far. 🎬 Here are some stats:

• Barbie has grossed ~$1.2B and became the 2nd highest grossing film in 2023, behind only The Super Mario Bros. Movie. The latter was released a quarter earlier than Barbie. 💸

• Barbie joins the elite club of films that have grossed more than $1B. Only ~50 films have achieved this feat. It’s on pace to be the highest grossing film in 2023. 🎬

• A survey found that almost a quarter of Barbie moviegoers hadn’t been to a movie theater since the Pandemic started. 🍿

Part of its success has been attributed to creatively using AI tools to engage its fans to drive virality. In the age of AI and the Internet where there is too much content, for a film to do well it must capture our attention.

Attention is the scarcest thing in today’s world.

Barbie’s integrated marketing campaign had a simple goal: make Barbie be everywhere. Mattel, the toy company that makes Barbie, made over 100 partnerships and activations for the Barbie movie. There was even an Airbnb house that was turned into a real life Barbie mansion.

The goal was to make Barbie top of mind for as many consumers as possible.

All of these campaigns supported the movie's success, but what helped it stand apart was its use of Gen AI to go viral. The traditional campaigns helped create the summer of Barbie zeitgeist, but going viral on the Internet sustained it. When something goes viral or “breaks the Internet,” the network effects of the Internet and social media spread across a global hivemind faster than lightning. ⚡

How Barbie Went Viral Online With AI?

At the onset of the Gen AI boom, many pointed out that these tools would disrupt marketing. The early use cases were mainly people using tools like ChatGPT to write marketing copy. We are now seeing more creative ways in how companies are using Gen AI tools to benefit their businesses.

Barbie created a simple selfie AI tool to help Barbie go viral 📸. The selfie remixing tool allowed fans to convert their photos into Barbie posters. For fans, they felt like they could participate more directly in Barbie culture by using an AI tool. For Barbie, it could use the high volume of UGC (user generated content) to capture mindshare.

This led to a virtuous flywheel. 🎡 

Fans posted their movie posters on social media, which generated attention and hype, which then enticed other fans to use the AI tool to remix on social media, which then generated more attention and hype, and the virality snowballed from there. A Fast Company article went on to say, “by mid-spring [2023], content from the AI-infused tool was going viral and producing 67% positive online conversations while seeing a 23,350% increase in mentions during one week in April. Since then, the #barbiemovie hashtag has garnered more than 325,000 posts on Instagram alone.” To further build virality, Barbie also combined this tactic with other AI powered apps like an AI powered quiz.

So What?

In the age of AI, garnering attention is increasingly becoming harder because of the flood of content. One of the best ways to generate attention is to involve fans in the process of generating that attention. Barbie fans were able to use a "novel tool" to become engaged consumers, spreading attention and growing the overall community.

AI enables fans to easily create high quality user generated content that traditionally had more friction and required more activation energy from the fan (i.e. not everyone knew how to make high quality images). With AI, fans can click a few buttons but still feel like they are participating in something bigger than themselves, generating what companies love – low friction virality.

For companies of all shapes and sizes, the job of a fan (read: customer or consumer) isn’t necessarily to create something high quality, the job of a fan is distribution. But as social media has shown, we prefer to share something when it’s directly related to us – so a selfie remixed onto a Barbie visual encourages the fan to share but directly supports the marketing efforts of Barbie.

Zooming Out

We expect to see other companies begin to use Gen AI tools more creatively.

Coca-Cola is doing something similar with its “Create Real Magic” campaign🎩. Consumers can use a Coca-Cola-branded AI tool, which uses Open AI’s DALL-E image generator, to generate original art using a time capsule of Coke’s archived IP. Fans can submit the images for a chance to be featured on a billboard. Thirty creators will also be selected to attend the Real Magic Creative Academy at Coca Cola’s headquarters, where they will co-create content with the Coke team. 🤝

Gen AI might also benefit smaller players and companies. Traditionally, if you are a large brand, you have an entire team of marketers on staff dedicated to projects like Coke’s, but if you are a small brand, you don’t have that same luxury.

With Gen AI, smaller companies might be able to produce an output with similar production value leveraging an “artificially expanded” staff. Whereas larger companies might have to start justifying why they have so many people on staff or produce way more output to justify the team they have.

We expect this to become the “new normal” in AI.

Additional Readings: Here Here Here Here Here

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DISCLAIMER: This post is provided strictly for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing written in this post should be taken as financial advice or advice of any kind. The content of this post are the opinions of the authors and not representative of other parties. Empower yourself, DYOR (do your own research).