BBDO's CCO on Smashing Stereotypes for Barbie

Earlier this week, BBDO unveiled its latest Barbie campaign, aimed at getting fathers to spend more time playing with their daughters. By airing during the NFL playoffs, the spot targetted men while they watched sports using it as an opportunity to teach them about the importance of nurturing that relationship.

shots caught up with CCO Matt Miller to find out how the campaign came about and the approach the team took to ensure the message was received.

How did you approach the project?

We always ask ourselves, ‘why must this brand exist?’ In other words, how would the world be worse if this brand didn’t exist. Even on a well-known brand like Barbie with an established campaign, that question always serves as our starting point. In this case, asking that question illuminated the amazing developmental benefits of spending time imagining with our daughters and the role Barbie plays in facilitating play time.

Having worked on the hugely-successful initial Barbie campaign, Imagine the Possibilities, did you look to the previous spot for inspiration or avoid it altogether to come up with an entirely new and different approach?

We never set out to replicate the success of the past. And on Barbie we really don’t have to. The platform idea of ‘You can be anything’ is so big and so true to girls and the way they play with Barbie that the creative sandbox is seemingly endless. With that said, we did learn somethings from Imagine the Possibilities that we applied here. Things like: we can never write it as well as a real girl can say it herself, and the more authentic the moment, the more authentic the emotion.

Imagine The Possibilities campaign:

Why did you decide that this year’s offering would be best suited to a documentary style?

We wanted to capture the authentic impact of real dads immersing themselves in their own daughters’ imaginative world. There’s a magic in unearthing those truly real moments that only a documentary style could capture. 

Tell us how you found the dad and daughter who star in the ad.

We had a traditional casting call with the only real mandates being 1. You must be a real dad and daughter duo and 2. Barbie must be played in the house. Some have an acting background, some do not. The process included us watching them play Barbie together and asking them simple questions about their relationship; what the dads hopes for his daughter are; and what the daughter wants to be when she grows up. In the end, we landed five fathers and we absolutely loved their daughters.