It started in April, with the Barbie x Ruggable washable rugs. By May, Barbie had a low-calorie pink lemonade, limited-edition fuschia Xbox controllers and a line of “on-chain virtual collectibles” designed to “help women access Web3.0”. Soon, Barbie was on Gap apparel, Starbucks cups, Superga shoes and Funboy pool floats; she was at Primark, Bloomingdales, a dedicated Amazon store, two pop-up cafes in New York and Chicago, an immersive museum in Los Angeles and a Barbie boat cruise around the Boston Harbor.
By July, the media rollout for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie had unleashed a torrent of press photos, TikTok filters, promotional interviews, trailer footage and more than 100 Barbie-licensed products on to the internet. The $145m Warner Bros blockbuster is Gerwig’s attempt, as she told the New York Times, at “doing the thing and subverting the thing” – where the subversion is a sardonic twist on the famous doll’s saga, and the thing is boosting sales. To aid the latter, Mattel has spared no expense getting out the word. “It’ll be very hard to be on planet Earth,” its CEO, Ynon Kreiz, has said, “and not know this movie’s coming out.” The campaign was so thoroughly pink, so omnipresent, so peppered with product tie-ins, that jokes about Barbie’s marketing briefly seemed to outnumber those aimed at the doll itself.
