With over 3 million views and thousands of inspirational comments across the first four episodes in 2021, Mattel aimed to build upon this positive feedback by rewarding young viewers and their families with seven brand new episodes. Featuring an array of fan-favorite guests and new trailblazing women thought-leaders, each episode focused on several exciting themes, including aerospace, animals, fashion, and art.

Recognizing the importance of accessible female role models for young girls, Barbie created the series in 2021 to expose girls to more trailblazing women to hear their stories. The You Can Be Anything Series provides fun, easily digestible, and compelling interactive content for girls to drive home the message that they can become the leaders of tomorrow. The series is another way the brand supports the Barbie Dream Gap Project, which aims to level the playing field for girls.

Each piece of content led back to build awareness of The Dream Gap, which has shown that beginning at the age of five, many girls develop self-limiting beliefs and begin to think they're not as smart and capable as boys. Barbie launched the Dream Gap Project in 2018 to give girls the resources and support they need to continue believing in themselves, and continues to devote considerable energy into combatting this notion to show young girls that they can truly be anything they want to be.

Execution

In collaboration with Mattel, we wrote and developed an additional seven episodes that covered key themes in young girls’ development while ensuring that the subject matter was not only relatable to children, but accessible to adults as well. We also chose to shorten the episodes from 20-25 minutes in 2021 to 8-10 minutes in 2022, helping to keep our target demographic engaged with more digestible content pieces.

The cross-generational content featured these role models and fan-favorite influencers allowing us to reach our target demographic; girls aged 6-10 and their parents; in a meaningful way.We navigated managing on-set live production around COVID restrictions, booking talent, developing art and creative design, animating, blocking, scriptwriting, editing, and seamlessly executing post-production and cutdowns.

Episodes 5 & 6 debuted in support of the International Day of the Girl. Subsequent episodes dropped in alignment with International Women’s Day for maximum relevance and impact, with the latest episode, featuring Gloria Estefan and young trailblazing scientist Alena Analeigh, dropped during Hispanic Heritage Month and International Day of the Girl.

Results

While the initial four episodes of the Barbie You Can Be Anything series set a benchmark, receiving almost 3 million views globally, subsequent episodes exceeded expectations, with an additional 10+ million views and inspiring young girls everywhere.