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How HLabs made its own Barbie interactive marketing campaign in just five days
Hiya Barbies, Hi Kens,
You want to build your own illustrated Barbie Dreamhouse?
Barbie has been a smash hit at the box office with the newly released film dominating the news headlines and social media feeds over recent weeks. Greta Gerwig’s masterpiece and a genius marketing campaign has created Barbie mania, with brands and creators all over the world jumping at the chance to create their own content. And HLabs was no different! With Barbie manufacturer Mattel being one of our clients we got right into the pink party spirit.
Here’s how we achieved our goal in just one week:
The concept
Our concept needed to be both flexible in its functionality as well as visually exciting - just like the plastic fantastic world of Barbie Land!
Inspired by this visual and typography, the idea was to design an interactive newspaper spread called Dollhouse Dispatch featuring a variety of columns, sections and scrollable elements to display the content in an engaging way.
The content featured was picked to help the user immerse themselves in the experience and really feel connected to the Barbie movement. On the page, you’ll see…
- Illustrated drag and drop house, enabling the user to compose their own house
- Interactive quiz which acted as a segway to link out to our client’s content in the answers
- AR filters accessible via QR code to help spread the fun on Instagram
Social media assets were then created to launch the experience on LinkedIn and Instagram.
Tools, techniques and platforms
HLabs offers multiple specialist services and this fun internal project was a combination of illustration, animation, art direction, web design, face filter design, project management and editorial.
Dollhouse Dispatch was then built on our partner platform Ceros while the illustrated ‘build your own Barbie Dreamhouse’ element was brought to life on ReadyMag, another no-code platform we’re partnered with.
AI and Spark AR were also utilised at points in the creative process.
Production breakdown
To show just how quickly we can jump on a brief at any moment, here’s an estimated run down of where the time was spent on Dollhouse Dispatch.
Ideation & wireframes: 1 day
Desktop design & build: 2 days
House illustration: 6 hours
Readymag ‘build your own Barbie Dreamhouse’: 2.5 days
AR filters (x3): 2 days
Mobile build: 1/2 a day
Text animation: 2-3 hours
Social assets: 1 day
What’s a Rich Text element?
The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.
Static and dynamic content editing
A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!
How to customize formatting for each rich text
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
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