BBDO Tells Dads to Play Barbie During NFL Playoffs

Following the success of BBDO’s initial Imagine the Possibilities campaign from 2015 – which aimed to challenge gender stereotypes among kids – the agency unveiled its follow-up spot during Sunday night’s NFL playoffs, released appropriately before the Super Bowl.

As the players for this year’s Big Game were selected, BBDO knew that all eyes would be on the big screen and decided that it would be an ideal occasion to encourage fathers to play with their daughters’ Barbie dolls. That’s right, fathers.

As the majority of the audience was made up of male fans, the agency targeted this particular audience to highlight how important playing with their young girls can be in shaping their future.

The spot, helmed again by Karen Cunningham, sees six real fathers describe how they regularly give up their usual Sunday routines to play Barbie with their daughters, edited alongside unscripted clips of them hunched up on the floor with doll in hand.

The campaign was inspired by research from Linda Nielsen at Wake Forest University which found that girls who have actively-involved fathers as parents are more likely to graduate from college, secure a higher-paying job and feel generally more confident in themselves.

By showcasing the work during a critical sporting event, BBDO captured the attention of many men to make them realise how their habits can impact on the decisions and dreams of their young girls.

"It’s a brand that very few dads have any past relationship with, yet we’re telling them to get down on the floor and play," says BBDO’s ECD Matt Miller, who promises that he regularly plays with his own daughter. "But once we saw the troves of research that showed the more involved a dad is in his daughter’s imaginative play, the more he contributes to her real-life development, our job became very easy. That’s something every dad wants for his daughter.'"

Barbie believes that the hours girls spend playing with its dolls impacts on their self-identity, which is where its tagline ‘Time spent in her imaginary world is an investment in her real world’ comes from.

To find out more about the initiative, click here or join the conversation using the #DadsWhoPlayBarbie hashtag. And you never know... you might actually enjoy Barbie world once you set foot in it.