Our designer Iya Mistry has been left fascinated by this week’s release of both Barbie & Oppenheimer and their promo campaigns - was it seeded or not!?
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I didn’t think much of it when Barbie and Oppenheimer memes started to appear on my For You Page on TikTok. I figured it was a small trend and would pass in a week or so.
A few days later I saw someone asking a friend on their Instagram Q&A which they’d see first. It was only then that I started to realise how far it had spilled. From social media to libraries and tshirts:
Both films release today (21st July 2023) and so in theory should be in competition. However, Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie, director and star of Barbie respectively, have released a series of photos picturing them buying tickets for films, including Oppenheimer, that premiere around the same date.
So what really pushed Barbenheimer into the social media soup?
The Barbie brand itself has undertaken a huge wave of brand collaborations, from Primark to Chanel. But the Barbie/Oppenheimer ‘collaboration’ (for want of a better word) feels different - probably because the focus is on something, i.e. a film, in the same category, rather than a consumer product.
With polar opposite subject matters, the Barbie / Oppenheimer collab doesn’t appear to be a match made in marketing heaven. Or do they? This kind of juxtaposition of themes that are so different lends itself well to memes, as we have seen in this case.
Marketing for the film industry could be argued as being pretty one dimensional - it traditionally picks one main audience to advertise to, ignoring overlaps. Barbenheimer is instead drawing attention to the fact that someone would want to watch both Barbie and Oppenheimer, potentially on the same day.
Showing audiences that creators understand they are multifaceted with varying interests and acknowledging the cultural context of their shared release date. This friction makes for interesting meme imagery - pink bombs and Barbenheimer versions of the La La Land poster.
Barbenheimer: marketing union or war?
So, are they working together or genuinely not.
We know this works - in the past, we’ve seen this friction generate buzz for both brands. The Colin/Cuthbert the Caterpillar cake drama of 2020/21 saw Marks and Spencer and Aldi go head to head on Twitter, culminating in a court case in June 2021. Both companies had caterpillar cakes with different names. M&S ended up winning the case - their cake Colin’s trademark was infringed upon by Aldi’s Cuthbert. This controversy was incredibly well-played on social media by Aldi (whose whole modus operandi is ‘like brands, only cheaper’) and earned them numerous awards, as well as a coveted spot in the ‘top four’ supermarkets in 2022 by market share.
Similarly our project with Monzo in 2022 had Flying Object creating a meme to show the differences between London and the rest of the country, using their users' aggregated spending data. Pret vs. Greggs sparked fierce online debate and more.
Obviously, in the case of Barbie and Oppenheimer, they aren’t going to court against each other but the buzz that this has generated online is huge and is clearly working in the interests of both films.
A lucky viral success… Barbenheimer
Overall we can see that, when it’s done right, playing on the friction between two stories, events or products can work so well for viral campaign success. Contrasting subject matter is prime for meme-ification, but relies on brands being able to step away and not take themselves too seriously. Barbenheimer has been led largely by Barbie’s team (or so it appears) so it fits with the brands existing image - would it have worked so well if it had been led by Oppenheimer? Probably not…