Strategy Content Strategy Barbie and Hot Wheels on Social Video: An Interview with Mattel Share on Mattel is one of the best-known toy brands in the entire world, boasting popular properties such as Hot Wheels and Barbie (who’s turning 60 this year). Mattel routinely uses social video not only to better understand its audience of young children and their parents, but also drive in-store retail sales. ), we hosted an interview with Mattel where Isaac Quiroga, Director of Video Engagement at the company, chatted about how the brand has managed to stay top-of-mind in the heavily-competitive digital video world of toys, games, and family entertainment. Basically, we’ve gotten smarter on how the data and metrics drive our sales and continued to follow those models. IQ: Absolutely, both in the short-term and long-term. We see, for instance, how content featuring a product or girls playing our products drives short-term sales, while animated series and content is a major contributor to long-term sales because it builds up brand affinity over the course of the stories and character development. While you may have you built the brand, you end up inspiring UGC, and this format is the ultimate contributor to our POS. It really is a sign that there are fans out there who want to create content or who want to purchase the product and then show themselves creating content. We continue to grow engagement knowing we have a particular metric we want to achieve, so we do have to take a risk and see if it pays off. We also want to help kids and family find content, and right now, that’s about being suggested to them.
Strategy Content Strategy Barbie and Hot Wheels on Social Video: An Interview with Mattel
Share on
Mattel is one of the best-known toy brands in the entire world, boasting popular properties such as Hot Wheels and Barbie (who’s turning 60 this year). The toy manufacturer is also an online video superstar, landing at #5 across the most-watched brands in the world in 2018. Mattel routinely uses social video not only to better understand its audience of young children and their parents, but also drive in-store retail sales.
Before our joint webinar (shameless plug!), we hosted an interview with Mattel where Isaac Quiroga, Director of Video Engagement at the company, chatted about how the brand has managed to stay top-of-mind in the heavily-competitive digital video world of toys, games, and family entertainment.
Read on to see what he had to say about these achievements!
Tubular: What are some key decisions you make that are tied to your digital video success?
Isaac Quiroga: A lot of it comes down to audience consumption, format preferences, and testing. We looked at what types of formats were resonating with a particular audience segment and would create videos in many of these formats and then test them.
You really don’t know how your audience will react unless you test and iterate; if we see a successful series, we continue to support it, but if not, we scratch that idea and look for the next one.
T: How does data and video intelligence help drive your strategy?
IQ: For a while, we focused on views, as they were the main indicator of audience interest and purchase intent. It didn’t matter if it was paid or organic views, either — all of it seemed to be working.
Later, our insights team found that engagements were more compelling to a specific property’s audience – in the sense that it’s a better indicator of how they interact with content. We adjusted our approach at that point, and figured out which viewership to engagement ratios we had to achieve to reach our goals.
Basically, we’ve gotten smarter on how the data and metrics drive our sales and continued to follow those models.
T: Have you seen an impact on sales you can attribute to your digital video efforts?
IQ: Absolutely, both in the short-term and long-term. We see, for instance, how content featuring a product or girls playing our products drives short-term…
COMMENTS