Barbie has always been known for her many careers and never-ending closet and last month Mattel opened up Barbie’s Dream Closet for children across Australia, with a little help from some clever technology.

The campaign

Mattel launched Barbie the Dream Closet as part of their global campaign, See What Happens When You Play with Barbie, landing on Australian shores on 26 February 2012.

Starting with a television commercial and the BarbieWOW website, the campaign, orchestrated by Melbourne agency Gun Communications, then moved onto its star attraction ‘The Dream Closet’.

The Dream Closet launched at Westfield Parramatta, and is due to move to Melbourne, then Brisbane later in the year.

The technology

Gunn Communications partnered with Perth-based digital development agency Adapptor on the project to create Barbie’s virtual dressing room. Using Kinect for Windows, the application maps the height and dimensions of the budding Barbie, overlaying her clothing items for a real-time custom fit.

“Adapptor was able to take this brief and create the most dynamic one that we’ve seen to date. The Dream Closet allows you to move around while the outfits move with you, and turn side on for an (almost!) 360 degree look. What is really clever is that each outfit will also resize to fit the individual user – in real time,” says Elisabeth Alexander of Gunn Communications.

The audience

With a target audience of girls aged five to 12, marketing was specific, especially across the online platform, says Alexander.

“Our target demographic, girls aged 5 to 12, have a strong online presence but not in easily-accessible spots. The concept itself needed to excite the target age group so that the Dream Closet itself generated word of mouth amongst their peer group.”

The communication

Traditional media avenues of print and TV were supported by targeted online and social, as was establishing the ‘Dream Closet’ in a high traffic shopping centre location.

The Barbie Facebook page, with over 4million fans, was the obvious starting point for the campaign says Alexander.

“Social media played a prominent role in enhancing Barbie the Dream Closet. We were able to utilise the global social media channels of Barbie to pre-promote the campaign as well as provide real-time content as the campaign progressed.”

With an Australia-specific tab, which was share-enabled, added to the page, fans who had stepped into the Dream Closet were able to browse images of themselves and share photos of their time in some of Barbie’s best outfits.

“We held a launch party for key fashion and news media, as well as prominent fashion and mummy bloggers, who then tweeted, wrote and blogged about the launch event and the Westfield Parramatta execution,” says Alexander.

The future

Alexander says that this type of interactive technology will be the future of many PR and marketing campaigns.

“Consumers want engaging experiences that cross the offline-online divide in an interesting and novel way, so we think that digital applications like The Dream Closet will become standard fare for future marketing and PR executions.”