From Barbie to Building Sets: How Mattel's CBO Transforms Legacy Brands Through Bold Storytelling

Thank you, Jenny. Great to be with you.

Absolutely. I've got the privilege of overseeing over a hundred active brands and of course we've got many more brands in our portfolio that are more niche. But Hot Wheels is having a huge moment right now. You can see some Hot Wheels product and commemorative items behind me. Hot Wheels is experiencing its eighth consecutive year of growth. We've got amazing collaborations and coming off of Cannes, we just won a bronze lion for a collaboration with Mischief and a campaign around Not Wheels. So very fun working on Hot Wheels. Of course Barbie. Uno is another brand that is just taking the world by storm right now. Everybody wants to play Uno. We've got engagement from families and kids to adults coming together as communities to play and interact and bring their competitive spirit. So that's been a lot of fun. And then tried and true 90-plus year brands like Fisher Price, Thomas the Train celebrating its 80th this year, and then American Girl, not everyone knows Mattel acquired about 25 years ago. So that's another prized brand in the portfolio.

Yeah. You know, play has actually never been more important. And we fielded a study coincidentally a few months ago called the Shape of Play in multiple countries around the world with kids, parents, and adult collectors that engage with our products to ask them about play. And again, like I said, it's never been more relevant and important. For kids, it's entertainment. It's a way for them to learn developmental skills. It's a way for them to explore identity. For adults, it can be nostalgic, it can be escapism, it can bring community. And so there are so many benefits to play and it's important right now. I think as the world has a lot of uncertainty and complexity, we are seeing more and more people revert back to what I'll call analog play. Our products are things you can touch and feel and there's a deep emotional connection to them.

Yes, over 25 years at Mattel. I've worked under six different CEOs, different leadership approaches, styles, strategic imperatives over the years, and I've never been more energized about the company and what's ahead. So that's what's kept me here. I've had different experiences, different careers within the career, but always have been learning and growing and excited about what's next. And it's a thrilling time right now at Mattel.

Yes, my early career did start in advertising. I've always been in the brand management space. I started my career in advertising in San Francisco. I'm a native San Franciscan. So after college, I moved back to San Francisco and started working at Grey. From there, I went to a small boutique agency and then landed at Foote, Cone & Belding. I worked on a variety of clients and different industries, from Fairmont Hotels to Taco Bell, Bank of America. And I loved the agency experience. I loved the opportunity to get exposure to different industries and client challenges and help them solve their problems through marketing communications. I love the creative process working with genius writers and art directors and producers. Ultimately, though, I realized that I had a deep interest in these business challenges and wanted to learn more about the entire business cycle and brand management holistically. So I had the opportunity to go client side and I went to work for the Gap headquartered in San Francisco and got to work under Mickey Drexler, legendary CEO. I was there in the mid to late 90s, a really exciting time for the company, and worked on Gap brand, Gap Kids, and Baby Gap for almost three years. I loved that experience and loved being more of a stakeholder for the entire business, not just shepherding the communications.

Well, you're right. It is interesting that it is still a conversation. I do think of course the function is absolutely critical. In a world that is as complex as it is today with all this disruption happening in the media landscape, in the retail landscape, having the consumer at the center of everything that you do is paramount. And that's the number one role of a CMO is to go where the consumer is going, to study behavior, and to work on programming and products and services and experiences that influence behavior. Ultimately, it's about relevance and connecting your brands to consumers, and without relevance there is no revenue. So it does seem very obvious for those of us that have grown up through the function. I do think savvy executives and CEOs and CFOs are definitely becoming more appreciative of the benefits, the insights, and the critical importance of the function, but I do think there are other ways to force that even further. At Mattel, what's unique about my role is that I co-own and manage the P&L with my partner who's our chief commercial officer. So we have shared accountability. Our team is not a cost center.

Well, I will share that there are a couple mantras that I have in my approach to leadership and brand management. One is what you're saying, getting comfortable being uncomfortable. The other that's connected to that is celebrating and embracing diverse voices and perspectives. I'm a big believer, and I use the expression a lot, that to manage the complexity of the marketplace and the complexity of these legacy brands in my portfolio, it takes a village. You absolutely need diverse voices and perspectives to help you weigh opportunities that might be bolder and riskier. I'm a big believer in taking swings. If you don't take a swing and you're passive, then you're just not in the mix. You're not in the game. You've got to constantly be thinking about breaking through. There is so much clutter and noise, and you have to serve up your brands and your stories in fresh and relevant ways because there's so much choice out there. So when we weigh opportunities that are big swings or that are making us uncomfortable, we absolutely value inputs from a variety of folks within Mattel and the organization. And we have a lot of external partners that we value greatly. We have cultural consultants, communication partners, and we pressure test and think through worst case scenarios and have mitigating plans. In some instances when we've done really bold things, before we go forward, of course I bring my boss, the CEO, into the mix, and sometimes we've even sent updates to the board so everybody knows what we're doing and the scaffolding we've built should things go in a different direction. But we go in with eyes wide open and we're pretty good at anticipating and troubleshooting all sorts of scenarios.

First of all, it doesn't matter what the size of your organization is. Mattel is a fairly big organization with a matrix kind of structure, so it's all about collaboration and influence. If you can't collaborate with various teams and get people on board, then you don't have any influence and you're not going to be effective. And you're right, partnering with the CEO is job number one. You want that stakeholdership to be felt by everyone, including the CEO, when you're taking big swings. I think the more people feel like they're on the journey and in it with you, the more they're committed. And then the more they're there for air support if something doesn't go right.

I would say absolutely. And it was a big deal at the time because also to give you more business context, the brand was firing on all cylinders. We had just emerged from a multi-year turnaround including the pandemic, and the business had doubled. So we had this massive momentum, and we had never taken the Barbie story to the big screen, nor did we initially even know what that story should be. There was so much risk in upsetting the apple cart and the momentum that was underway. Of course, as we got further into the development of the film with the amazing Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie, we got more comfortable with the narrative and the storytelling. But initially there were a lot of questions: Do we need this? I still to this day have heard from people who either did not see the movie, or there were people who really thought they knew what the movie was going to be and thought it was something that wasn't for them. That's what we were worried about—we just didn't want to serve up something that was expected. And of course, we certainly didn't do that.

Well, I think that was the other thing too. We were protective initially and we were definitely thinking of our core consumer, which is kids and families. We didn't appreciate that the brand could stretch and we could broaden the audience to young adults and frankly up to octogenarians. The massive appeal of this film was beyond what we initially thought. That's what was really exciting. When we started to get traction with the project and do some testing and get some reaction, we realized this really is something for everybody. Now we've re-engaged with new fans, which is really exciting as we look to the future.

It's funny, like you said, I've had a couple years now to reflect a bit more. Initially I would have given a more pragmatic marketing case study response, but what I'm appreciating now—and there are actually some memes going on right now about the summer and everyone's sort of saying they'd like the summer to be a little more Barbie and a little less Oppenheimer—I think the fundamental fact that we led and the filmmakers led with positivity is really interesting. I'll bring that even to our brand color pink. It's a positive, optimistic, joyful color. People wore pink as a sign of joy and identity. Men wore as much pink as women did, and all ages. It was celebratory and about community, and it created culture. It was incredible. But leading with positivity, I think, is what really struck that chord and created such fandom. I think it's something that we shouldn't forget. We need positive experiences in our lives and positive brands in our lives.

Yes, I love the Dream Gap project. This was a project we created maybe eight or nine years ago. It's a social impact initiative that we created specific to Barbie to even the playing field for girls. We learned through some studies—there's an amazing professor out of NYU who studied how girls starting at the age of five or six somehow started to doubt their competencies and capabilities and started losing confidence in themselves. He coined the phrase 'dream gap.' We love that because Barbie is all about dreaming big, and we are the original girl empowerment brand. We want to close any gap that is there for girls and allow them to achieve anything they want to achieve. So we started this social mission work where we're raising money with other partners and working with NGOs like Girls Inc., Black Girls Who Code, to bring services and opportunities to girls and help them achieve anything they want to achieve.

Well, inclusivity is a huge value for Mattel. We want to encourage diverse voices to be heard and everyone to feel invited and included in important conversations at the company. We also want society to feel that our brands are accessible and to see themselves in our brands where that makes sense. Certainly with Barbie, we've been able to evolve the product line to be a better reflection of the world that we all see around ourselves. That includes not only different ethnicities and different body types, but also people with different abilities. We've been iterating and now we have over 175 different types of Barbies reflective of all different types of people. But it goes beyond Barbie. We're a very purpose-driven company. I'll give you a recent example with Uno and our games division. Uno is having a moment, and there's so much fandom around it. What we realized is the fundamentals of the game, the mechanics, are based on colors. Well, there are colorblind people in the world, so they can't play the game. Our design team created symbols and icons to make the game colorblind accessible, and we've started to roll that out now as a practice across all of our games. By the end of the year, over 90% of our Mattel games portfolio will be colorblind accessible. I love the way that one of our playbook pillars—driving and leading through purpose—has been embraced by a variety of different brands across the portfolio.

Well, to get specific around theatricals, we talked about the two-year anniversary of the Barbie movie. We also just wrapped production of our next big theatrical, which is Masters of the Universe, and that is releasing next summer. We're very excited about that. Of course, lots of learnings from the Barbie film are being applied from a marketing standpoint, though the story is very unique and with different filmmakers. What's fun about Masters of the Universe is it's a more niche brand with a more niche fan following—a lot of men who collect our action figure line as well as other lifestyle product inspired by the show from the 80s. But we have an opportunity to bring new fans into the franchise next year when the movie comes out, and certainly reach kids but also broaden to women and an array of fans. So we're excited about what that film is going to do for that property.

Well, I think for sustainability and long-term growth, you have to think about your brands as more than any single category. You have to think about them as ideas, as IP. That's certainly been the mantra under Ynon Kreiz, our CEO, who joined over seven years ago. We've evolved from a toy company to a toy and children's family entertainment company, to now having one of the leading portfolios of IP in the world, and thinking about that IP as franchise through the brand management lens. Storytelling is a huge part of extending the value of these brands and inspiring all sorts of different product expressions and experiences.

Yes. Mattel Studios, an amazing division led by Robbie Brenner. That is where we're not only producing theatricals but also premium streaming shows, scripted, unscripted, animated, live action. So a really exciting time for us in the world of content creation and storytelling.

Well, we've been thinking a lot about the Mattel brand recently. Interestingly, the Barbie movie made the Mattel brand front and center. You could have argued that we were more of a house of brands in the past. Now we're a branded house of brands. Mattel was a character in the film with a hilarious CEO played by Will Ferrell. That started to make Mattel more of a consumer-facing household brand. This year is actually the 80th anniversary of Mattel, so we are doing a commemorative product line celebrating our anniversary color, which is ruby red. Mattel's branded color is red, but we're creating commemorative product. We have an amazing philanthropic program working with 80 different partners commemorating each year of the company's history, and other nice projects like going through the archives and publishing beautiful coffee table books. Mattel is the lead brand message. In addition, we just announced a few months ago a new building set business for us. We acquired a company called Mega Bloks about 15 years ago, doing very well in the preschool space with big chunky blocks, but we had an opportunity to do better with actual bricks. Building and construction is a very popular play pattern right now with all ages. When we decided to reinvigorate that business, we studied the Mattel brand versus Mega and realized we had more equity with Mattel. So we've just relaunched Mattel Brick Shop as our new offering for adults in the building set space. We're partnering with our number one vehicles brand, Hot Wheels, as the first collection. That was very intentional.

We've just launched. We've had incredible response from influencers and fans of the category. We had a pre-sale that sold out, and we'll officially be at retail in another month. Thinking about the thematic of vehicles and Hot Wheels was a strategic choice, but branding this new business as Mattel Brick Shop was a strategic choice, and we're really excited to see the reaction.

Yes, really excited about our strategic partnership. We're going to be working with them on products and experiences for 13 plus, so young adults and older. Early days, but very excited about thinking of new ways to play and bringing our analog products to life. I'll give you an example. We see a lot of application in our games business. You can see behind me, Magic Eight Ball. You can imagine maybe an interactive Eight Ball, which could be kind of fun. So we're trying to figure out the right way to leverage AI, recognizing right now it's about adults because there's so much sensitivity and privacy concerns with kids. We're being very cautious there. But we're also using AI as a tool to fuel creativity, to help with ideation, to help with research. We're starting to embrace it across all aspects of the company. It's frankly a corporate mandate for everybody to start using these tools and see what's possible.

I could give many examples. I'll share one that was certainly very personal and difficult because it involved people. Those are the most difficult decisions. By the way, our people are our superpower, and that's what's kept me at Mattel all these years—the incredible people. So when you have to make decisions about leadership changes or restructuring, it's incredibly difficult. We had been experiencing a lot of softness in our Fisher-Price business, the infant toddler preschool business. When we looked back over the past six years, while the company had been growing, we would have been growing at a 2x rate if Fisher-Price hadn't been declining. We had some wins with Barbie and Hot Wheels that were masking the softness, but we really had to address that business because it's a big important business. Fisher-Price is the number one brand in the infant toddler preschool space, and it wasn't acceptable to be declining. We actually got pressure from activists on that business. So I had to make a really tough decision to reorg the business. We acquired it years ago and their headquarters are in East Aurora, a suburb of Buffalo, New York. We had a core Fisher-Price team there that works on infant and newborn and some baby gear products. We also had a preschool entertainment team that works on products linked to kids' shows. We decided to move that business to LA to be closer to the studios, and we rolled it under a leader that runs action figures and also works with the same studios. There were synergies there. Then we really rightsized the infant toddler newborn business in Buffalo and had them focus on that business and that audience, which is not kids but parents, because moms are making this decision. That resulted in some leadership shifts. It was a very difficult decision and very disruptive. But I will say the business is now turning, and engagement is up on the Fisher-Price campus, which is exciting. We have new leadership that brought great reinvigoration. But these choices really do keep you up at night.

Oh gosh. Well, yes, lots of announcements coming in July, so I can't give away too much. But one announcement we just made is that Hot Wheels is partnering with F1. We're now also participating in all the fun around the F1 movie that's coming out this weekend. We've created a car from the fictitious team featured in the movie, which has already sold out in minutes. So much fun. The fandom for Hot Wheels just continues. And of course, F1, hats off to them—what an incredible franchise that's really taking hold all around the world.

Oh goodness. Well, again, so many incredible people out there. I'm trying to think of people I was just chatting with. I'm a huge fan of Asmita from L'Oreal. She's amazing, and what a complex business with such a broad portfolio. They have been so digital first in their approach to demand creation and connecting to consumers. It's fascinating. So, yes, the global CMO of L'Oreal. I should absolutely invite Asmita on. I last saw her at a WFA conference in Toronto probably two years ago now. And then I would say just hit up some of the brands that won big last week at Cannes because some of the work I saw was just incredible.

Thank you.

Jenny, it was so much fun. My pleasure and great to see you as always.