We Had Our AI Read All the Articles About the Barbie Movie
Overtone article types can see how to make or break a movie campaign
As people young and old have gone on vacation or to the beach this summer, they have been accompanied by a new friend on all their adventures. That friend is Barbie.
The film from Oscar-nominated Greta Gerwig has been popping everywhere from Brooklyn to the Burj Khalifa. But how did Barbie successfully cut through the noise when there is so much else going on? A big marketing budget (an estimated $150 million) will do a lot of the work, though other blockbusters with similar budgets fell flat.
Mapping the news cycle
Social media also plays a role but let’s see how journalists were writing about Barbie in the lead up to the big event. The same AI language model tools from Overtone that publishers use to distribute articles in the best way can also map how trends are moving over time.
Take a look at the charts above, which monitored several thousand mainstream news outlets from the beginning of the year until Barbie and Oppenheimer went into wide release on July 21, by which time hundreds of articles about both films were being written every day.
Before that crescendo there were four important peaks:
April 4-5 - The release of the Barbie trailer.
April 25-26 - Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie appear at CinemaCon. Mattel releases Barbie with Down Syndrome.
May 9-10 - Oppenheimer trailer release.
May 25-26 - A triple whammy of a new Barbie trailer, Barbie soundtrack announcement and Barbie star Margot Robbie interview in Vogue.
Note that some of these events lead to bunches more articles being written in the following weeks, such as the May 25-26 Barbie event, and others, such as Oppenheimer’s trailer, do not. So what makes a concept catch on?
Give ‘Em Something to Talk About
When we use Overtone’s models to look not just at the number of articles being written but the type of articles being written, we can see the differences.
Focusing again on the peaks, we can see that the type of article being written corresponds with a big shift in the amount of buzz generated for a movie. On the late May peaks for Barbie, for example, there is a heavy number of opinionated pieces, ranging from articles that our AI classified as a “hot take” to articles our AI classified as more in-depth thinky types, dealing with what the movie is actually about rather than just its existence.
Hot Take: The Barbie Album Rollout Has Begun - Vulture - May 26
More in-depth Opinion: What Is Barbie Going For, Exactly? An Investigation - Vulture - May 25
For the Barbie peaks that didn’t lead to a higher level of sustained buzz than there was previously, as well as the Oppenheimer peak, we see that most of the coverage was matter of fact reporting about the existence of a trailer.
Factual Quick Hit: 'Oppenheimer' trailer: Cillian Murphy assembles team to build atomic bomb - United Press International - May 8
Barbieheimer
That never boded well for Oppenheimer. But the impact of opinionated chatter leading to more articles and a bigger share of the conversation online also seems to hold true for Christopher Nolan’s film, which people started to discuss around the middle of July in big, nuclear-focused think pieces like this one. This can be seen in the red opinion peak for Christopher Nolan’s film.
That peak comes right after there was already opinionated chatter about Oppenheimer alongside Barbie, the so-called “Barbieheimer” or “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, which involved watching the two movies as a double feature. On the chart below you see that chatter about both movies in the same article had a red opinion peak on July 10, after which discussion of Barbieheimer seemed to lead to increased coverage of Oppenheimer by itself.
Opinion Piece: Barbieheimer: Destroyer of worlds, savior of cinema - Vox - July 10
In-depth Opinion: The Bhagavad Gita, the bomb and the dharma of Robert Oppenheimer - Religion News Service - July 23
The differences in what is actually being written reflects the different news cycles. We have seen this before for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, but it also holds true for Barbie, Oppenheimer and “Barbieheimer”. If a PR or marketing team wants to take on the world, it certainly appears that particular Overtone article types are significantly more likely to help them.
If you’d like to dig deeper into the articles and analysis we did of Barbie and Oppenheimer in the media, please reach out at contact@overtone.ai.
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