Digital Roundup: 005

The Barbie movie winning the marketing game, a pop-up pub championing women’s football, and Meta unveiling Threads as a competitor to Twitter (or should we say X?) Here's our take on everything you need to know about the past few weeks.?

It’s a Barbie World, we’re all just living in it?

The release of Barbie has shown marketing teams around the world how it’s done. With a marketing budget of $150million, the cost of promotion eclipsed the production costs by $5million - and it shows.?

In the build-up to the movie premier Barbie collabs were everywhere, leading to the world going mad with ‘Barbiecore’. Here’s some of our favourite viral partnerships:?

• AirBnB – That’s right, Barbie’s Malibu DreamHouse is available to rent, and it’s everything we dreamed it would be.?
• Pinterest – They joined the Barbie fun with an advert inviting people to make bold aesthetic choices to show that they’re ‘Not Just Ken’. The ad comes after the platform saw searches for ‘barbiecore’ and ‘barbie moodboard’ rise by 980% compared to previous years.?
• Bumble – In a combined activation with Warner Bros, the dating platform helped Barbie-loving singles find a date to the movie with a tool that allows people to send Barbie or Ken-themed compliments to other users.

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Just Eat said ‘Women’s Football Matters’?

With the Women’s World Cup being hosted in Australia this year, the hype in the UK hasn’t quite matched last Summer’s Euros fever.?

In a bid to prevent the awkward game times from minimising support, Just Eat have opened ‘The Queen’s Header’; a pub in Shoreditch where fans can watch the games whilst being served breakfast from a range of Just Eat vendors, including Joe & the Juice and Greggs.?

A ticketed launch event took place on the 22nd July, with all proceeds going to its ‘Feed the Game’ initiative, which helps to fund grassroots women’s football and ‘keep more women playing the sport they love’.?

Move over Twitter, there’s a new social platform in town?

Threads - Instagram’s answer to Twitter (X - but more of that coming up) launched on July 5th and the initial reaction was a huge success, with over 10 million users signing up in the first 7 hours.?

Reviews of the app were positive too. Dubbed by The Guardian as ‘Twitter without the rough edges or news’, the algorithm is designed to present people with positive content, based on the kind of profiles they engage with on Instagram. It also enables posts of up to 500 characters and can host videos up to 5 minutes in length. As well as that, it has a carousel feature which mirrors that of the photo app.?

But it hasn’t all been good news for the Twitter rival. Within a week of launching, Threads’ active users had halved. Dropping from 49million active users on the 7th July to just 23.6 million on the 14th, the app has a way to go before overtaking Elon; despite recent complaints over Twitter’s changes, the app still has around 109million active users (numbers based on Android data).?

Twitter rebrands to X?

Despite Elon having apparently been planning a platform called ‘X’ for a quarter of a century, the recent Twitter rebrand hasn’t quite been seamless.?

The app changed its logo to a black and white X, replacing the long-recognised bird. However, the ‘tweet’ button remains the same, and ‘retweets’ were only changed to ‘reposts’ a full week after the initial rebrand announcement.?

What’s the reason for the change? According to X’s Managing Director, Linda Yaccarino, ‘X is the future state of unlimited interactivity’.?

In a series of tweets (Xs?), Linda explained the plans for X to become a global marketplace for goods, services, ideas and opportunities, in which payments and banking will be integrated into the platform.?

She also noted that the new platform will be powered by AI, connecting users in ways ‘we’re just beginning to imagine’.?