Mattel rolls back into branded entertainment

Mattel, an early pioneer of content integration, is now circumventing broadcast restrictions on children's fare with DVD and Web site-based branded entertainment.

Barbie's sales have been thinner than her waist lately, and Mattel's broader fashion doll business is just as puny. But what could do Barbie and pals more good than a supersized cheeseburger combo meal landed in my mailbox two weeks ago, addressed to my 8-year-old daughter, Leah, during her first week as a third grader.

23-minute animated feature A DVD mailing for My Scene "Masquerade Madness" features a 23-minute animated feature with a sophisticated and hiply drawn Barbie, her exquisitely attired friends with names like Nolee, Delancey and Kenzie, and "The Boys," who entirely warrant such names as Hudson, Sutton and River. The DVD comes with a coupon for the new My Scene perfume and a mail-in offer for a free My Scene bag with doll purchase. Pre-show ads pitch a CD-ROM game and Myscene.com.

These junior soap-opera characters and the kiddie lifestyle brand they inhabit is Mattel's answer to MGA Entertainment's Bratz, the chunky upstarts who have been muscling Barbie off the playground. In a conference call with analysts last month, Mattel Chairman-CEO Robert Eckert acknowledged reinvigorating the fashion doll business is his biggest problem. Branded entertainment of the sort Mattel could only dream about in recent years appears to be the solution.

Mattel, pioneer content integrator You see, once upon a time, more than a decade before Madison + Vine had a name, there lived a content integrator named Mattel that was so successful Congress passed a law to curb it.

In the 1980s, Mattel's workshops spawned He-Man and She-Ra, action figures that hit the market just ahead of the Saturday-morning cartoons that made them famous. G.I. Joe, a "Real American Hero" who'd seen more action during Vietnam than all swift-boat and Texas Air National Guard veterans combined, got his own TV gig, too.

Enraged consumer advocates responded by getting the Children's Television Act of 1990 passed, followed by more specific 1996 regulations by the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC required broadcasters to air three hours of "educational," or at least action-figure-free, children's programming. It didn't ban He-Man, but said such shows, if accompanied by ads for the starring action figures, constitute infomercials, not qualified children's programming. Broadcasters, not wishing to turn any more time over to low-rent kids' shows, gave content integration the boot.

The My Scene DVD is an artfully executed dodge of such barriers that hits its target, much like G.I. Joe, with overwhelming force.

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