What People Get Wrong This Week: Barbie’s Protest Hoax
Last week, Mattel Toy Corporation announced a line of EcoWarrior Barbie dolls made from biodegradable material and inspired by renowned environmentalists. The company has also pledged to be completely plastic-free by 2030. “We’ve made over a billion plastic Barbies, and that’s enough,” Mattel CEO Inon Kreutz said in a statement . “With our commitment to ending plastic, we denounce the empty promises of plastic recycling and take a bold step towards real environmental sustainability.”
As part of the plastic-free initiative, actress Daryl Hannah showcased the new dolls in a video promoting her new Barbie dolls, which are made from “nettle denim”, “mycelial skin” and “protein fibre”.
Several low-profile media outlets— People magazine, The Washington Times —picked up the story by publishing the web equivalent of toy stories below the fold, but it didn’t seem to generate much interest.
Everything written above is fake.
Maybe because it was all fake. There is no “Barbie EcoWarrior” and Mattel hasn’t announced it will be plastic-free by 2030 – at least they haven’t announced it recently (more below). This is all an invention of the Barbie Liberation Organization, an environmental group trying to trick the media into talking about plastic.
Even the angry corporate response from Mattel lawyers , in which Michael Pellegrino, Senior Director and Assistant General Counsel of Mattel, allegedly said, “Mattel is the victim of a prank set by trolls playing with the emotions of Barbie fans everywhere… the full force of the law against these bullies. Mattel is fun, it’s not fun,” is a fake, perhaps an attempt to take a second bite from an apple that never existed.
How to deceive none of the people even once
I like good pranks, but this was a terrible prank . Even though it was carefully designed, with fake websites and the assistance of a celebrity official, it just didn’t work. The hoax failed to catch the Barbie hype and fool anyone but People magazine (which has since deleted its story). Even Mattel didn’t care, as it said in an email to CBS News that it had “nothing to do with Mattel.” So what went wrong?
The Barbie Liberation Organization hoax has gone down like raw wood because it’s trite and uninteresting, but more importantly, it’s failed because Mattel is already doing everything this group is trying to shame . Four years ago, the company pledged to be 100% recyclable by 2030 , and in August this year launched the Barbie Eco-Leadership – four Barbies made from recycled plastic that care about the environment. There is nothing to protest here.
The people who got it wrong this week are a protest group that doesn’t seem to have done basic research on the topic of their protest. I’m sure Mattel is doing something bad, so why not start there?
If you want to effectively dishonor a corporation, you have to choose something that they don’t do but should do and that everyone wants them to do. You don’t even need fake websites and celebrities. This winter, it only took one tweet from the fake Eli Lilly account that read “We are delighted to announce that insulin is now free” to drive down Eli Lilly’s stock price by 4.37%, bring the cost of insulin to the world’s attention and force Eli Lilly, stop advertising on twitter.
More importantly, Eli Lilly decided to limit out-of-pocket insulin spending to $35 a month for people with private insurance shortly after the hype over the tweet. Eli Lilly probably planned the move anyway, but I like to believe it was a tweet.