Creative Crowdsourcing Site Plays With Mattel Toys
Mattel is working with Tongal, an online community of artists, to create fresh videos featuring classic properties such as American Girl, Barbie, Hot Wheels and Thomas & Friends.
Sid Mathur, senior VP-strategic development at Mattel, oversees the content distribution team at the toymaker. The partnership with Tongal had three goals, he said: to meet the need for short-form content as new platforms emerge; to gain access to the global creative community; and to see what classic properties like “Thomas” mean to people around the world.
Tongal, a “crowdsourced studio” of writers, directors, actors, animators, production companies, editors, cinematographers and others, hands over a company’s creative brief to its community of 100,000, and then the pitch process begins. Businesses select a few ideas, then filmmakers work on one of the winning ideas. Finally, the business selects the winning pitches and the creatives involved are awarded for the finished product.
