Toy startup GoldieBlox, which makes construction and engineering kits for little girls, had the distinction of being the first small business to air an ad during the Super Bowl.
The Oakland, Calif.-based company beat out more than 15,000 rivals in a contest run by Intuit and ultimately decided in a public vote.
The personal finance software firm footed the estimated $4 million bill for the ad, which was seen by a record 111.5 million viewers, according to Nielsen.
For GoldieBlox, the Super Bowl ad represented the culmination of a dizzying 14 months.
The company’s founder, Stanford-trained engineer Debbie Sterling, now 30, launched a Kickstarter campaign in the fall of 2012 after a particularly horrifying visit to a toy store, where she realized little had changed in the girls’ aisle since she was a child: it was all pink and pretty, with little to engage the brain.
“We are taught from a very young age that we want to become princesses,” explained Sterling in a 2013 TED talk. At present, 14 per cent of the country’s engineers are women, according to a 2012 congressional report. As she told a rapt TED audience: “Just because this is the way things are doesn’t mean this is how they have to be.”
Armed with both her engineering degree and a stint in marketing, Sterling set herself a goal of “disrupting the pink aisle” — with the eventual aim of encouraging more girls to pursue careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math).
Fast forward to 2013. After raising far more than her original $150,000 crowdfunding goal on Kickstarter, Sterling and her small team set about getting her toy prototype manufactured.
Each GoldieBlox kit combines a construction toy and a book that features Goldie, a smart young girl wearing a tool belt who helps solves problems by building machines. Soon enough, Toys ‘R’ Us came calling; more recently, Target agreed to start carrying GoldieBlox.
The startup’s trajectory hasn’t been without controversy. Since November, GoldieBlox has been mired in a back-and-forth battle of lawsuits with hip-hop group The Beastie Boys. The toy company used a parody version of the rappers’ hit song ‘Girls’ in an ad that swiftly went viral.
There has yet to be a decision on whether GoldieBlox had fair use rights to the 1987 hit after changing the lyrics to empower future scientists. For some pundits, Sunday’s Super Bowl ad represents a victory over naysayers.
“It must be sweet, sweet vindication for them after all that backlash,” said Rachel Sklar, an attorney and media critic who has written about the case and believes GoldieBlox was within their rights.
Sklar sees the huge success of GoldieBlox this past year as representative of a greater movement away from gendered toys — that is, blue building blocks for boys and pretty princesses for girls. She hopes this unprecedented exposure during the Super Bowl will help speed the demise of the pink aisle.
“It’s such a refreshing change to see empowered, active, fierce little girls — a departure from the representation of women in general during the Super Bowl,” she said. “It offsets GoDaddy and the like. And relaxing the strict framework in which the media depicts women feels like a vacation.”
Read the remainder of this article at http://www.forbes.com/.
