Hasbro and Ogilvy Brazil Reframe Baby Alive as a Tool for Raising Empathetic Children
Hasbro's "We All Can Take Care" is a 60-second film created by Ogilvy Brazil, published in Brazil in April 2019, which argues that playing with Baby Alive dolls develops empathy, responsibility, and nurturing behaviour in both boys and girls.
The campaign launched on April 23, 2019, addressing a specific cultural friction point in the Brazilian market: the widespread social perception that dolls are exclusively a girls' toy. By repositioning Baby Alive as a developmental instrument rather than a gendered product, Hasbro and Ogilvy sought to expand both the cultural conversation and the brand's addressable audience among Brazilian children and their parents. The single film asset carries the full weight of this argument, using the simple act of a child caring for a doll to make its case without polemic or spectacle.
The strategic objective, as documented across coverage by LBBOnline and Ads of the World, was to reintroduce Baby Alive within a framework of child development — one in which caring, empathy, and respect are presented as universally valuable traits that doll play can actively nurture. This framing gave Hasbro a platform that transcended a conventional toy advertisement, positioning the brand inside a broader conversation about how children in Brazil are raised to relate to one another. The campaign represents a Brazil-specific initiative by Ogilvy São Paulo, distinct from any global Hasbro master-brand repositioning effort, and stands as one of the more purposeful entries in the toys and children's entertainment advertising space from that year. Clapboard Score: 64/100.
Hasbro identified a cultural perception gap in Brazil that was simultaneously limiting its market and reflecting a broader social conversation about gender and childhood. The brand's challenge, as stated by Kellen Silverio, Hasbro Brazil's marketing director, in LBBOnline, was to demonstrate that both girls and boys can learn profoundly from playing with dolls — a position that required cultural courage in a market where gendered toy categories are sharply defined.
The strategic insight driving the campaign was direct: caregiving behaviour, when practised through play, produces measurable developmental outcomes. Nikki Kennamer, Senior Director of Global Brand Strategy and Marketing at Hasbro, stated in LBBOnline that playing with dolls leads to human and social development in both girls and boys. This claim gave the campaign a grounding in child development discourse that elevated it above simple brand messaging and gave Brazilian parents a rational as well as emotional reason to reconsider their assumptions.
In the competitive context of the Brazilian toy market, Hasbro's main global rival Mattel occupies adjacent territory with its Barbie and doll-adjacent lines, while LEGO Group commands significant market share through play-based developmental claims of its own. According to Finance Yahoo, Mattel and Hasbro together controlled more than 30% of the United States toy market, a dominance that reflects the duopoly's global competitive standing. By anchoring Baby Alive in an empathy and responsibility narrative, Hasbro in Brazil moved the brand away from a direct product comparison with Mattel and onto developmental ground where Baby Alive's caregiving mechanics — feeding, nurturing, responding — become the product's distinguishing feature rather than its appearance or price point. Ogilvy Brazil, which has held the Hasbro Brasil creative account since April 2016 according to available agency records, was well-positioned to translate this insight into a culturally resonant film for Brazilian audiences.
Ogilvy Brazil produced a single 60-second film as the sole media asset for the "We All Can Take Care" campaign. The creative approach depends on restraint. Rather than constructing an argument through narration or statistics, the film centres on observed moments of children caring for Baby Alive dolls, allowing the developmental thesis to emerge from behaviour rather than assertion.
LBBOnline described the film as "super sweet" in its April 2019 coverage, a characterisation that points to the executional register Ogilvy chose: warmth over confrontation, observation over declaration. This tonal decision was strategically coherent. A campaign challenging entrenched Brazilian social norms around gendered play risked alienating its core audience — parents — if it adopted an adversarial or lecturing posture. By keeping the film observational and emotionally immediate, Ogilvy made the inclusive message feel inevitable rather than imposed.
The film's 60-second duration is long enough to establish character and emotional context but short enough to maintain the quality of attention that social and broadcast film demands in the Brazilian media environment. The decision to deploy a single asset rather than a multi-format campaign concentrated the creative effort and ensured that the message was not diluted across executions. According to adsoftheworld.com and adruby.com, the campaign was categorised within the Film medium, consistent with a strategy that prioritised storytelling depth over channel breadth. Production credits for "We All Can Take Care" are not publicly documented in available sources, meaning the director and specific craft roles behind the film cannot be attributed here without risk of error. What the finished work demonstrates, however, is a production sensibility that trusted performance and proximity over production scale — an approach well-suited to the intimacy of the subject matter.
"We All Can Take Care" earned measurable industry recognition following its April 2019 release in Brazil. According to adsoftheworld.com and latinspots.com, the campaign received a Gold award at El Ojo de Iberoamérica in the El Ojo Eficacia category under "Recreación" in 2019 — one of the most significant creative effectiveness competitions in the Ibero-American advertising market. The campaign also received a Silver at Effie Brasil, according to available awards documentation, recognising demonstrated effectiveness rather than creative merit alone.
No broader verified performance data — including sales uplift, brand tracker movement, or media reach figures specific to the Brazilian market — is publicly available for this campaign. What the awards record establishes, however, is that independent juries in Brazil and across Ibero-America judged the campaign to have produced real effectiveness outcomes, not merely creative quality.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness case rests on several reinforcing elements. The single-film format concentrated impact. The developmental framing — connecting Baby Alive to empathy and responsibility outcomes in children — gave Brazilian parents a category-redefining reason to reconsider the product. The inclusion of boys in the caregiving narrative directly expanded the brand's potential audience in the Brazilian market without requiring a product change. These structural choices, combined with the cultural salience of the gender-and-play conversation in Brazil at the time, explain why the campaign performed credibly enough to earn Effie recognition. At a Clapboard Score of 64/100, the campaign registers as a solid, purposeful piece of work that executed its brief with clarity and cultural intelligence, even if its reach and documented consumer impact remain difficult to verify independently.
The campaign argued that both boys and girls benefit from playing with Baby Alive dolls. Ogilvy Brazil built the film around the idea that doll play develops empathy, responsibility, and nurturing behaviour in children, challenging the Brazilian social norm that dolls are exclusively a girls' toy.
Ogilvy Brazil created the campaign for Hasbro. It was published in Brazil in April 2019, with a campaign announcement date of April 23, 2019, as reported by LBBOnline and documented across adsoftheworld.com and adruby.com.
The campaign won Gold at El Ojo de Iberoamérica in the El Ojo Eficacia "Recreación" category and a Silver at Effie Brasil, both in 2019. These awards recognised the campaign's creative effectiveness in the Brazilian market, according to adsoftheworld.com and latinspots.com.
Hasbro identified a cultural perception gap in Brazil where dolls were seen as exclusively for girls. Marketing Director Kellen Silverio stated in LBBOnline that the challenge was showing both boys and girls can learn from doll play, directly expanding Baby Alive's audience without changing the product.
The campaign holds a Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100. This reflects a well-executed, culturally purposeful campaign that delivered a clear developmental argument for Baby Alive in Brazil, supported by Effie and El Ojo de Iberoamérica recognition, though broader consumer data remains publicly unavailable.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
