LEGO celebrated its 90th anniversary on June 10. Founded by carpenter Ole Kirk Kristiansen, the Danish icon gradually innovated from wooden toys to the building set systems we know today. And it is just as creative in its marketing campaigns and other projects. Take a look back at the most successful ones.
Among them is certainly the Kipper ad created by TBWA back in 1981. For LEGO, it was the first spot built purely on stop motion animation, with the bricks themselves playing the main role. The humorous video of two constantly rebuilding rivals, which began as a "cat and mouse game" with the tagline "it's a new toy every day" inspired creativity so well that it aired for several years. In a vote by the readers of The Drum magazine, the spot ranked among the 100 best commercials of all time.
The spot is reminiscent of the brand's digital film work today, represented most notably by the 2014 LEGO story. The film was awarded Best Animated Feature at the BAFTA Awards and received an Oscar nomination, among other awards. Not only was there a sequel, but also film and TV series "parodies" of Batman and Star Wars. Alongside this, there are also successful video game franchises. The reality show LEGO Masters, which ran for the first time this year in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, can be added to the TV offensive. All of this is a successful marketing venture that attracts not only movie-themed building sets.
In 2018, the world was captivated by a campaign for LEGO Technic, for which a life-size Bugatti Chiron was built at the company's factory in the Czech Republic. One million pieces were needed for the build, and 2,300 miniature motors were also used to make the car drivable. It was tested by former car racer and now Bugatti test driver Andy Wallace. The video documenting the project's creation has over 13.3 million views on YouTube alone.
In 2019, the Rebuild the World campaign kicked off. It began with a spot from agency BETC starring a rabbit that escapes a hunter in a world based on the brand's products across its history. The environments and all the characters are inspired by real-life pieces or figures, so there are references to the original wooden duck on wheels, the dragon from the aforementioned Kipper campaign, and a replica of the LEGO house from its home town of Billund.
The Rebuild the World campaign was designed not only to inspire creativity, but is also part of the company's wider environmental and social responsibility initiative. It included, for example, the Green Instructions project, which gave instructions for converting existing sets into their "greener" versions. It was backed by Poland's Ogilvy and was introduced at last year's Forum Media conference by the agency's executive creative director Maciej Twardowski.
The changing world through creativity was also shown in the agency's in-house Christmas 2020 campaign, in which children presented their own world to surprised parents, where the old rules of the past do not apply. The spot features a cover version of Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful Wold, with the melody for the global spot recorded by the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra.
Last year, LEGO dusted off the forty-year-old What It Is Is Beautiful print campaign. The company modernized the iconic project for International Women's Day, allowing parents to upload photos of their children via a special website, celebrating their creativity in the visual and showing them as "builders of the future."
As Andrea Fafliková, who is responsible for internal and external communications and events in the REEMEA region at the LEGO Group, told MAM, 80 percent of the company's campaigns are based on global or regional creative, while 20 percent are based on local concepts. These are also regularly placed in competitions such as the Czech Effie, where Ogilvy's Tichý Lounch LEGO Dots campaign succeeded in 2020, or the gold-awarded HR campaign from the same agency, which helped reduce recruitment costs by 58 percent. The playful online campaign used real employees at the Kladno factory with their own creations, attracting candidates who would fit in with the team.
Source: mam.cz
