Six Million people saw the LEGO break live on TV, and social media went into meltdown, leading to an additional 1million seeking it out on YouTube.
Post-launch tracking indicated that the ad break influenced an incremental 5% of opening week’s box office revenue, resulting in a ROMI of £5.96 for every £1 spent.
Finally, the 3½ minute break was independently tested by market research company YouGov, who described it as the best performing ad break they’ve ever measured – aggregating the ads into a piece of ‘LEGO-tainment’ made the break 14% more enjoyable than an identical break featuring the originals.
Creative Execution
We approached and secured four LEGO-friendly brands – the British Heart Foundation (BHF), British Telecom, Confused.com (an insurance aggregator) and Premier Inn hotels - and remade the familiar TV ads they had on air at the time in LEGO, interspersing the break with imagery of the movie’s characters and ending it with a trailer.
(N.B. Such was the appeal of this unprecedented idea that these four brands paid their own production and media costs to ensure they could be part of it. Warner Bros. did not pay for anything other than their own media.)
Managing the combination of four different brands whose original ads were created by four different ad agencies and bought by three media agencies, we sourced production companies to recreate the ads in LEGO and co-ordinated all of this into a single 3 ½ minute break, supporting it with a full PR launch and social media strategy.
Insights, Strategy and the Idea
To hit its UK box office targets, The LEGO Movie needed to get adults who could easily dismiss it a ‘kids film about toys’ to go and see it.
We did this with a media solution which would rekindle childhood memories of the magic of the brand and unlock their inner child by joyously turning part of their recognisably ‘grown-up’ world into LEGO.
For a movie in which the whole world is made of LEGO, we replicated that experience for viewers of the UK’s most-watched weekend family TV show, Dancing on Ice, by turning existing TV ads into branded content for The LEGO Movie – rebuilding them brick-by-brick in LEGO. It would be a TV event in its own right which would delight both adults and kids at the same time.
It was an epic and unprecedented idea – The world’s first all-LEGO ad break.