Lego Content Puts Another Creative Brick In The Wall

“Our role is to set the scene for engagement, then let our users express their own thoughts and ideas through Lego,” said Lars Silberbauer, the company’s senior global director for social media and video.

In five short years, privately held Danish toy company Lego has gone from having no official social media presence to boasting an integrated, comprehensive approach to marketing, comprising dozens of social, online video, and search platforms. According to Lars Silberbauer, the company’s senior global director for social media and video, the approach has dramatically boosted sales, while helping to secure the brand’s future. After all, he said, “Very few people say, ‘Hey, let’s go have some fun and browse a corporate website today.”

“The patent on the Lego brick ran out long ago,” Silberbauer told attendees at Content Marketing World 2016, in Cleveland, “so what we actually sell is a very generic brick that anyone can make. We don’t encourage it, mind you, but you could. That’s why it’s so important that our content reaches out and connects with people.”

Silberbauer described a hybrid approach that sees internal marketing teams engage with professional storytellers to create original branded content, such as the Lego movie, while at the same time encouraging user-generated content.

“There is 20 times more user-generated content created about Lego than what we actually generate ourselves,” Silberbauer said. “Our role is to set the scene for engagement, then let our users express their own thoughts and ideas through Lego.”

By way of example, Silberbauer pointed to the Lego Ideas page, which invites people to propose their own ideas for new Lego sets, and the $100 challenge, for which he asked his own team to create a campaign they could execute for the amount of cash they collectively had in their wallets–which came to about $100.

“It’s easy to build a campaign for millions of dollars, but sometimes by applying outrageous constraints, we come up with really creative new ideas,” Silberbauer said.

In response, his team came up with a simple Lego figurine they called George. They invited Lego users to re-create George and take pictures with him against different backgrounds all around the world. The prize: $100 worth of Legos.

Within minutes of the campaign going live, George was pictured in front of the Parthenon in Athens. During the next couple of weeks that followed, Lego aficionados took photos of George in cities all over the world, depicted him getting married and being confronted by an angry ex-girlfriend, among other scenarios.

“It’s important to understand that people want to use our content in their own conversations, and that we are all hard-wired for social interaction,” Silberbauer said.

This ethos of discovering and sharing creativity is also embodied in Lego’s 2015 Kronkiwongi campaign. Partnering with Facebook, Lego encouraged adults and children all around the world to create a “Kronkiwongi”—which previously did not exist—using only their imagination, then share a picture of their creation with others.

“Adults usually wanted more information about what a Kronkiwongi was and how to make it, but the kids will immediately tell you that a Kronkiwongi has six legs or four eyes, or wheels, or walls,” Silberbauer said.

The campaign was built around three documentary-style videos featuring real kids interpreting and building a Kronkiwongi. The result was more than 37 million video views and a demonstrable reach of 80% of the target audience.

“Our mission is to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow,” Silberbauer said. “The Kronkiwongi campaign was all about the creativity and imagination we needed to make sure that the kids get creative and keep creating to deliver and maintain the affinity with the brand that’s crucial to our success.”

Read previous CMWorld article: “Marketers: It Might Be Time To Get Into To The Insight Biz”