I recently took my kids to watch The LEGO Batman Movie. The film, centered around DC Comic’s
renowned Batman character, is a spin-off
from The LEGO Movie, released in
2014. Both of them are directed by Chris McKay and produced by Warner Bros.
Pictures and Danish toymaker LEGO.
The film is, in my opinion, an exercise of overflowing
imagination, destined to fascinate adults, adolescents and young children alike;
we thoroughly enjoyed it.
By my aim with this post is not to become a movie critic.
Rather, to note that perhaps both The
LEGO Batman and The LEGO Movie
are the greatest exercises of branded content ever made. Because both films are
basically two long LEGO ads. Instead of placing a product
"accidentally" in the scenes of a film, as so many brands do, in
these films LEGO directly chooses to take the product placement to a new
dimension by becoming the undisputed protagonist of them.
I would specially highlight how revolutionary was The LEGO
Movie, which, under its catchy “Everything is awesome” message, hid a really
ambitious and fresh approach to the movie.
Instead of making a conventional product, aimed at its
target audience, children, with a simple and politically correct story about
universally shared values and which highlights how good LEGO toys are, the
toymaker embarks on a very clever and
really risky script, because it embraces revolutionary and counter-cultural
concepts, and even attacks the capitalist economy.
No, I'm not exaggerating. Conservative news outlets harshly
criticized the movie for its biased leftist and anti-business messages (in fact
the bad guy is called President Business).
-‘So, wait a second, are you saying that a film by a
multinational company with a clearly marketing objective is spreading one of
the most radical allegations against the current political and economic
system?’
Well yes, and it does not seem to be giving them a bad
result. Both movies have been absolute hits at the box office around the world,
and the company has become in the past couple years the biggest toy maker in
the world. Not bad for a company that 10 years ago was on the brink of
disappearance. It comes as no surprise to me that LEGO recently replaced
Ferrari as Brand Finance’s “world’s
most powerful brand”
"Story comes
first"
Perhaps part of the success lies in the fact that people at
the helm at LEGO commissioned not an advertisement product, but a real movie,
the best they were able to do, without any hindrance of any type, with the goal
of connecting with the emotions and feelings of millions of children (and their
parents) around the world. Further proof that good content is king.
The origin of the name LEGO comes from the first two letters
of each word of the expression in Danish leg godt, which means "play
well".
Based on recent perfomance, that seems like an
understatement. LEGO is playing awesome
the marketing game.