In praise of the Lego ad break: A fantastic demonstration of the brand's imagination
Last week I eulogised about the amazing work of Droga5 for Newcastle and then assumed it would be a while before something else turned up that I really loved that much. Then Lego produced the outstanding launch work for its new movie, taking over a whole ad break in Dancing On Ice and remaking a bunch of current ads out of Lego. It’s not only a brilliant idea but it’s an important piece of work. I am so jealous I ve just smashed up my six-year-old son's Lego set. So much of this is genius.
I couldn’t think of a better show to put this idea in than Dancing On Ice. It is simply the closest an entire TV show comes to being made of Lego. The way the skaters dance, the set, the performance of the presenters and possibly even the audience in the arena all have more than a whiff of being assembled from brightly coloured plastic bricks. Lego has a history of producing great ads, starting with the amazing Kipper ad made by TBWA. Easily one of the greatest ever. The voice over is Tommy Cooper, except it isn't; it’s comedian Mike Reid doing Tommy Cooper. Apparently Tommy turned up, had a go and then flipped the agency Reid's number – "call him, he does me better than I do” – and left. So the brand has a rich heritage of impressions.
This time Lego impersonates other brands' TV ads, illustrating how the world of advertising has evolved. It’s stunt TV, it’s a press spectacle, it’s inherently funny as an idea and in execution, it's commercially smart and it not only sells the film but also the product. (It’s great to see that if your little yellow plastic Lego man has a heart attack he can also be revived by pumping along to Staying Alive – so long as you don’t snap him in half.) What it isn’t is a boring old TV script or worse, just edits from the movie. This is not advertising going through any kind of motions.Best of all Lego has always been about imagination and this idea is a fantastic demonstration of it. Not explaining it, but demonstrating it. Lego has built its own plastic mountain, climbed to the top of it, and shouted its own story from it. Or perhaps it wasn’t a mountain after all but its own drum to beat. That’s Lego for you.How did all this wonder happen? I think we should point the finger at media agency PHD and congratulate it on pulling this all together with its sister content agency Drum, its client and the production company. This is the type of game changing idea that we‘ve been waiting for a smart and creative media agency to stimulate. And one that ad agencies have been dreading. OK, it’s a movie launch and not a classic brand challenge, but I for one hope that this is the beginning of a trend. As Droga5 showed with Newcastle, the innovative use of media unlocks another way of using creativity. PHD has put itself properly on the creative map with this and long may it continue. If the ad industry were made of Lego we would be dismantling all the structures and rebuilding it in different shapes. I am just putting my six-year-old's set back together to see what it looks like…..