The Lego Movie: content marketing at its finest

Those clever cookies at Lego have teetered on the edge of genius with their latest piece of content marketing – The Lego Movie. As the in-movie earworm "Everything is awesome" hints, things are pretty cheery at Lego towers right now.

Notching up box office receipts of more than $250m in the US and £31m in the UK by the first weekend in April is a storming result in cinematic terms (it cost about $60m to make) but the more fascinating stats will be the sales figures of Lego in the coming years. Yes, this movie is a stunning piece of content marketing dressed up in a silver screen ball gown.

Many franchise films are planned knowing that much of the cash made will come from sales of "merch", yet Lego's efforts feel different in part because it is the brand as a whole rather than a specific set of characters that are popularised each time someone watches the film.

Building blocks of success

While there are all sorts of great examples of content marketing, a common theme is that a brand will create useful or entertaining content targeted at consumers that will soon be in a position to pay for the company's services/products; the actual content itself can be almost anything but it should stay within the spirit of the brand's image, even if it is not strictly related. Think about Red Bull's Stratos project among others – do you really need an energy drink to jump from space?

As a product, Lego is for kids, so the Lego marketing team's main challenge is to make their products appealing to children; however, it is the parents, aunties, uncles, grandparents and godparents who hold the purse strings. This is where the joy – and the genius – comes in: The Lego Movie is a ripping adventure for kids, but is also great fun for adults.

What Lego did right

It would have been easy for Lego to make a piece of nonsense that played well for kids, but instead the company brought in Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (of 21 Jump Street and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs fame) to create a genuinely funny and clever movie. For those that have not seen it, there is a twist in the tale that completely fits with the spirit of Lego without looking contrived, but even without that, the zany and inventive way the story zips along is like an advert for playing with these toys. There are no rules. The limit of the story is the limit of your imagination.

The importance of making this story enjoyable for adults cannot be understated, as they might buy children's toys for a huge number of young relations and friends' kids over the ensuing decades. It is a huge coup to persuade adults essentially to be indoctrinated with the Lego spirit of adventure.

Compare that to the groans of agony coming from theatres in 2007 when the Bratz movie was released (currently featuring a 9% rating on Rotten Tomatoes), as parents worldwide cursed the cinema gods.

Playing the long game

The benefits of this Lego film are not just limited to the supportive spending of adults either. What makes a children's movie such an enduring legacy is that it firstly finds its excitable audience in the cinema, then the young viewers eagerly snap up a DVD that can be viewed several times over and will probably sit in the DVD collection for years. As the child grows up, they will inevitably feel nostalgic about the films they watched as a mite and watch them again in adulthood, perhaps even showing it to a young relative and beginning the cycle again. Think about how Disney's hand-drawn classics have endured, or the acclaim that meets Pixar's more modern masterpieces; a lifetime or more of awareness is created.

Now it has been confirmed that animation co-director Chris McKay will direct a Lego sequel to be released in 2017. His work on Robot Chicken bodes well for the film, as does the presence of Lord and Miller as producers. He has instantly shown an awareness of a problem Lego has struggled with in the past by pointing out that the first movie perhaps would not pass the Bechdel test in spite of the prominence of main characters Wyldstyle and Unikitty; McKay wants more stronger women in the sequel.

Lego's Friends product range, released with the aim of raising the brand's profile among girls, was heavily criticised despite bringing in healthy profits, so if Lego can use the second film to correct this gender politics misstep then the brand will be showing another level entirely of content marketing brilliance. All of this while steering clear of sales messages: simply marketing through entertainment.

Pablo Smithson is a campaign delivery manager for Red Rocket Media. Find him on Twitter @PablitoSmithson.

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