LEGO City Of Tomorrow
Key performance indicators? THose weren’t the KPIs mattered on this program.
LEGO wanted to promote their LEGO CITY line with a build event at Toys’R’Us stores across Canada. Now let’s be honest, LEGO kind of sells itself, so setting up some tables with bricks on them would have probably hit all of their KPIs. However, we didn’t win this pitch based on how effectively we’d hit sales and attendance targets - the numbers adults usually care about. Instead, we shifted the focus to the stuff we knew little builders would care about - Kid Performance Indicators. ;)
success depended on us looking at lego as a communication tool. Not just building system or a toy.
Considering how increasingly conscious younger generations are and how much earlier they begin thinking about their futures, “Build Your City of Tomorrow” became the call to action for the promotion. The key to success would be in how sincere that CTA felt to every kid who came to the build events. In other words, these events couldn’t just be about building things with LEGO. Kids needed to feel like we cared about WHAT they were building and WHY they were building. We took this so much to heart that, as we began piecing the event plan together, we paused for a moment and crafted a little manifesto to keep everyone on the same page.
Pre-event, our main communication medium was the stores that would host the events.
POS materials invited kids and their imaginations to the events. The art direction and the messaging worked to give the big weekend a sense of scale and a purpose; we needed their help to inspire the nation!
We worked with LEGO and Toys’R’Us to takeover as many facings as we could in stores across Canada. Click / tap to take a look at the original concept for the store takeovers.
From the minute they arrived, WE immersed kids in the experience and made them feel like what they were about to do mattered.
When young builders showed up at Toys’R’Us with their families, staff presented them with Official City of Tomorrow credentials and told them how happy we were to see them. Why? Because the LEGO Build Crew needed their help designing the future!
Then Tens of Thousands of Canadian KIDS were asked, “WHAT WOULD YOU BUILD TO MAKE THE FUTURE A BETTER, SAFER, Or HAPPIER PLACE?”
We anticipated that question might need some further explaining, but we were proven wrong, because damn kids are smart now. Kids dug into countless brick bins at multiple build tables and got to work. Some worked alone, others together, but they all came up with mind-blowing ideas.
Each idea was added to an ever-growing ‘City of tomorrow’ at every Toys’R’Us location.
The staff, or the LEGO Build Crew, helped young builders find the perfect spot for their creations. It was an important step that helped the kids feel like they were all working together and contributing to something big.
Original table concept.
Remember the whole thing about the kids feeling like they were actually making an impact? I didn’t think we would quite nail that with just the event alone.
We needed another proof point for the young builders that showed them just how much their ideas mattered. We couldn’t promise them their ideas could change the future and inspire a nation, if we didn’t put them in a spotlight larger than Toys’R’Us.
Prior to the event weekend, we encouraged LEGO to make an incremental investment that would allow us to document our favourite ideas from the events with a piece of video content. They bought in. We used the events to cast the kids, rented a studio, and then just let them do the talking :)
Me chatting with the kiddos about their ideas.
Produced in one week on a modest budget and given no media support, the video quickly earned hundreds of thousands of organic views across LEGO’s digital channels.
