The Meta-Marketing of ‘The Lego Movie’
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> It’s a counterintuitive sleight of hand: By acknowledging that their central message is unbelievable or at least exaggerated, the branding masterminds gain our trust and bolster our faith in the brand. Will Ferrell, for example, promoted “Anchorman II” and Dodge at the same time by appearing on talk shows as Ron Burgundy and declaring that Dodge’s cars were “terrible.” Dodge sales spiked. (Ferrell also voices President Business.) In New Zealand, Burger King ran YouTube ads of two guys eating Burger King while complaining about YouTube ads. Nearly every Super Bowl ad this year referred to the fact that it was a Super Bowl ad. The brand — and the TV ad, the movie and the fictional spokesman — is hyperaware of its own fictionality and thus earns the right to simultaneously denigrate and elevate itself as divine.
Humor is a great wrapper for the sour pill of deception. At first our conscience might reflect on the acidity, but given enough exposure, eventually the mind will heartily consume the sour pill as if it was the sweet truth all along.
We're firmly at a point in society where truth is not often established by a hard and uncomfortable examination of facts, but whether or not we feel comfortable and entertained by whatever thoughts are presented before our minds. Feelings rule supreme over facts in this country, by far.
Does it make me feel good? / Does it make me feel bad? / Do what makes you happy. -- Just a few of the feeling-oriented mantras society uses for decision making.
Humans who are (intentionally) not taught how to think critically are easily manipulated via their emotions.
Anyone who thinks that there is not a war on your conscious, fought through your pavlovian emotional responses has not been paying close enough attention to the world around them.
Definitely agree, probably easier to shorten it to that. We all have our blindspots where we're easily influenced, there's just too much daily data and information we vacuum up to even consciously process it all. Hopefully I didn't make myself out as somehow excluded from that aforementioned "society"
Our own personal "McDonald's of the Soul" as Jim Gaffigan says in his stand up.
Find me one banker or one politician who has been held accountable for anything of sizable matter.
Also, apparently LEGO is being held responsible for girls liking pink now. (Hint: pink is not the problem - girls want to signal they are girls, and by random chance pink got selected as a predominant signal).
Source: I was a child once.
Later on, I learned Lego manufacturing tolerances are measured in micrometers.
[1] http://flowingdata.com/2013/02/07/analysis-of-lego-brick-pri...
Legos are priced at what people are willing to pay for them. If they were overpriced they would not sell and there would be no Legos. Maybe you are suggesting that Legos should be cheaper because the material cost do not justify the prices you see, well again, Legos are priced at what they sell at and clearly people have voted with their wallets and have said that Legos are worth greater than the sum of their parts. It would be a disservice to Lego's investors to price them in accordance with the wishes of people who think everything should be accessible to everyone. For-profit companies should responsibly capture all the value they can.
The net effect of your comment is to further confuse the distinction between what is expedient/existing and what is right, and to discourage people from developing an independent sense of the latter (in the same vein as "might makes right" and "technological determinism").
Nope never said that, show me where I said this.
> people have voted with their wallets and have said that Legos are worth greater than the sum of their parts
Also,
> Legos are priced at what they sell at"
If you're taking issue that it's not a direct iron-clad "tautology", then please insert whatever less-stringent term you please that indicates circular reasoning by which a process supposedly justifies itself.
That's half a quote. The point you misquoted was very specific, regarding Legos being priced higher than their material costs works, because people value Legos for more than the plastic they're made with. That's not a tautology, that's a simple observation. This is without a doubt the worst conversation I've ever had about Legos.
This "conversation" has been terrible because you've been nitpicking for seemingly its own sake, while completely ignoring any substance of what I've said.
I wonder how do you reason without the theory of markets? Serious question!
I wont argue with that. But you can raise prices by raising demand for your product. Perhaps by aggressively marketing (and meta-marketing) a movie based on your product...
So what?
They raise the price. You think it's too high. Don't buy it.
How will it "make" you pay more in the future?
http://www.reddit.com/r/geek/comments/14ccan/lego_super_star...
As a side point, I found the piece very well written. The author's biases are not hidden, while the analysis stays focused on objective points, which makes it very well balanced IMO.
One of them loves Transformers and Ninjago, we get her those toys with no mention of boy versus girl toys.
I just don't understand what the problem is with needing specially made toys for girls to offset some perceived injustice when they can play with the boy toys just as well.
Also the question is how do you identify female LEGO figurines? If you add feminine traits like lipstick or long hair, aren't you cementing another stereotype? Or adding boobs - again you are exposing yourself to criticism. I'd say as long as it doesn't spot a beard, any LEGO figurine can be taken as male or female at wish.
I suspect the criticism assumes LEGO firefighters are male unless they wear lipstick, because I don't think all LEGO firefighters are bearded.
And, as you say, what is the problem of playing with a figurine of the opposite sex? We even bought our son a Playmobil horse with girl tender that came in a pink box. I have yet to notice any trauma it might have induced. Maybe the payback will be in 20 years when his psychotherapist will expose our deeds.
Edit: here is a random LEGO firefighter I googled. What does make it male? http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61cMG%2BjM8hL._SL1500_...
I don't see fire fighters or policemen or construction staff, so her statement (and other peoples argument) is valid. How to interpret this fact can be tricky, because there's still more variety than traditional 'girly' toys I think, but when contrasting this with the "City" line of toys (http://www.lego.com/en-us/city), the gender bias is blinding.
I think it is great that Lego has developed a theme that isn't focused on physical confrontation. I have three girls who play with Lego and they request a mix of sets. For Christmas, they requested sets from Friends, Lord of the Rings, and Ninjago. My four year old got a Chima set. They don't see it as a girl vs boy thing.
Now, if I was heavily into buying Lego bricks, I'd also mix from the different sets to have more situations, and my kid doesn't really care if his toys are action figures or dolls.
You know what "traditional" girl toys are? What previous generations, or "parents", say they are.
Please show me what makes the actual firefighters and policemen "male"? I see some figurines with beards, but many without beards - they could be any gender.
Also never mind the fact that including many female fire fighters would be a lie, because the real world isn't really like that.
They then developed a lego girls magazine.
Girls were transferred over to the girls magazine automatically.
The girls magazine has much fewer build instructions for different projects.
Offering two different magazines is fine - here's detailed builds and new kit information; here's a social stuff mag. But automatically offering one to girls and the other to boys is weird.
I agree it could have been handled better. But what if girls actually prefer the girl's magazine? The PC assumptions seems to be to assume that girls only like what they are told to like, but what if there actually are differences in preferences, and marketing is simply reacting to it?
It should be noted she never uses the word "evil" or any such synonym. The claim is that LEGO is an indifferent entity that tries to manipulate people into buying their stuff religiously, and the article demonstrates the latest form of such manipulation. Whether that's "evil" is left to you, even if the author clearly has an opinion on the subject.
Seems the author is not beyond using manipulation either.
"The claim is that LEGO is an indifferent entity that tries to manipulate people into buying their stuff religiously"
Really - are they not just a company trying to sell it's products? It seems to me the way you or the author words it is simply reframing that as something negative.
If the brand is "creativity is good, and you can actually build whatever you want with LEGO, not just the Star Wars model the evil empire suggests", where exactly is the problem? I'm pretty fine with such a brand.
Maybe they simply like their own product, and the enthusiasm shows in the movie?
I am not a LEGO expert - I am waiting for somebody to tell me why they are supposedly evil, other than them being successful? I just don't like articles that sort of imply that somebody who is successful has to be evil. It's also banking on the envy we all have in us. Yes it feels good to read such an article, makes us feel better about our own mediocrity. In fact, it being in the NYT, that is probably exactly the point of it: it's OK to be mediocre and never try to change the status quo, as long as you keep reading the NYT and click on it's ads. You're a loser, but hey, you are a better person.
Since HN is interested in companies and product development they might be interested in the book "The Real Toy Story". It's a cut throat industry.
I'm a bit sad about the rise of themed tie in kits. I'm a bit worried about the development of "girls kits" and "boys kits" - I don't mind them having different kits but they are undeniably gendering the kits rather than just offering choice.
It's great to see Lego doing well after a really rough time.
Yes, the language is shaped by her opinion of LEGO, or more likely, of corporations in general. But she isn't making an y real effort to convince you; it's an assumed context. If you think that corporations are great, you're not really the intended reader.
Really - are they not just a company trying to sell it's products? It seems to me the way you or the author words it is simply reframing that as something negative.
It's not reframing unless one considers that in general, a company selling their products is a good thing. But even if one does, there's still an argument to be made about LEGO's (and other corporations') way of doing so.
If the brand is "creativity is good, and you can actually build whatever you want with LEGO, not just the Star Wars model the evil empire suggests", where exactly is the problem? I'm pretty fine with such a brand.
Well, for one, there's the question of whether LEGO's actions are coherent with that brand. If the Star Wars model is the product of an evil empire, why are they selling it? Her point is that such incoherent is not some marketing failure, but actually a deliberate way to fake credibility by attacking the company that it's promoting.
(Of course, even the core part "you can actually build whatever you want with LEGO" suggests that you need to buy their products to be creative. But that's what every company would claim, so that goes back to the issue of how you view the whole system.)
Maybe your politics are getting the best of you? Can't someone be against advertising and still enjoy the fruits of capitalism?
Personally, I hate ads. I hate being manipulated. And, I hate that corporations spend an insane amount of money every year just to get me to buy their stuff that I don't want - it just increases the price of the products that I do want.
If the issue was just the ads, playing with the bricks themselves wouldn't necessarily be bad, but that's what she implies.
> No wonder I feel guilty as I’m driving my children to see “The Lego Movie.” I should be taking them on a long hike or handing out aprons and baking cookies. But we aren’t doing those things; instead we spend our weekends hunched over expensive plastic bricks, and now we’re going to watch them on the big screen. I have filled my daughters’ empty minds with a blind devotion to an indifferent commercial empire.
The issue isn't just the ads, or just the expensive bricks, it's how the two come together to form a feedback loop. The kids enjoy playing with legos, so they want to see the movie. They see the movie, which makes them want to buy more bricks. Lego Movie 2 comes out and the process repeats. The main thing the author seems to dislike is manipulation.
Sure they could be better or more entertaining. But most ads are easily recognizable and easily ignored. As much as I get a similar reaction to being manipulated once I recognize the manipulation I can use the info for my advantage or to move on.
Maybe this is naive but without advertising how robust would the worlds economy be?
LEGO is not alone in this regard, but they do create wants out of nothing.
So, you have a child, and this child is happy. Then the child sees a LEGO set, the child wants it, and now the child has an unsatisfied want. Child gets LEGO set, set satisfies synthetic want, child is happy again, and welfare returns to its original state.
Now, you might argue that there is a net increase in welfare from start to finish, since the child may have learned something new or acquired new experiences. Ok, sure, but after the 4th or 5th set, you are going to see some diminishing returns. And in this regard, LEGO's interests and your interests are opposed.
As for creating wants ex nihilo, well, yeah, but only to the extent that it's true of any company that advertises at all. Entertainment and creation come right after food on a child's list of priorities, sometimes before; generally this is not a synthetic want. I'd rather know about good products like lego than take whatever dreck I stumble upon.
There will always be infinitely more things kids would like to have than you could possibly buy. So you'll have to deal with rejecting wishes anyway.
I still prefer them craving for a complicated LEGO model to craving for chocolate or TV shows.
As for the pink lego, there are balancing up and downsides there. I totally hate the gendered toy segregation, and Lego now goes along with it. But Lego didn't cause it, and by doing it too, they're probably getting more Lego in the hands of girls, which I consider a good thing.
So do something bad in order to achieve something good, or refuse the bad and thereby end up reinforcing it? By not having pink Lego, they'd unintentionally make Lego a boys-only toy. By making gender specific lego, they make lego a toy for everyone again (which it was before this stupid pink rash took over the toy industry).
I have also bought pink Playmobil (big Lego competitor in Germany, don't know about elsewhere) for my son.
I think people actually want to differentiate themselves from other people. Pink is just one of many ways of saying "I'm different/special".
Box of bricks - the only thing they were when we were kids.
Models - when we were kids models required xacto knives and volatile glue. They don't make those models any more (at least they don't sell them in Target like they used to). Lego has taken over the modeling market, and I think in net their model products are superior.
You can still buy boxes of bricks, I do frequently for my Lego obsessed son. Unfortunately, in some respects, Lego is now more a modeling company than a box of bricks company. In other respects, I've seen it argued that the transition is the only thing that has kept Lego from shutting down, so the models enable boxes of bricks to still be sold.
The Lego business was on a serious decline a decade ago (2003ish) while it was still a family run business. They knew they needed to get out of "pure" Lego and diversify (licensing, older demos) but went about it the wrong way (trying to become a lifestyle brand). What we see today is a turnaround effort by brought-in CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp who figured out how to help the Lego brand adapt and survive the changes in the market, one major component being all of the tie-ins to the entertainment industry. [1]
Today, we're seeing a decline in toy sales due to video games [2], something which Lego seems to be ahead of the curve on as well. I'm just glad they still produce the Technics line.
[1] http://www.economist.com/node/8083013 [2] http://kotaku.com/toys-are-dying-and-its-all-video-games-fau...
The beginning of the movie (until the escape) is more of a double-reference to 1984 and A Brave New World. What comes next emphasizes more on the philosophy of Lego construction: combining and inventing instead of following the instructions. At no point in the movie the means of productions and the society based consumption are questioned. There is not even one clear reference to liberalism/communism (or such). Some satires do critic specific things (Starbucks), but that's it.
If you are looking for a hidden marketing message in a movie named "The Lego Movie", you probably have time to waste. I may sound a little aggressive but I was unnerved by the fact that the author consider plain activities as hiking or cooking as necessarily better than creative ones (well, maybe I do not identify sarcasm). I really don't get how playing with games from Lego can be such a bad thing: it's just a game, you are not locking them in some corporation's golden prison.
Cooking involves just as much creativity as Lego, it's a useful skill, and it's not governed by one massive corporate entity. "Better" is a subjective word, but those are some nice qualities.
I find cooking to be the kind of artistic challenge that pits imagination and experience against a physical reality totally unforgiving of ignorance and mistakes - much like writing software or playing music. It's like sculpture and chemistry that you can eat!
So build a new 'LEGO' company, build the bricks to the same quality standards as original LEGO does, and let's see if you can beat their price.
In the mid 90s, I worked for a toy design startup making plastic parts. Think "Lego + N-scale trains". (It flopped.)
At the time, there were two awesome toy makers, with two very different strategies. Lego was open about their manufacturing, but would hide their designs. PlayMobile was very guarded about their manufacturing, but would happily preview the designs.
Methinks Lego deterred competition by showing just how hard it was to compete on quality, PlayMobile competed by making plastic parts more cost effectively than anyone else.
We play tested everything we could. Made me a toy snob. Sad, I know. Little Tikes and Duplo are the best bang for the buck for their target age group. I snear at Brio, Tonka, MegaBlocks, and many others.
The only Lego-compatible brand I've come across approaching them in quality are Kre-O.
Buy it once and give it to your kids' kids one day.
Additionally, their Creator sets actively encourage multi-purpose bricks since the box itself already gives you 3 different models you can build out of the contained bricks, plus the endless possibilities of your inventions.
I bet her kids would disagree. After all, they are just kids playing with kid toys.
I saw the LEGO movie, I thought it was really good. It's a good story about being yourself, being creative, and standing up for what you feel is right. I saw the movie with my children and none of us felt the need to suddenly go buy LEGOs afterwards. We didn't see the movie as a big infomercial, it's just a movie for gosh sakes. An enjoyable one at that.
Every movie that resulted in retail items selling big was not necessarily intended to be an infomercial. And the movies that were? So what?
As for her complaint about the girl sets not having fire fighters, why not buy the sets that have fire fighters? If she only buys the sets supposedly made only for girls then who is at fault with that?
It wasn't "just a movie". The affect may be subtle, subconscious, or non-obvious, but it is undeniably there.
Disclaimer: I really enjoyed the movie also.
But realizing that influence goes a long way in denying it. If the movie was made for that specific purpose then I would have to say I am the special because as I said elsewhere, I don't feel the need to purchase LEGOs after seeing the movie.
I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one. After all, my children who saw the movie have not started asking for LEGOs.
But it was a fun movie, wasn't it?
And it was most definitely quite fun, both on a surface level and for sparking discussions like these. They did quite an impressive job.
I guess I would say that any positive mental associations I have is for the entertainment factor as I liked the movie and the Ninjago show. It certainly hasn't resulted in a positive enough influence to make purchases. That's the focus of my comments, that the article that started this discussion seems off to me because it suggests that the LEGO movie is just a huge branding effort to convince people they must buy LEGOs. Your comments are much softer than that viewpoint so I think I'd be more agreeable to your viewpoint than the article's.
I'm waiting for a plane to take off right now and can't dig up articles, but maybe a more knowledgeable HN'er can fill in for me.
I think it's just coming back in fashion in ways that are both a lot more naive (in their content and their approach) and more sophisticated (in their forms and that of the subcultures that they use as a substrate) than what the 20th saw.
Fiction is the worse. All the best books get made into movies that my boys have to see. Sometimes I wish I never picked up a book and instead took them on hikes and taught them to shoot guns.
(That's about the point I gave up reading...)
I mean, goddamn, I almost want to have a kid just so I can justify buying more Legos.
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The handles for lightsabers are also rooftop horns for big trucks, door handles, scepters, fence supports and robot arm extensions.
The mast of a pirate ship becomes the main barrel of a cannon, one of the pilings for a dock, and a barricade across a driveway.
The mixer of a concrete truck becomes a starship engine, a fuel tank, and the incubation chamber for your clone laboratory.
The pants of a minifigure are popular as fingers for giant robot hands. The single-piece LEGO cat is, admittedly, always a cat... but it can be chasing mice, sleeping, caged, a main character, a sidekick, a statue.
Context is everything for imaginative play.
It certainly has been a good marketing move for Lego -- despite having more Legos than I ever had, he still wants more, more, more -- but in no way has it been a damper on creativity.
But I don't remember it ever being that big a deal; certainly when I had money, I rarely (if ever) spent it on Lego sets. On the other hand, it verges on all-consuming passion for my boy. (Complete with comments like "This set has a piece I don't have in it!")
That said, I absolutely love the creativity he shows playing with them.
I've seen this same view on politics as well. Yet just because Party A is trying out propaganda does not mean they have 'won control of the debate' and everyone else who was addressing the same topics is now quiet and sheepish.
In fact, you could say the idea that 'we talked about it, therefore our reponse reigns supreme' is part of the propaganda message---that because it is mentioned by a mainstream source, it has become mainstream belief by default.
David Foster Wallace covered the topic in his essay, "E unibus pluram":
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/E+unibus+pluram%3A+television+...
> You can find successful television ads that mock TV-ad conventions almost anywhere you look, from Settlemeyer's Federal Express and Wendy's spots, with their wizened, sped-up burlesques of commercial characters, to those hip Doritos splices of commercial spokesmen and campy old clips of Beaver and Mr. Ed.
> Plus you can see this tactic of heaping scorn on pretensions to those old commercial virtues of authority and sincerity - thus (1) shielding the heaper of scorn from scorn and (2) congratulating the patron of scorn for rising above the mass of people who still fall for outmoded pretensions - employed to serious advantage on many of the television programs the commercials support. Show after show, for years now, has been either a self-acknowledged blank, visual, postmodern allusion- and attitude-fest,
“The word LEGO is a brand name, and is very special to all of us in the LEGO Group Companies. We would sincerely like your help in keeping it special. Please always refer to our products as “LEGO bricks or toys” and not “LEGOS.” By doing so, you will be helping to protect and preserve a brand of which we are very proud, and that stands for quality the world over. Thank you!”
I don't think The Lego Movie is 100% pure marketing, but it sure isn't 0%. They did a fantastic job with it however. It is the only branding effort I know of that has reached this level (which is a hard level to even describe, hence the struggle encountered by the author of the article). Has anyone heard of other high quality movies produced by product companies?
I like the original transformers movie, great dialogue and outstanding jap. animation.
SPOILER BELOW
And as someone who recently built a 4x8 table with a full sheet of plywood to build legos with my 4 year old son, I got a huge kick out of the end of the lego movie. It had some surprisingly dark scenes, but I didn't notice the product placement - but then again, legos were/are my favorite toy.
- the consistent message provided by the hero, is that it's okay to be a cog in the machine - the only save-the-day solution provided by the hero is to "follow instructions" - all the creatives (the master builders) are captured and tortured - Emmit saves the day by martyring himself in some bizarre Christian allegory where he ends up in the "real" world - the psychopathic manager-type tyrant who rules the world and wants to freeze everyone is declared okay and special at the end
Also, Emmett is a cog who learns to be an individual. Two paths to the same goal, one from the enslaved worker and one from the slave-master.
> if anything, it's a Buddhist tale, not a Christian one
I don't know why any philosophy (religious or otherwise) should get dibs on the "it's better when people care about each other" message.
Actually I saw it as an allegory for Lego - the specialized sets with instructions to build one thing vs the older, more general blocks that (with imagination) you can use to build anything.
However, I couldn't be less interested in what anybody thinks the 'message' is.
To the point of the original post, it's just the branding and consumerism that's over the top. I can't wait for them to replace all the Lego Movie ads at the bus stops and train stations.
What I got from the movie was a well-developed cynicism of authority. It wasn't nihilist, but very anarchic. The message I got was: have fun making things, but don't expect anyone else to respect or even understand them.