To successfully launch The LEGO Movie 2 – a movie grounded in joy and optimism – at a moment when the UK was feeling anything but joyful and optimistic.

Our media strategy needed to target families - primarily the parents who would be booking the tickets, whilst finding as many media moments where our campaign could be experienced together. As the movie was a sequel to a big hit, we also needed to ensure the strategy was activated on as large a canvas as possible so in every instance we partnered with the UK’s biggest brand in every medium, including ITV (TV), The Sun (newspapers) and Heart (Radio). In each of these, we then partnered with those brands to create unique media moments which were all designed to raise a smile amongst those who experienced them.

The outcome was AWESOME WEEK – a week of specially created media executions designed to bring a smile to faces across the UK. On TV we made ad breaks more awesome with a specially-created break during ITV’s The Voice that consisted entirely of ads featuring the movie’s characters. The UK’s first-ever programmatically delivered outdoor campaign put a positive spin on negative news during the week On radio, we ran promotions that made listeners’ social plans more awesome by giving them the opportunity to win awesome experiences. The movie’s lead character, Emmet, wrote a week of upbeat columns in the UK’s biggest selling newspaper And to make dull Winter mornings more awesome, the movie’s stars served drinks in a fully functional coffee shop made from 50,000 LEGO bricks.

The LEGO Movie 2 opened at No.1 in the UK box office and stayed there for 3 weeks Helping the launch campaign deliver a return on marketing investment of £1.77: £1 (within this, post-campaign analysis showed that the programmatic outdoor element of the campaign alone delivered c£500k of incremental box office revenue)