Being so dominant in the kids’ market, LEGO has the perfect owned touchpoints to address the young decision makers: a LEGO Ninjago TV show broadcast nationwide, magazines and several digital formats. Sounds like an unbeatable advantage even for a household name like Disney. But, thanks to German law, this advantage is also LEGO’s biggest flaw: law doesn’t permit brands the usage of their owned formats for advertisement purposes, as kids might not be able to distinguish between content and advertising.

Knowing this, we turned the local legal restriction into our biggest advantage for selecting affine touchpoints.

We needed to punch earlier and in a smart way to make it to the top of boys’ “must see movies” list. Therefore, campaign planning was led by three principles…

Instead of creating a movie launch campaign drawing on Disney’s vast global experience in targeting kids, we consistently used the local regulations to our advantage.

For TV we launched custom spots around the LEGO Ninjago show ensuring maximal attention of the viewers. Besides, our analyses of thematic interests gave us a selection of placements that ensured additional TV reach in the target group and a decrease of waste of media budget.

Our digital planning relied on the same principles. We placed prerolls preceding the trailers of our competitors: Whenever our target watched a LEGO Ninjago Trailer, or otherwise affine videos they saw the Cars 3 trailer ad first. Further, we used affinity analyses of the fandom, identifying additional placements and increasing visibility with our environment targeting approach.

Print ads in the LEGO Ninjago magazine further increased the dominance of Cars 3 right in the heart of our competitors’ touchpoints.

Cars 3 wins the race: our strategy relying on local insights and the unique regulation typical only for Germany coupled with smart planning brought the movie 79% more visitors than the share earned by LEGO Ninjago.