The LEGO Festival Of Play comprised of mostly real-world activations and events, and was therefore not limited by restrictions imposed by broadcasters, government or regulatory bodies.

Public filming permits were required in all cases and we worked with our existing council contacts in each state to secure these in addition to forging new relationships with Tourism Bodies to get permissions not normally attainable by standard applications.

LEGO Australia asked us to develop a national creative communications strategy to celebrate a very special milestone – the 50th anniversary of the LEGO brick in Australia, that would appeal to fans young and old and help to inspire the LEGO builders of the future.

LEGO comes from ‘Leg Godt’ – Danish for ‘play well’.

In recent years, technology has changed the notion of what it means to “play well” and LEGO’s ownership of the position of “play well” has been challenged as never before in its history.

It was important that the campaign conveyed LEGO’s belief that ‘playing well’ is as important today as it was 50 years ago.

But we didn’t want to rely on a traditional campaign that simply communicated this message. Besides, we didn’t have the budget.

Instead, we wanted people to experience ‘play’ for themselves. If they couldn’t experience it, we wanted them to see it online, in the press, or on TV.

The answer? The Festival of Play – a series of events and collaborations, with experiences at its heart, inspiring both young and old across the country, to ‘play well’. The festival housed around 20 initiatives, including:

As a creative platform, the festival’s experiential programme allowed us to house many initiatives with a truly national footprint that achieved that goal.

• ‘LEGO Forest’ – Giant pop-up life-size forest in Sydney CBD, Broken Hill and Coogee Beach

• ‘Brickworks’ - 10 famous Australian creatives help create large-scale LEGO mosaics as panels to form a public art gallery on the street and galleries

• ‘Builtboard’ - The world’s first LEGO billboard unveiled in Brisbane

• ‘Play Days’ – an initiative with schools that allowed kids to learn from master builders.

• ‘Play Pits’ - Giant 2m x 8m red LEGO Brick landed in Melbourne

Every experiential element was designed to deliver content that had editorial currency across multiple channels. The campaign website included sharing functionality and for each activation the LEGO Global Facebook page was utilised.

On occasion we used famous LEGO fans for the trailer voice-over and for Brickworks.

Because our experiential content was fun, designed for all ages, striking and often a world first, it attracted tweets from stars as far-a-field as Ashton Kutcher and his 11.7m following, and events drove global media coverage and inspired hundreds of thousands to visit them.

Business

• The Festival contributed to an increase of 18% in consumer sales in 2012*

*Source: NPD Data

Campaign

• 15:1 ROI

• 400k+ footfall via experiential activations

• 450k branded content views

• 52k Facebook likes

• 157,000 Campaign website unique visits

• 761 pieces of editorial coverage

• 82% Key message inclusion

Overview

The huge earned and social media success of the campaign was achieved with only 10% of the total budget spent on media support and no ATL activity at all...highlighting the strength of the branded content created from experiential and digital activities pushed out through PR in engaging consumers and media alike.

Helping to prove the original challenge set out to us, that LEGO is as relevant today as it was 50 years ago.