I recognize, and have always recognized, that I’m kind of a sucker. And someone who’s spent as much time as I have working in advertising really should be far more skeptical of it. But here’s the thing: After spending so much time in recent times insisting to us that what Lego girls really want is pastel-purple bricks, “mini dolls,” and pre-made sets requiring minimal assembly, Lego has made an ad that I really like. Are they doing it to get money out of people? Yes. It’s what’s known in the industry as an “advertisement.” But it’s one that shows a girl playing with Legos the way research indicates girls play with Legos: Taking the world around her and creating a world of her own, using her imagination to see
Transcript:
A new mother is handed a pink-swaddled baby. And then we see a little girl doing little-girl things: Pushing a Lego figure in a boat though a bubbly bathtub. Dressed as a doctor, treating her stuffed bunny in the OR she’s built in her bedroom. Guiding her Lego helicopter through an epic blanket fort. Parachuting a Lego Friends figure off of a balcony. Helping her hamster through a Lego maze. Putting on a shadow-puppet play for an adoring audience of parents and stuffed animals. Building a Lego house as her smiling mother looks on.
GIRL VOICEOVER: I don’t always want you to help me. Do you know why? I want to figure it out on my own. Even when it doesn’t turn out the way I want, I know it’s not wrong. Because you taught me how to think. How to dream. I’m about to make something that I know will make you proud.
As noted by AdWeek:
The ad nicely flatters parents — suggesting Lego is the choice of smart, creative kids who’ve been brought up well — while also recognizing that girls play with Lego differently than boys do. Lego research has long indicated that boys tend to build in a “linear” fashion, replicating what’s on the box, while girls prefer a more personal approach — creating their own story-filled environments and even imagining themselves living inside them.
Even though a lot of what the girl is playing with — the pink and yellow house she was building at the end, for instance, and all of the figures shown in the ad — come from Lego’s girl-targeted Friends line, many of the things she’s building come straight from her imagination. It calls to mind that famous “What it is is beautiful” ad from 1981 more than the similarly styled parody ad from earlier this year featuring Lego’s Heartlake News Van, complete with makeup table.
In my mind, of course, an earlier take on the ad had the girl shoving over an entire bucket of loose bricks to dig through them for the 1×1 white one she was looking for, and then her mom kneels down to see what the girl is working on and gets the 1×1 and eight of its friends embedded in her knee and almost swears, but doesn’t, because her daughter is sitting right there. This is more similar to my own Lego experience as a kid, but also probably less likely to push Lego Friends sets, and less likely to sell moms on the benefits of scattering tiny, tiny plastic pieces all over the floor in the interest of nurturing creativity.
But it’s nice to see Lego making a cool ad, is my point, even if it is for the sake of selling things.