The Lego Movie: TV Advertising

Thursday 22nd March
LO: To evaluate the methods used to market The Lego Movie; to link the methods to the target
audience

The opening week's box office for any movie can make or break it's lifetime commercial performance. To generate the hype they required they needed to advertise to as many people as possible, which is why they advertised to ITV as they were able to reach their target audience. To grab everyone's attention, ITV allowed them to create an all Lego advertising break. They made every advert that was meant to be aired out of Lego to replace the normal ones.

In Dancing on Ice at 7:27 pm on Sunday the 9th of February, five days before the film launched. ITV broadcasted the world's first all Lego advertising break.

The adverts included:

• British Heart Foundation
• Confused.com
• BT Infinity 
• Premier Inn

The adverts were separated by 2 second stings which showed different characters from the movie. The same time it was shown live, they released the ad break on YouTube. Nearly 6 million people watched it live, then an extra 1.1 million searched it up on YouTube the following week. The press talked about it in 60 different publications. Then not only was it number 1 in the UK box office charts at the end of 2014, it was the best performing movie of any kind.

How did The Lego Movie break boundaries with branded marketing, how did it target different parts of the target audience and was it successful?

They broke new boundaries with branded marketing by creating a TV advert made out of Lego, it was a world's first. The reason its broke new boundaries is because no one had seen it before or thought about creating an ad break based around the product your movie features. The amount of people that saw it live was 6.1 million and a further 1.1 million searched it up on YouTube in the following week. The adverts included adverts for the British Heart Foundation, Confused.com, BT Infinity and Premier Inn.

It targeted all three of the target audiences for the film. The way it targeted parents and children is because it was aired during a popular show, dancing on ice, at peak time for views, 7:30 pm. They specifically case this time as they knew parents and children would be watching dancing on ice so they would all see it. It targeted young cinema goers through the use of uploading the ad break onto YouTube as soon as it went live. Many people tweeted asking followers whether they saw the world's first Lego ad break and because it was uploaded onto YouTube everyone searched it up, gaining more interest. The hashtags #THE LEGO MOVIE and #BLOCKPARTY went up by five times the use when the ad break was aired.