Smells Like ‘10s Spirit: How ‘The LEGO Movie’ Gave Brands a New Way to Talk

“Smells Like ’10s Spirit” takes a look at the decade in movies through the lens of success stories only made possible by unique trends that emerged. This series explores ten films – one from each year of the 2010s – and a single social, economic or cultural factor that can explain why it made an impact or lingers in the collective memory. Each piece examines a single film that tells the larger story of the tectonic forces reshaping the entertainment landscape as we know it. In this edition: The LEGO Movie, written and directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller.

For all the talk about how movies have waned in influence, it’s hard to imagine the world’s most powerful brand in 2017 attaining that status without them. That brand? Not Netflix, Amazon, Disney or any other content creating studio. No, according to Brand Finance’s Brand Strength Index (BSI), the most powerful brand of that year was LEGO. While the evaluators noted its high performance against metrics like familiarity, loyalty and promotion, the company found new relevancy thanks to their investment in branded entertainment. 2014’s The LEGO Movie provided an example of how legacy brands could stay relevant in a new decade where companies assumed more rights and expectations regarding their presentation and communication.

“Corporations are people, my friend,” Mitt Romney infamously told a crowd in Iowa during his 2012 presidential bid. He lost, of course, but the idea of corporate personhood did not die with Romney’s campaign. The 2010s have been host to an unprecedented rise in the rights given to businesses, beginning with 2010’s landmark Supreme Court case Citizens United v. FEC that granted free speech protection to corporations. They enjoy other rights as American citizens do, such as the freedom of religion, and even receive certain privileges that they do not – such as the permanent corporate tax cut included in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. But the implications of corporate personhood extended far beyond the corridors of Washington – they also played out in every American home.

Concurrently with the unprecedented rise of corporate cash flowing into the American political system through dark money, innovations in communication forced brands to be more transparent and communicative with their customers. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter flourished in the later part of the ’00s as a playground for photo uploading and stream-of-consciousness thought dumping for their users. But by the turn of the decade, it was increasingly clear that they also served as a crucial new marketplace for advertisers to reach consumers in a more sophisticated, targeted fashion than ever before.

While conversations around data access and privacy have only begun to reach a fever pitch following the revelations of Cambridge Analytica’s misuse during the 2016 election, the push and pull between brands have to give their consumers in exchange for their attention began long before. The trade-off for access to users was that companies had to be more open and conversational. It made sense for companies to play ball, as a study by Label Insight revealed 94% of consumers were likely to be loyal to a brand offering complete transparency. But the process was not an easy one for marketing departments used to carefully manicured press releases, and it resulted in countless unforced errors in the early part of the decade – who can forget all the brands who felt the need to produce custom content commemorating 9/11 or thought it was a good idea to use “bae” in their social copy?

The changes to interfacing with brands rippled throughout the larger commercial ecosystem. As NYU marketing and psychology professor Adam Alter put it, consumers have “come to expect small doses of humanity from even large brands that may have once seemed faceless and corporate before the rise of social media.” People wanted brands to talk with them, not at them. Customers wanted companies to serve as more than a merchant selling them things. They wanted them to be a part of their lifestyle and identity.

In this new environment, brands needed to get more creative than a Super Bowl spot or a viral tweet to command attention and drive business results. And especially with audiences spending less time watching linear TV and more time on commercial-free streaming services, they had to get craftier to find space in which to convey their messages. The smart ones looked beyond the hot platforms of the moment and turned to a medium that benefitted storytellers, not marketers looking to aggressively push a call to action: movies (and original narrative entertainment at large).

The LEGO Movie was released into this era but not exactly born from it. Warner Bros. and the LEGO Group announced plans to develop the film in 2009, two years after Paramount and Hasbro’s teaming up to spawn the Transformers franchise had spawned boffo box office. These Michael Bay projects managed to rise above the level of flagrant product placement (one of the few compliments one can pay these otherwise soul-crushing films), but their larger-than-life action sequences were heavy on CGI and low on practical business value. The films never clearly articulated what exactly Transformers stood for nor how could a child play with them, and the same problem plagued other toy-based films of the same ilk like G.I. Joe and Battleship.

LEGO needed a movie featuring their products to do more than just broadcast their name to wide audiences; it needed to drive sales and keep the brand relevant in an increasingly digitized gaming vertical. While not as deep in financial morass as Marvel prior to launching their Cinematic Universe, the Danish toymaker was hardly sitting pretty when they greenlit The LEGO Movie. They faced their first deficit in company history back in 1998 and saw net sales fall by 26% over the next five years. The declines led to a change in executive leadership and a pledge to “focus back on its traditional values and products.”

The company found perfect creative partners to achieve this renewed mission through the film. From the beginning, LEGO never put pressure on them to serve as marketers as well as filmmakers. “Right from the start we were skeptical about doing it because people could see it as a giant commercial and that wasn’t something we were interested in doing,” co-director Chris Miller told Fast Company. “Luckily, the people at Lego felt the same way.” With toy sales a concern but not an absolute business imperative, their minds were free to run in more inventive directions. That autonomy led to a major breakthrough in the way in which companies could sell themselves to customers.

Producer Dan Lin described early inspiration for the overall tenor of The LEGO Movie deriving directly from the user experience:

“I watched my son play with Lego, and as he was doing so, he was talking to himself. He was telling a story as he was playing with his Legos, and the story was much bigger in scope and imagination than what was physically in front of him. So then I had this idea that if I could make a movie that captured the imagination of kids when they’re building with Lego that would be something special, something that people hadn’t seen before.”

Though their vision wasn’t always an easy sell – the film’s meta third act twist reportedly made Warner Bros. executives uneasy – it worked because the brand allowed them to use LEGOs not as a product to peddle but as a form of creative building blocks. As anyone who’s ever taken a college communication seminar knows Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message – and audiences understood it. Seeing an entire universe created from the company’s product alone speaks volumes on its utility and applicability.

In The LEGO Movie, the toys are not just blocks with a barcode. They are conduits for imagination and childlike wonder, and every aspect of the film speaks to this latent function. Heck, even the creativity of the way in which they plug the product while eschewing everything about plugging the product speaks to the premium that the brand places on ingenuity. Through a hyper self-aware and self-referential storyline, Lord and Miller buy a lot of goodwill among viewers inclined to see the entire enterprise as a cynical cash grab. Furthermore, it allows them to do a whole lot of brand promotion because they are at least transparent about it!

Perhaps Lord and Miller’s real genius is the way it talks to two generations separately for most of the film, only to bring them together at the close to drive home a message. For kids, The LEGO Movie celebrates their boundless imagination in building worlds from disparate parts. Which, not so coincidentally, serves as great advertisement for LEGO’s deep back catalogue of themed sets! Bizarre non-sequiturs and childlike mishearing of big words (“pièce de résistance” gets ineloquently rendered as “piece of resistance,” to pick just one example) lend the film a feeling as if it could only be the product of a young brain’s synapses firing. The entire story possesses a purposefully simple structure, too, as ordinary Emmett Brickowski (voice of Chris Pratt) seeks to prove he’s special in the high-stakes situation of stopping Lord Business (voice of Will Ferrell) from freezing the town in a preternaturally perfect state.

Lord and Miller do not pander to adults watching the film using double entendre or reference-based humor. They trust that older audiences can appreciate the craftsmanship of the world constructed before their eyes, taking in the entirety of the creation with wonder and respect. Perhaps they get transported to a more innocent time in their lives organically, but just in case not, The LEGO Movie makes the message crystalline in its unorthodox conclusion where Lord and Miller make a stunning reveal.

At this point, The LEGO Movie jumps back to expose the animated world they show is actually being constructed in real time by a young boy, Finn, playing with his dad’s intricately assembled LEGO set in their basement. The conflict driving the play action along mirrors the tensions in his own familial relationship: feeling like his imagination is a burden rather than a blessing and fearing the stiflingly literal interpretation of LEGO building established by his father. It’s here when Lord and Miller unveil that the live-action dad is played by none other than Will Ferrell – an extension of the animated world’s villain.

It’s here where The LEGO Movie moves from being a kids movie to a family movie. As Finn begs his dad to let him play freely with the set, his father patronizes him by explaining, “It’s a highly sophisticated interlocking brick system.” Finn replies, “but we bought it at the toy store,” putting it all into humorous perspective. It’s the child who saves the day by believing in the power of LEGO’s guiding virtues of unrestricted playfulness and the value of the ordinary toy figure. Only in the father’s willingness to resume the creative and care-free impulses of his youthful days can he find resolution with his son. The film’s final images of Finn and his dad, blissfully united and bonding through their LEGOs, convey the key brand message that their products can connect parents to their children in a way that’s impossible with an iPad.

Not every brand can pull off what LEGO did with their film. (In fact, they couldn’t even strike lightning twice themselves as the 2019 sequel’s message of how LEGOs can facilitate connections between siblings of the opposite sex failed to resonate quite as strongly.) As Dan Lin observed, “You’d be shocked at the brands that have come to me and asked me to Lego-ize their brand […] only a few select brands can be Lego-ized. In my mind, they have to have great brand equity.” In other words, the brand must have some kind of shape and form in a customer’s mind that a company can then personify.

For those like LEGO who had this opportunity, mountains of potential awaited. A 2015 IBM study showed that 80% of consumers felt brands didn’t understand them as an individual, and only 23% of consumers in a 2012 Harvard Business Review study said they had a relationship with a brand. Among those who do share a connection, the same study found a majority maintain it because of shared values. The mantra of “you are what you buy” has taken on particular prevalence in the 2010s as social media and the Internet make it harder for corporations to hide where their money goes – witness the urban exodus from SoulCycle and Equinox in summer 2019 when a key financier held a fundraiser for Trump. The LEGO Movie literalized the brand’s association with creativity, kindness and intergenerational fun. The sales followed suit, too; LEGO saw an 11% jump in sales within 5 months of the film’s release, giving them an edge on Mattel as the largest toy company in the world.

It’s tough to draw any straight lines outward from The LEGO Movie, given that correlation does not imply causation. It is tempting to see the rise of cheeky brand Twitter accounts like Netflix writing in the first-person later in the decade as stemming from the same humanizing impulse. The transparency of their intentions as conveyed by the business taking on a personal, jocular tone gives them greater permission to ruthlessly self-promote. Certainly other marketers have glommed onto the idea of delivering brand messages through cinematic forms, be it Australia’s tourism bureau enlisting Danny McBride and Chris Hemsworth for the fake movie Dundee or Taco Bell leaning into parodic territory to create a fake movie trailer with Darren Criss to sell their Nacho Cheese fries.

Other companies have attempted to deploy branded entertainment to bolster their image. There have been more facepalms like Pepsi’s Uncle Drew, an unconvincing #sponcon reel that does little to further the brand beyond plastering the logo in the background of some basketball tournaments, than successes. 2019’s Detective Pikachu, a Pokémon movie greenlit in the immediate wake of AR app Pokémon Go’s 15 minutes of viral fame, might have come the closest to replicating The LEGO Movie‘s success. As Rob Letterman’s mystery film introduced young audiences to a full roster Pokémon, it made one crucial adjustment to the franchise’s leading figure – it gave a furry texture to Pikachu, rendering him like a kind of real-world pet. For a brand looking to establish an offline identity and gain further respectability outside the gaming community, trying to align themselves with their electric creation with the human-canine bond could be a boon for Pokémon’s business.

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, Little White Lies and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.

Where to stream The LEGO Movie