INSIGHT
Every June 1st, kids all over China revel in a day devoted to celebrating them. Children’s Day (儿童节 értóng jié) is filled with special performances at school, free entry at museums and special pop-up experiences across every major cities. All set up for the youth to play and enjoy.
In a country where it is usual that both parents work full-time jobs, Children’s Day also represents a very special family moment for bonding and fun together. Most parents take the day off and spoil their kids with treats, experiences and loads of presents!
Children’s Day also represents the single biggest toy shopping occasion in the Chinese market and the most important sales drive period for the year for the LEGO brand.
STRATEGY
China has one of the longest school days in the world. Students spend an average of 8.2 hours engaged in class and after-school tutoring. Children’s Day isn’t just a day to celebrate them — it is an excuse to be a kid and play!
This represented the first large-scale local campaign for the LEGO China team, so the pressure was on to cut through. But we knew that in a noisy time for the category, we needed to provide more than just marketing; we needed to give kids a mission to complete and reason to play.
Our call to action was simple: the bricks are missing and we need your help to find them or Children’s Day would surely be canceled. Find the bricks, Rebuild the City of Play.
RETAIL/ECOMMERCE
For parents, we took over high-traffic shopping areas and LEGO stores with our Children’s Day campaign visuals. We also partnered with JD.com for a Super Brand Day promotion that took over the popular ecommerce site for 24 hours. The partnership included interactive games and a stop-motion animation film depicting a JD delivery driver finding the bricks and saving Children’s Day.
DIGITAL
In the weeks leading up to the big day, we partnered with popular kids digital content platform, Tencent Video, to launch a pre-roll video that announced our mission. Kids could then click through on their device to an interactive HTML5 game that allowed them to “collect” the bricks in their room. Each player was rewarded with a coupon that could be redeemed for a free prize in-store.
EXPERIENTIAL
In three key strategic cities, we wanted to give both parents and kids something they could enjoy together. We built massive LEGO playgrounds in high-traffic shopping malls to help bring the Find the Bricks mission to life. Kids solved puzzles, completed hands-on building challenges and marveled over massive dioramas that showcased LEGO sets in a real city of play.
RESULTS
The campaign was successful in making a big impact during an extremely noisy time. Our video content cut through with a benchmark-beating 11.5% CTR. The digital game was played over four million times in the two weeks it was live and over 45,000 families visited our three events during the Children’s Day weekend. Overall sales crushed expectations and posted 33% growth over the previous year.
My role: lead campaign strategy, developed integrated connections plan, co-lead creative execution and served as a member of the core working group alongside brand managers and media partners.
Animation: M2Film (Denmark)