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Brilliant Print Ads For Lego
I just came across some truly awesome print ads for Lego. Found them on Tribble’s site. The work was done by FCB Johannesburg (after a cursory Google, I can’t even find a web site for them! A lot of mentions of them and these ads, but I’ll be damned if I can find their website! How weird for an ad agency to not have an obvious pretense on Google for a search of their name!)
Obviously the idea is to present Legos as a child sees them. I grew up thinking that Legos (and all the much less expensive varieties like LocBlocks, etc. that I was typically playing with as Legos were and are priced at a pretty steep premium and my folks didn’t have a ton of money) were basically the best toys a kid could have. I still remember creating my own little play computers, complete with plug in memory cards, folding screens, etc. In my mind, I can see a very direct connection between my playing with Legos as a kid, and my fascination with technology (both hardware and software). Building pretend portable computers out of Legos had to have some impace on my later attempt to design and market a tablet form-factor computer (I called it the X-Tend… There’s still a reliquary of my work on it buried deep in the catacombs of my company site). If only working on the X-Tend was as easy as working with Legos. But I digress.
Having a 16 month old boy now myself, I’m fairly adamant that he’s going to have lots of access to Legos. Hopefully he’ll take to them like I did. Without the blowing them up with fire crackers and using them as pop-up targets for my BB guns of course.. 
That said, I do have to voice an opinion that Lego has been making a pretty big mistake for last few years. They are producing way to many specialized kits that are loaded with overly specialized pieces. You buy a 150 piece kit and you can essentially make the two or three things on the box and that’s about it unless you combine it with three or four other kits.
All of those specialized pieces essentially for kids to think about them in only one way. With the “old” Legos, a simple 4×4 block could be anything. A head or a tail. Now they have pieces that are heads or tails, and it’s pretty hard to use them for anything other than what they actually are, and not what they could be.
Thankfully you can buy pretty much any combination of pieces from Lego directly, but I still think that all those pirate ships, Star Wars, and racing car kits lining the shelves of Target and Toys-R-Us are not really giving kids the true advantage that Legos really could be offering when it comes to priming the pump of a kids imagination.
Full Credits of the work (as far as I can tell):
- Agency: FCB Johannesburg
- Photographer: Gerard Turnely
- Director: Brett Morris
- Copywriter/Art Director: Lance Vining
- Art Director: Charles Foley
- Awards: Grand Prix-Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival
Tags:Advertising,imagination,legos,toys
Topics: Advertising, Business, Visual Art |
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