This paragraph from the article represents all that I feel about the rise of anti-marketing marketing, but couldn't articulate:
> It’s a counterintuitive sleight of hand: By acknowledging that their central message is unbelievable or at least exaggerated, the branding masterminds gain our trust and bolster our faith in the brand. Will Ferrell, for example, promoted “Anchorman II” and Dodge at the same time by appearing on talk shows as Ron Burgundy and declaring that Dodge’s cars were “terrible.” Dodge sales spiked. (Ferrell also voices President Business.) In New Zealand, Burger King ran YouTube ads of two guys eating Burger King while complaining about YouTube ads. Nearly every Super Bowl ad this year referred to the fact that it was a Super Bowl ad. The brand — and the TV ad, the movie and the fictional spokesman — is hyperaware of its own fictionality and thus earns the right to simultaneously denigrate and elevate itself as divine.
This is the exact problem I have with shows like Jon Stewart and Colbert: when they can make you laugh at all the corrupt shenanigans in politics and government; it diffuses the actual need to do anything about it. It creates a false sense of superiority in the viewers whereby they think "I'm so smart to recognize how corrupt the government is! Ha ha" and then people go on about their lives not changing anything because anger has now become nil via humor.
It's not just the inaction, I despise the subtler shenanigans, which is the tremendous influence of using humor to establish truth or falsehood. "Well it's funny and I'm hilariously entertained, so their message must be true!"
Humor is a great wrapper for the sour pill of deception. At first our conscience might reflect on the acidity, but given enough exposure, eventually the mind will heartily consume the sour pill as if it was the sweet truth all along.
We're firmly at a point in society where truth is not often established by a hard and uncomfortable examination of facts, but whether or not we feel comfortable and entertained by whatever thoughts are presented before our minds. Feelings rule supreme over facts in this country, by far.
Does it make me feel good? / Does it make me feel bad? / Do what makes you happy. -- Just a few of the feeling-oriented mantras society uses for decision making.
Some years ago I wrote up a pretty lengthy piece about how emotional manipulation is the core of all television programming -- I think it was on Kuro5hin.. but I can't seem to find it any more....
Humans who are (intentionally) not taught how to think critically are easily manipulated via their emotions.
Anyone who thinks that there is not a war on your conscious, fought through your pavlovian emotional responses has not been paying close enough attention to the world around them.
Humans ... are easily manipulated via their emotions.
Definitely agree, probably easier to shorten it to that. We all have our blindspots where we're easily influenced, there's just too much daily data and information we vacuum up to even consciously process it all. Hopefully I didn't make myself out as somehow excluded from that aforementioned "society"
Our own personal "McDonald's of the Soul" as Jim Gaffigan says in his stand up.
Is it really that humour defuses anger in these cases, or is it perhaps that the humour is a way to highlight an issue to people who normally wouldn't care? Perhaps it says that something is now "so bad that it's funny"... and that now it's time to fix it before it becomes "so bad that it's just plain sad".
There's a (vitriolic) write up on "The Last Psychiatrist" blog which generalizes this to the idea of the "The Long Con" by discussing the Dove Beauty campaign [0]. It's a more thorough write-up, in part because The Last Psychiatrist says things the NYT can't, but also because they diverge off to examine why this marketing works and where else it's applied.
David Foster Wallace' piece on television and advertising might be interesting in this context. I don't have time to comment further right now, but here's a link. It's well worth a read:
http://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf
Sounds as if she started from the premise that corporations that earn millions (or billions? don't know) can never be good, then scrambled for evidence throughout the piece. Is there any reason to assume that LEGO is really evil? I for one am thankful for it's existence, because my kid is having a lot of fun with it.
Also, apparently LEGO is being held responsible for girls liking pink now. (Hint: pink is not the problem - girls want to signal they are girls, and by random chance pink got selected as a predominant signal).
I don't see that she stated outright or even implied that LEGO was evil, as such. Just an overpriced, indifferent corporate empire with brilliant, unnerving meta-marketing. I would say that meta-marketing is the focus of the article, with the LEGO movie merely being the centerpiece. And I'm really not sure where you got "apparently LEGO is being held responsible for girls liking pink now" - the only reference to pink was a quote from the movie in question.
Legos are manufactured to an incredibly high standard. Lego knock-offs just aren't the same; they don't snap together and stay together as well, and they are easily deformed.
Source: I was a child once.
Later on, I learned Lego manufacturing tolerances are measured in micrometers.
I didn't call them overpriced, she did. I was about to defend her by noting the massively increased price of LEGO sets over the past few decades versus the (I would assume) relatively static economics of manufacturing plastic bricks - but then I googled it and it's all a lie[1]. Guess I'll file that one next to "there were more thunderstorms when I was a kid".
This is so true, my parents have my 35 year old Lego that my children were still playing with until quite recently. Apart from a few odd pieces it's all as good as new.
Legos are priced at what people are willing to pay for them. If they were overpriced they would not sell and there would be no Legos. Maybe you are suggesting that Legos should be cheaper because the material cost do not justify the prices you see, well again, Legos are priced at what they sell at and clearly people have voted with their wallets and have said that Legos are worth greater than the sum of their parts. It would be a disservice to Lego's investors to price them in accordance with the wishes of people who think everything should be accessible to everyone. For-profit companies should responsibly capture all the value they can.
No, there are clearly real problems with market based economies and issues of social responsibility. Selling plastic block toys, for which there are cheap enough alternatives, doesn't really seem to fit in this picture though.
Your original comment basically just stated the same tautology four different ways, as if it were the last word on the matter. Besides judging the large-scale results of the system (eg your reference to 'social responsibility'), we're also entitled to judge the small-scale details vis-a-vis our own heuristics, even when they are at odds with a market's state.
I'm not sure I understand what your point is. I explained why Legos are not overpriced, and made some probably unnecessary judgement statements about why people would call it overpriced. I didn't say Legos are not overpriced because they are not overpriced, I said they're not overpriced because their products are selling. Where is the tautology?
Your original comment is basically just different ways of saying that Legos are priced appropriately because Legos are selling, and Legos are selling because they're priced appropriately. While this is the extent of the analysis in terms of simple market mechanics, your main point seems to be to insist that the only way to judge pricing is how the market responds. This is in fact trivially wrong because any market is in fact a sum of individual actors who each form their own judgment.
The net effect of your comment is to further confuse the distinction between what is expedient/existing and what is right, and to discourage people from developing an independent sense of the latter (in the same vein as "might makes right" and "technological determinism").
It's a basic tenet of consensual transactions, which you allude to:
> people have voted with their wallets and have said that Legos are worth greater than the sum of their parts
Also,
> Legos are priced at what they sell at"
If you're taking issue that it's not a direct iron-clad "tautology", then please insert whatever less-stringent term you please that indicates circular reasoning by which a process supposedly justifies itself.
> people have voted with their wallets and have said that Legos are worth greater than the sum of their parts
That's half a quote. The point you misquoted was very specific, regarding Legos being priced higher than their material costs works, because people value Legos for more than the plastic they're made with. That's not a tautology, that's a simple observation. This is without a doubt the worst conversation I've ever had about Legos.
I said "allude to", which still applies to your whole quote.
This "conversation" has been terrible because you've been nitpicking for seemingly its own sake, while completely ignoring any substance of what I've said.
No it doesn't apply, and thus the substance of whatever you've said doesn't appeal to me. It fails a heuristic of mine I'll call "throws out false accusations after misrepresenting what I've said".
If you don't believe that a product's price effects its sales, then you could have simply stated this several comments back, rather than role-playing a computer by placing critical importance on the form of my saying why I assumed you agreed with that widely-held belief. Then we could have actually talked about the actual non-meta issue.
Well there is a certain logic to markets. If LEGO is overpriced, a competitor should be able to offer a cheaper alternative. So if you claim LEGO is overpriced, you have to explain why no cheaper competitor emerged.
Maybe there are reasons (for example patents - but the competitor would not have to be the same kind of thing, just the same category).
I wonder how do you reason without the theory of markets? Serious question!
>Legos are priced at what people are willing to pay for them.
I wont argue with that. But you can raise prices by raising demand for your product. Perhaps by aggressively marketing (and meta-marketing) a movie based on your product...
There was a post on reddit a while ago from a former lego employee addressing why they are so expensive. It comes down to the fact that they don't want the bricks to be off by more than half a thousandth of an inch, so every brick can fit with every other brick ever made.
As a side point, I found the piece very well written. The author's biases are not hidden, while the analysis stays focused on objective points, which makes it very well balanced IMO.
She continues with references to the new LEGO girls world which has no fire fighters and so on. Admitted, she doesn't mention pink, but it has been a recent accusation that LEGO created that pink world without manly jobs in it.
If I wanted my daughters, or if they wanted, to play with LEGOs that had fire fighters then I would buy the sets that had fire fighters. I just don't bother to say that set is for boys while that set is for girls.
One of them loves Transformers and Ninjago, we get her those toys with no mention of boy versus girl toys.
I just don't understand what the problem is with needing specially made toys for girls to offset some perceived injustice when they can play with the boy toys just as well.
I personally think those complaints about female LEGo are ridiculous. I have half a mind to calculate how much it would cost to buy all LEGO kits that have no figurines at all - probably way more than any average family would ever spend on LEGO at all.
Also the question is how do you identify female LEGO figurines? If you add feminine traits like lipstick or long hair, aren't you cementing another stereotype? Or adding boobs - again you are exposing yourself to criticism. I'd say as long as it doesn't spot a beard, any LEGO figurine can be taken as male or female at wish.
I suspect the criticism assumes LEGO firefighters are male unless they wear lipstick, because I don't think all LEGO firefighters are bearded.
And, as you say, what is the problem of playing with a figurine of the opposite sex? We even bought our son a Playmobil horse with girl tender that came in a pink box. I have yet to notice any trauma it might have induced. Maybe the payback will be in 20 years when his psychotherapist will expose our deeds.
I don't see fire fighters or policemen or construction staff, so her statement (and other peoples argument) is valid. How to interpret this fact can be tricky, because there's still more variety than traditional 'girly' toys I think, but when contrasting this with the "City" line of toys (http://www.lego.com/en-us/city), the gender bias is blinding.
The Lego Friends theme doesn't have firefighters because it is focused on social relationships, not overcoming conflict. It doesn't have to be a girl vs boy thing (although it is undoubtedly targeted toward girls to compete with other non--confrontational toys that have proved popular with girls), it is just part of the theme. Ninjago doesn't have firefighters either.
I think it is great that Lego has developed a theme that isn't focused on physical confrontation. I have three girls who play with Lego and they request a mix of sets. For Christmas, they requested sets from Friends, Lord of the Rings, and Ninjago. My four year old got a Chima set. They don't see it as a girl vs boy thing.
I'm not convinced on the marketing part. How is a lifeguard post or a ranch more social and less conflicting than firefighters or construction workers ?
Now, if I was heavily into buying Lego bricks, I'd also mix from the different sets to have more situations, and my kid doesn't really care if his toys are action figures or dolls.
I don't think "social" is the selling point. If I just look at "all buildings", only very few of them seem to be about actual work. It's more about having fun in exclusive locations with loving animals.
How is that a valid criticism? It doesn't have firefighters because it is about other things. It's valid in the same way as complaining that a set about fire fighters doesn't have any police men.
Please show me what makes the actual firefighters and policemen "male"? I see some figurines with beards, but many without beards - they could be any gender.
Also never mind the fact that including many female fire fighters would be a lie, because the real world isn't really like that.
Girls were transferred over to the girls magazine automatically.
The girls magazine has much fewer build instructions for different projects.
Offering two different magazines is fine - here's detailed builds and new kit information; here's a social stuff mag. But automatically offering one to girls and the other to boys is weird.
Difficult move. However, how else could they have pulled of the separation into two magazines? If they didn't subscribe anyone to the new magazines, they might have failed?
I agree it could have been handled better. But what if girls actually prefer the girl's magazine? The PC assumptions seems to be to assume that girls only like what they are told to like, but what if there actually are differences in preferences, and marketing is simply reacting to it?
The article is not a justification; it's merely an exposition of the latest manipulation technique employed by them (and others).
It should be noted she never uses the word "evil" or any such synonym. The claim is that LEGO is an indifferent entity that tries to manipulate people into buying their stuff religiously, and the article demonstrates the latest form of such manipulation. Whether that's "evil" is left to you, even if the author clearly has an opinion on the subject.
She doesn't use the word "evil", but her language implies it. For example, near the top "that’s when those Danes have us in their whimsical Scandinavian clutches forever". So she evokes the image of LEGO being some entity with "clutches" - sounds pretty evil to me.
Seems the author is not beyond using manipulation either.
"The claim is that LEGO is an indifferent entity that tries to manipulate people into buying their stuff religiously"
Really - are they not just a company trying to sell it's products? It seems to me the way you or the author words it is simply reframing that as something negative.
If the brand is "creativity is good, and you can actually build whatever you want with LEGO, not just the Star Wars model the evil empire suggests", where exactly is the problem? I'm pretty fine with such a brand.
Maybe they simply like their own product, and the enthusiasm shows in the movie?
I am not a LEGO expert - I am waiting for somebody to tell me why they are supposedly evil, other than them being successful? I just don't like articles that sort of imply that somebody who is successful has to be evil. It's also banking on the envy we all have in us. Yes it feels good to read such an article, makes us feel better about our own mediocrity. In fact, it being in the NYT, that is probably exactly the point of it: it's OK to be mediocre and never try to change the status quo, as long as you keep reading the NYT and click on it's ads. You're a loser, but hey, you are a better person.
In the world of toys Lego is considerably less evil than many other companies.
Since HN is interested in companies and product development they might be interested in the book "The Real Toy Story". It's a cut throat industry.
I'm a bit sad about the rise of themed tie in kits. I'm a bit worried about the development of "girls kits" and "boys kits" - I don't mind them having different kits but they are undeniably gendering the kits rather than just offering choice.
It's great to see Lego doing well after a really rough time.
"whimsical Scandinavian clutches" does not sound very evil to me. It would have sounded more evil if she'd just said "clutches". A lot of the wording to me makes it sound light-hearted, rather than as any real criticism of LEGO. The kind of complaint lots of parents will make of them while still going to the LEGO store and getting just as excited as their kids about some new set or finding just the right bricks for some project.
So she evokes the image of LEGO being some entity with "clutches" - sounds pretty evil to me. Seems the author is not beyond using marketing ploys either.
Yes, the language is shaped by her opinion of LEGO, or more likely, of corporations in general. But she isn't making an y real effort to convince you; it's an assumed context. If you think that corporations are great, you're not really the intended reader.
Really - are they not just a company trying to sell it's products? It seems to me the way you or the author words it is simply reframing that as something negative.
It's not reframing unless one considers that in general, a company selling their products is a good thing. But even if one does, there's still an argument to be made about LEGO's (and other corporations') way of doing so.
If the brand is "creativity is good, and you can actually build whatever you want with LEGO, not just the Star Wars model the evil empire suggests", where exactly is the problem? I'm pretty fine with such a brand.
Well, for one, there's the question of whether LEGO's actions are coherent with that brand. If the Star Wars model is the product of an evil empire, why are they selling it? Her point is that such incoherent is not some marketing failure, but actually a deliberate way to fake credibility by attacking the company that it's promoting.
(Of course, even the core part "you can actually build whatever you want with LEGO" suggests that you need to buy their products to be creative. But that's what every company would claim, so that goes back to the issue of how you view the whole system.)
Maybe your politics are getting the best of you? Can't someone be against advertising and still enjoy the fruits of capitalism?
Personally, I hate ads. I hate being manipulated. And, I hate that corporations spend an insane amount of money every year just to get me to buy their stuff that I don't want - it just increases the price of the products that I do want.
I think facepalm is correct when saying the author implies something more than just hating ads, when she says "I should be taking them on a long hike or handing out aprons and baking cookies. But we aren’t doing those things; instead we spend our weekends hunched over expensive plastic bricks".
If the issue was just the ads, playing with the bricks themselves wouldn't necessarily be bad, but that's what she implies.
You left out a lot of context for that quote. Here's the full paragraph:
> No wonder I feel guilty as I’m driving my children to see “The Lego Movie.” I should be taking them on a long hike or handing out aprons and baking cookies. But we aren’t doing those things; instead we spend our weekends hunched over expensive plastic bricks, and now we’re going to watch them on the big screen. I have filled my daughters’ empty minds with a blind devotion to an indifferent commercial empire.
The issue isn't just the ads, or just the expensive bricks, it's how the two come together to form a feedback loop. The kids enjoy playing with legos, so they want to see the movie. They see the movie, which makes them want to buy more bricks. Lego Movie 2 comes out and the process repeats. The main thing the author seems to dislike is manipulation.
Ads are as likely to decrease the price of the product as increase it. Advertising leads to new customers which may lead to economies of scale that reduce the unit price enough to offset the ad outlay. In fact, if the company in question has to increase their prices to cover advertising, it's probably an irrational investment, unless the alternative is to go out of business, or they manage to drum up enough demand that the market bears a higher price. In the last case, competition is likely to bring the price to a reasonable level.
To a certain extent, I used to feel that way too. But now I have to ask 'why waste your time hateingthe ads?'
Sure they could be better or more entertaining. But most ads are easily recognizable and easily ignored. As much as I get a similar reaction to being manipulated once I recognize the manipulation I can use the info for my advantage or to move on.
Maybe this is naive but without advertising how robust would the worlds economy be?
Is there any reason to assume that LEGO is really evil? I for one am thankful for it's existence, because my kid is having a lot of fun with it.
LEGO is not alone in this regard, but they do create wants out of nothing.
So, you have a child, and this child is happy. Then the child sees a LEGO set, the child wants it, and now the child has an unsatisfied want. Child gets LEGO set, set satisfies synthetic want, child is happy again, and welfare returns to its original state.
Now, you might argue that there is a net increase in welfare from start to finish, since the child may have learned something new or acquired new experiences. Ok, sure, but after the 4th or 5th set, you are going to see some diminishing returns. And in this regard, LEGO's interests and your interests are opposed.
Have you played much with legos? If there is a point of diminishing returns, it is far after the 4th or 5th set. Every set linearly increases the number of things you can have built at one time (and yes, that matters), and generally introduces some unique pieces that increase the space of possible models. If it's true that newer models have dramatically less composable pieces, then my argument is weakened, but when I was a kid the only way my sister and I could have had too many legos was if they didn't fit in my room anymore.
As for creating wants ex nihilo, well, yeah, but only to the extent that it's true of any company that advertises at all. Entertainment and creation come right after food on a child's list of priorities, sometimes before; generally this is not a synthetic want. I'd rather know about good products like lego than take whatever dreck I stumble upon.
If the alternatives are Hasbro and Mattel, I'm actually quite happy with Lego being so big.
As for the pink lego, there are balancing up and downsides there. I totally hate the gendered toy segregation, and Lego now goes along with it. But Lego didn't cause it, and by doing it too, they're probably getting more Lego in the hands of girls, which I consider a good thing.
So do something bad in order to achieve something good, or refuse the bad and thereby end up reinforcing it? By not having pink Lego, they'd unintentionally make Lego a boys-only toy. By making gender specific lego, they make lego a toy for everyone again (which it was before this stupid pink rash took over the toy industry).
This article reminded me of how much things have changed since I was a child. I had a yellow Lego castle. There were no movie tie-ins. It was the archetypal medieval castle, enough to thrill the imagination. Then I thought of another childhood thrill: tinkering around on an Apple II+. In this case the transformation is even more obvious. What used to be a company that produced hobbyist equipment that booted into a BASIC programming language REPL now has deep ties to the entertainment industry and produces locked-down consumer devices.
You have to remember that Lego has two parallel businesses:
Box of bricks - the only thing they were when we were kids.
Models - when we were kids models required xacto knives and volatile glue. They don't make those models any more (at least they don't sell them in Target like they used to). Lego has taken over the modeling market, and I think in net their model products are superior.
You can still buy boxes of bricks, I do frequently for my Lego obsessed son. Unfortunately, in some respects, Lego is now more a modeling company than a box of bricks company. In other respects, I've seen it argued that the transition is the only thing that has kept Lego from shutting down, so the models enable boxes of bricks to still be sold.
I can't find the original article but this might explain the change.
The Lego business was on a serious decline a decade ago (2003ish) while it was still a family run business. They knew they needed to get out of "pure" Lego and diversify (licensing, older demos) but went about it the wrong way (trying to become a lifestyle brand). What we see today is a turnaround effort by brought-in CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp who figured out how to help the Lego brand adapt and survive the changes in the market, one major component being all of the tie-ins to the entertainment industry. [1]
Today, we're seeing a decline in toy sales due to video games [2], something which Lego seems to be ahead of the curve on as well. I'm just glad they still produce the Technics line.
Eh, you can still make programs for Apple computers. Sure you have to go disable GateKeeper or whatever garbage, but GCC is out there and there's way more available information now than there was for the Apple II. And that's just for system programming.
tl;dr: the author thinks the movie is about corporations and seeks for meta-buzzwords
The beginning of the movie (until the escape) is more of a double-reference to 1984 and A Brave New World. What comes next emphasizes more on the philosophy of Lego construction: combining and inventing instead of following the instructions. At no point in the movie the means of productions and the society based consumption are questioned. There is not even one clear reference to liberalism/communism (or such). Some satires do critic specific things (Starbucks), but that's it.
If you are looking for a hidden marketing message in a movie named "The Lego Movie", you probably have time to waste. I may sound a little aggressive but I was unnerved by the fact that the author consider plain activities as hiking or cooking as necessarily better than creative ones (well, maybe I do not identify sarcasm). I really don't get how playing with games from Lego can be such a bad thing: it's just a game, you are not locking them in some corporation's golden prison.
> I was unnerved by the fact that the author consider plain activities as hiking or cooking as necessarily better than creative ones
Cooking involves just as much creativity as Lego, it's a useful skill, and it's not governed by one massive corporate entity. "Better" is a subjective word, but those are some nice qualities.
If you think cooking isn't creative, you probably can't cook beyond "don't put spoons in the science oven" and don't eat very well. Cooking as creativity can run the gamut from simple games for toddlers to fine art that rivals any other art form.
I find cooking to be the kind of artistic challenge that pits imagination and experience against a physical reality totally unforgiving of ignorance and mistakes - much like writing software or playing music. It's like sculpture and chemistry that you can eat!
Are you saying that a movie where the villain is a character called Lord Business, and who is the president of the country and CEO of the largest corporation that makes all history books, voting machines and owns all TV and radio has nothing to do with corporations?
In the mid 90s, I worked for a toy design startup making plastic parts. Think "Lego + N-scale trains". (It flopped.)
At the time, there were two awesome toy makers, with two very different strategies. Lego was open about their manufacturing, but would hide their designs. PlayMobile was very guarded about their manufacturing, but would happily preview the designs.
Methinks Lego deterred competition by showing just how hard it was to compete on quality, PlayMobile competed by making plastic parts more cost effectively than anyone else.
We play tested everything we could. Made me a toy snob. Sad, I know. Little Tikes and Duplo are the best bang for the buck for their target age group. I snear at Brio, Tonka, MegaBlocks, and many others.
My son has lots of LEGO and the occasional little set from some other sources. It's sad - most of the "inferior" bricks stand out like sore thumbs. You can spot individual bricks in a sea of LEGO from a decent distance because of the difference in quality of edges etc.
The only Lego-compatible brand I've come across approaching them in quality are Kre-O.
I grew up with Lego. I love Lego -- the older stuff anyway; the newer bricks are too specialised -- and what's amazing about Lego is that it is almost impossible to destroy a Lego brick. I still have all my old Lego and all of my dads' Lego from when he was a kid. They do get a bit grimey and dirty after a while -- thankfully they're easy to clean in sudsy water and they'll look good as new, even 40 years later.
Buy it once and give it to your kids' kids one day.
They have reverted some of their more overt specialisation in more recent years and brought back some of the more "classical" elements, like the translucent "lights" etc., alongside new bricks that can be used in many different ways (and some of which I wish I could have had when I was a child). There was a period where everything was pre-made, pre-printed and almost monolithic, with single-purpose blocks, but most of that seems to be gone.
Additionally, their Creator sets actively encourage multi-purpose bricks since the box itself already gives you 3 different models you can build out of the contained bricks, plus the endless possibilities of your inventions.
Thanks for the tip on the Creator sets, I visited my local games store recently but did not see these. Just bought a couple sets on Amazon... now I have Lego again (in a few days)! :D
I could be totally wrong but I think she dislikes herself more than LEGO. She too easily gives in to simple marketing to do things she feels she should not be doing, she buys things she shouldn't be buying, and doesn't the spend the kind of time with her kids she feels would be best. LEGO is a scapegoat for her own perceived failings with her kids.
I bet her kids would disagree. After all, they are just kids playing with kid toys.
I saw the LEGO movie, I thought it was really good. It's a good story about being yourself, being creative, and standing up for what you feel is right. I saw the movie with my children and none of us felt the need to suddenly go buy LEGOs afterwards. We didn't see the movie as a big infomercial, it's just a movie for gosh sakes. An enjoyable one at that.
Every movie that resulted in retail items selling big was not necessarily intended to be an infomercial. And the movies that were? So what?
As for her complaint about the girl sets not having fire fighters, why not buy the sets that have fire fighters? If she only buys the sets supposedly made only for girls then who is at fault with that?
I would say more that it more influences than affects.
But realizing that influence goes a long way in denying it. If the movie was made for that specific purpose then I would have to say I am the special because as I said elsewhere, I don't feel the need to purchase LEGOs after seeing the movie.
I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one. After all, my children who saw the movie have not started asking for LEGOs.
I would say influencing is one way of affecting. Marketing and branding are far more than simply converting purchases. Despite me trying to remain self-aware, I undoubtedly have stronger positive mental associations for Lego related things after watching the movie. I would be surprised if you didn't also, regardless of your lack of intent to purchase :)
And it was most definitely quite fun, both on a surface level and for sparking discussions like these. They did quite an impressive job.
Well, I guess I can't necessarily disagree since your explanation requires admitting things that cannot be proven. I can say that I don't "feel" more inclined to purchase LEGOs, movie or not, then before. I see lots of the Ninjago show on Netflix because my daughter likes it, but I don't buy them that often and she doesn't ask for them.
I guess I would say that any positive mental associations I have is for the entertainment factor as I liked the movie and the Ninjago show. It certainly hasn't resulted in a positive enough influence to make purchases. That's the focus of my comments, that the article that started this discussion seems off to me because it suggests that the LEGO movie is just a huge branding effort to convince people they must buy LEGOs. Your comments are much softer than that viewpoint so I think I'd be more agreeable to your viewpoint than the article's.
Isn't "meta" the keyword of the 21st century? I remember reading articles about "meta modernism" being the thing we're in right now (after modernism, post modernism and post post modernism)- everywhere from art to culture to, as this article points out, advertising.
I'm waiting for a plane to take off right now and can't dig up articles, but maybe a more knowledgeable HN'er can fill in for me.
"meta" in art and literature was more of a 20th century thing, even an early 20th thing (as you can see in the work of the Avant-gardes) and you can find a lot of earlier examples, at least in literature, maybe most notably through books that experimented with diegesis.
I think it's just coming back in fashion in ways that are both a lot more naive (in their content and their approach) and more sophisticated (in their forms and that of the subcultures that they use as a substrate) than what the 20th saw.
I have difficulty distinguishing between what has been described to me as "meta-modernity" and what older textbooks describe as "eclectic post-modernism", and between that and what Orwell described as "double-think", albeit with more positive overtones (plus-good, not plus-bad).
I don't really think it's a separate phenomenon from post-modernity, more a natural emergent property of a post-modern culture, but I would add to that that I am not really knowledgeable in this area, just interested in contributing to the discussion and maybe getting some clarification & correction on my views.
Fraking books. I'm sure we all feel the guilt of letting our kids read books too early. Fiction, non-fiction, magazine, and gasp graphic novels. And the movie tie-ins, the fantasy worlds, the sci-fi realms. I knew as soon as I shared A Wrinkle in Time it was all over. Now they're reading everything and deep diving into over-consumption. Star Wars fiction, biographies, current events, and even internet sites.
Fiction is the worse. All the best books get made into movies that my boys have to see. Sometimes I wish I never picked up a book and instead took them on hikes and taught them to shoot guns.
Haven't seen the movie, don't watch TV so missed the marketing, but I have to say that Lego would have to do something SERIOUSLY wrong to cancel out the sum total of my positive childhood memories of their brand and product.
I mean, goddamn, I almost want to have a kid just so I can justify buying more Legos.
Nope. It only looks that way if you're buying one set.
The handles for lightsabers are also rooftop horns for big trucks, door handles, scepters, fence supports and robot arm extensions.
The mast of a pirate ship becomes the main barrel of a cannon, one of the pilings for a dock, and a barricade across a driveway.
The mixer of a concrete truck becomes a starship engine, a fuel tank, and the incubation chamber for your clone laboratory.
The pants of a minifigure are popular as fingers for giant robot hands. The single-piece LEGO cat is, admittedly, always a cat... but it can be chasing mice, sleeping, caged, a main character, a sidekick, a statue.
In fact, one of the things that sets Lego squarely apart from many of their "clones" is exactly how the LEGO "special pieces" are for the most part styled in ways that make them reusable. They're detailed "just enough" to play their part, and not so much that they are unmistakeable just one specific thing.
I dunno, my five-year-old son has no problem what-so-ever re-purposing those specific elements to be whatever he wants in completely different contexts. If anything, all the newer pieces seem to make Legos much more flexible than they were back in my day (the late 70s).
It certainly has been a good marketing move for Lego -- despite having more Legos than I ever had, he still wants more, more, more -- but in no way has it been a damper on creativity.
Well, true, no, I would always have loved to have a few more sets. :)
But I don't remember it ever being that big a deal; certainly when I had money, I rarely (if ever) spent it on Lego sets. On the other hand, it verges on all-consuming passion for my boy. (Complete with comments like "This set has a piece I don't have in it!")
That said, I absolutely love the creativity he shows playing with them.
I've been out of the Lego game for about a decade at this point, but it was very easy to re-purpose most "specialty" pieces. Depending on what type of things you wanted to build, it often would be preferrable to re-imagine a specialty piece because they often looked slicker/cooler than what a similar construction of generic bricks would look like.
> They implement total control by owning both sides of the spectrum.
I've seen this same view on politics as well. Yet just because Party A is trying out propaganda does not mean they have 'won control of the debate' and everyone else who was addressing the same topics is now quiet and sheepish.
In fact, you could say the idea that 'we talked about it, therefore our reponse reigns supreme' is part of the propaganda message---that because it is mentioned by a mainstream source, it has become mainstream belief by default.
Lego is what made me into a programmer, the idea of using my imagination to create things followed me into adulthood. I still remember old WWDC lunches where Apple supplied each table with a random collection of lego to create something and then displayed all of them (I think it was a contest). A room full of programmers hacking on lego using not just the pieces but anything handy including uneaten food and implements was pretty amazing.
> You can find successful television ads that mock TV-ad conventions almost anywhere you look, from Settlemeyer's Federal Express and Wendy's spots, with their wizened, sped-up burlesques of commercial characters, to those hip Doritos splices of commercial spokesmen and campy old clips of Beaver and Mr. Ed.
> Plus you can see this tactic of heaping scorn on pretensions to those old commercial virtues of authority and sincerity - thus (1) shielding the heaper of scorn from scorn and (2) congratulating the patron of scorn for rising above the mass of people who still fall for outmoded pretensions - employed to serious advantage on many of the television programs the commercials support. Show after show, for years now, has been either a self-acknowledged blank, visual, postmodern allusion- and attitude-fest,
"Legos" always sounded weird to me. Interestingly enough, LEGO used to have this on their site:
“The word LEGO is a brand name, and is very special to all of us in the LEGO Group Companies. We would sincerely like your help in keeping it special. Please always refer to our products as “LEGO bricks or toys” and not “LEGOS.” By doing so, you will be helping to protect and preserve a brand of which we are very proud, and that stands for quality the world over. Thank you!”
The idea that a legitimately great movie can't be based on a product doesn't make any sense to me. My reigning, hardly ever challenged, favorite movie of all time was based on a line of toys, and could have been called an advertisement. But if so it was an ad with a huge all-star cast, one of the greatest wall-to-wall soundtracks ever arranged, action unrelenting in its cadence, an epic reveal, and a great script with dozens of memorable one-liners. The fact that it was part of a larger mini-storm of culture that included selling toys... means what? Now I have to find room somewhere in my top 5 for The Lego Movie, because it was that good. What do I care that it was about a well-known toy? Why would I care whether it was good or bad for the line of toys? Why would I care whether the toy company influenced the script at all, when the script is that good?
You might not care, but many think it is a fascinating topic. It blends elememts of social science, economics, business strategy, and psychology in interesting ways. Marketing is very powerful, in ways we don't even fully understand.
I don't think The Lego Movie is 100% pure marketing, but it sure isn't 0%. They did a fantastic job with it however. It is the only branding effort I know of that has reached this level (which is a hard level to even describe, hence the struggle encountered by the author of the article). Has anyone heard of other high quality movies produced by product companies?
Awesome! I won't lie, it's my favorite movie too (perhaps there is a support group for us somewhere?). I also got a kick out of transformers prime. The megatron-starscream interactions were always hilarious.
SPOILER BELOW
And as someone who recently built a 4x8 table with a full sheet of plywood to build legos with my 4 year old son, I got a huge kick out of the end of the lego movie. It had some surprisingly dark scenes, but I didn't notice the product placement - but then again, legos were/are my favorite toy.
Why do people here sympathize with this movie? It starts out as an amusing corporate satire, but if you really follow the plot, it is disturbing on numerous levels:
- the consistent message provided by the hero, is that it's okay to be a cog in the machine
- the only save-the-day solution provided by the hero is to "follow instructions"
- all the creatives (the master builders) are captured and tortured
- Emmit saves the day by martyring himself in some bizarre Christian allegory where he ends up in the "real" world
- the psychopathic manager-type tyrant who rules the world and wants to freeze everyone is declared okay and special at the end
The psychopathic manager-type tyrant is brought over to the side of good when he changes his behavior due to a realization that he is hurting people with his actions. He becomes less selfish and more empathetic. He is not redeemed by believing in the power of a savior; if anything, it's a Buddhist tale, not a Christian one.
Also, Emmett is a cog who learns to be an individual. Two paths to the same goal, one from the enslaved worker and one from the slave-master.
Re "message provided by the hero, is that it's okay to be a cog in the machine."
Well that's kind of true to life - a lot of people do fine in regular corporate jobs and a lot of creative types have problems. Many of the best movies show some part the world that's mucked up eg. the top three movies on imdb are about a corrupt prison system and the mafia. You can like a movie without it saying everything is rainbows. Maybe that's why the Lego movie is more enjoyable for adults than most of the kiddie pap.
Actually I saw it as an allegory for Lego - the specialized sets with instructions to build one thing vs the older, more general blocks that (with imagination) you can use to build anything.
The Lego Movie inserted itself directly into my top five of all time. Every line of the script is brilliantly written, it is roll-on-the-ground hilarious, the comedic timing of the action is perfect, and it even hits philosophical points. It's like an older Pixar movie on speed.
However, I couldn't be less interested in what anybody thinks the 'message' is.
Remarkably, the Lego Movie is PG. I used this as the excuse to keep my wife from taking the kids. I'm a huge fan of the toys, less so of the advertising. I used Legos as building blocks to teach the kids letters. They build trucks, castles, and learn to count with them. I've even been to Legoland, which is great for kids.
To the point of the original post, it's just the branding and consumerism that's over the top. I can't wait for them to replace all the Lego Movie ads at the bus stops and train stations.
The Lego movie didn't strike me as hyper-consumerist, and I saw it twice. It mentioned a lot of sets but didn't promote collecting them or anything. I figure a lot of people will download the soundtrack, since it's pop electronica that also works as a hipster-ironic parody of itself.
What I got from the movie was a well-developed cynicism of authority. It wasn't nihilist, but very anarchic. The message I got was: have fun making things, but don't expect anyone else to respect or even understand them.
> It’s a counterintuitive sleight of hand: By acknowledging that their central message is unbelievable or at least exaggerated, the branding masterminds gain our trust and bolster our faith in the brand. Will Ferrell, for example, promoted “Anchorman II” and Dodge at the same time by appearing on talk shows as Ron Burgundy and declaring that Dodge’s cars were “terrible.” Dodge sales spiked. (Ferrell also voices President Business.) In New Zealand, Burger King ran YouTube ads of two guys eating Burger King while complaining about YouTube ads. Nearly every Super Bowl ad this year referred to the fact that it was a Super Bowl ad. The brand — and the TV ad, the movie and the fictional spokesman — is hyperaware of its own fictionality and thus earns the right to simultaneously denigrate and elevate itself as divine.