Somehow I missed this LEGO commercial from last year, but this week Facebook has been showing it to me daily. It’s a good commercial, but not a perfect commercial. The commercial shows a girl playing with LEGO sets as well as creating her own LEGO builds while integrating the creations with other types of play. I like the commercial a lot. The only real concern I have is that in the two separate scenes that show her playing with sets, both of the sets are Friends sets. I like how the commercial depicts the various ways to play with LEGO through building with instructions as well as free play, but I would have been happier if one of the sets was a LEGO City set or a Ninjago set (my new favorite line) or any set from the “blue” aisle. But, I do like seeing a girl playing and creating with general bricks.
Although I know it’s generally not a good idea to read the comments, I clicked on them because I’m curious how the general public’s view of the Friends and Elves lines might be shifting. In the past, those pink bricks have gotten a lot of hate, but I’m starting to see a lot of love for them in the adult fan world. The comments on this commercial from the Facebook post, mostly from parents, are closer to the comments I’m used to seeing. The commercial is a year old, but the comments I read were from the past few days. They run the typical gamut from “I love the pink” to “I hate the pink.” Many parents were discussing how their children love all the LEGO lines and integrate them in their play. But, then there was this comment:
“Why do you market so hard to girls? How about encouraging all children to have an imagination and show boys and girls playing together? Offensive commercial to boy moms.”
What? When has LEGO ever used the majority of their marketing budget to target girls? Never. That’s why people like commercials like this so much.
While I would be more than okay with a LEGO commercial showing both boys and girls playing with all of the LEGO bricks, comments like this miss the point. A few months ago, I would have written this person off as a troll, but as the Target fiasco showed me, some people actually think that any move toward equality for girls automatically means less equality for boys. Comments like this one are so disheartening, especially when I think about the huge difference between the number of available “girl” sets and the number of available “boy” sets. I really hate even making a distinction between the two, but if we are going to talk about how LEGO is marketing “so hard to girls,” then let’s make that distinction for just a moment. In my local Target, the LEGO for “girls” is still a couple of aisles over from the LEGO for “boys,” and it takes up half of one side of an aisle. The aisle for the “boys” takes up the entire aisle. Both sides. It’s pretty much the same story about my local Toys R Us except all the LEGO is together.
LEGO is already heavily marketed to boys. I’ve written about it over, and over, and over. And, yet, some still fear that any move LEGO makes to become more inclusive to girls means that suddenly the boys are completely left out. Thankfully, I haven’t been seeing this attitude in the adult fan community where the Friends and Elves sets are started to see a lot of love due to their increasingly cool designs. But, I can’t help but wonder how attitudes like the mother’s above will affect the kids in those households. How will the commenter’s son internalize his mother’s attitude? She’s basically telling her son that if girls gain an inch, he will lose a mile… but equality is not a zero sum game.
For comparison, here are some other recent LEGO commercials: seven new commercials for the Star Wars: The Force Awakens sets, LEGO Minecraft (with the addition, near the end of the commercial, of the female character Alex, and a LEGO City commercial.
