What I find interesting in old magazine ads like this, is how much text they have, today probably no one would read all that text on an ad
Read Ogilvy on Advertising - makes you think all the (non copy filled) adverts of today are crazy. Copy works.
Lego’s 1981 Ad Campaign
101–110 of 146 posts
Re: Lego’s 1981 Ad Campaign
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, Lego still does. Mine just discovered them this past Christmas. They'll build them 5 times in a row and then trade with each other so they can build a new one. I tell ya, as much as I remember loving Legos when I was a kid, there is absolutely nothing as cool as building them with your own kids. Also, they still sell those big boxes of random pieces. I think it's called the "Classic" line or something like that.
Where did you get the idea that the toy is plural? It's not.
Probably no pedantic asshole corrected me when I was a kid and now it's a habit.
Re: Lego’s 1981 Ad Campaign
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's weird, I read about it really not long ago. Maybe they tried to delay things through legal means. That said yes, the LEGO company put a lot of thinking in their 'toys'. I think it's also the way things were done in those days, now it's all ship often, ship cheap.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lego_Group Heading 'trademarks and patents', the last patent expired in '89.
Aight, so I heard about the post 2000s lawsuits but didn't understand the grounds on which LEGO was able to sue.
Re: Lego’s 1981 Ad Campaign
#104Comments and picture of the girl as a grownup http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/girl-famous-1981-lego-ad-has-f...
Re: Lego’s 1981 Ad Campaign
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
While it may be the case that kids these days demand and get the kind of toys they want, it is also the case (at least in certain cultures) that parents obsess a lot on what kind of toys make their kids 'smarter', 'happier', etc. So, Lego could look at ads that target parents in some of their markets.
You think? Maybe they would hire you as a marketing consultant, because they probably never got round to thinking about that kind of thing. Not sure if "marketing" is even a thing in socialist countries like Denmark.
Denmark is not a socialist country, and they certainly have marketers, especially in multinational companies like Lego. In fact, their current CMO held the same position at Revlon before joining them.
Re: Lego’s 1981 Ad Campaign
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consumers could have demanded products without corn syrup in them. It turns out they don't care. If people did care, those other factors probably would have had to take a back seat to consumer demand. So I don't think you can say that it was irrelevant to the rise of HFCS. (You can argue that people are ill informed and blah blah blah, but that's still them not caring enough to demand whatever it is you think they sh…
People aren't just ill-informed - they live under a perpetual onslaught of advertising. Try taking away the advertising if you want to give people a free choice. Or balance it with an equivalent level of glossy but fact-based media persuasion about the true effects of HFCS, smoking, etc.
I don't understand what advertising has to do with HFCS.
Sure, Coke and Pepsi blast ads all the time, but do the arithmetic, they save a couple cents using HFCS over cane sugar. They aren't advertising to get people to accept HFCS, they are advertising to increase consumption of their sugared drinks. If there was reasonably widespread resistance to HFCS they would just switch.
(The arithmetic: there's about 1 pound of sugar in a 12 pack of coke. That's ~$0.50 of cost, max: http://www.sugaralliance.org/us-sugar-prices/. HFCS saves a lot of that cost, ~$0.40 of it: http://www.cornnaturally.com/pdf/hfcs-in-the-us.pdf . So a typical can of soda could use cane sugar for ~$0.03. Note that I've picked a hostile price for cane sugar.)
Re: Lego’s 1981 Ad Campaign
#107Anita Sarkeesian has a great couple of videos on Lego's transition from advertising like this, to advertising in a heavily gendered way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrmRxGLn0Bk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe65EGkB9kA
That person is irrelevant to the matter discussed here.
Re: Lego’s 1981 Ad Campaign
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, Lego still does. Mine just discovered them this past Christmas. They'll build them 5 times in a row and then trade with each other so they can build a new one. I tell ya, as much as I remember loving Legos when I was a kid, there is absolutely nothing as cool as building them with your own kids. Also, they still sell those big boxes of random pieces. I think it's called the "Classic" line or something like that.
Where did you get the idea that the toy is plural? It's not.
LEGO bricks are commonly called legos in the U.S. This is not a new development.
Re: Lego’s 1981 Ad Campaign
#109Back when we were kids there was only one type of Lego, the type that was meant for everybody. Now they have their own line for girls, Lego Friends. And Lego Friends is just stupid http://seasonaldepressioncomic.com/2014/12/06/lego-friends/
Maybe classic Lego was meant for everyone, but actually it has always been far more popular among boys. While the old sets may seem gender neutral on the surface, the appealed much more to boys than girls. Lego have made many misguided attempts to sell to girls, but the recent "Friends"-line is the first time Lego have succeed in capturing a significant market of girls.
I didn't do statistics, but at least I was fighting with my sister on who gets more Lego bricks to play with.
Re: Lego’s 1981 Ad Campaign
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
The pictures of only boys on the blue boxes and the pictures of only girls on the pink boxes is something that needs to be considered. I don't care if more boys buy guns and more girls buy toy horses. I do care if those toys are packaged in rigidly gendered packaging and stocked in gendered sections of the toy store.
I recently saw Nerf guns for girls in the store. While my children are not yet of Nerf gun age, I think the Nerf gun for girls might significantly increase the odds that one day I'll be able to have Nerf battles with her. So yay for that. I would probably first try with a "normal" Nerf gun, but if that doesn't stick, why not try the girl variant.
Nerf guns, or Nerf bows? I've seen a lot of girl-gendered bows lately, thanks to The Hunger Games, I guess.