Heads Up: Casting Shadows: LEGO's Silent Storytelling
The Brief: After years of declining sales through the early 2000s, LEGO needed a revitalised brand image that would remind consumers of the product's creative potential. The brief delivered to agency Blattner Brunner in 2009 was to reignite consumer imagination and reconnect people to LEGO's core message: the power of creativity and endless possibilities.
The Campaign: The "Shadow" campaign from LEGO was a beautifully minimalistic and highly creative campaign crafted by Blattner Brunner. This ad series creatively showed simple LEGO brick structures casting shadows of well-known images—like a ship or a dinosaur—using only shadow and imagination to convey the endless possibilities LEGO offers for creative play.
This campaign became a symbolic turning point. It aligned perfectly with LEGO's rebranding focus on imagination, simplicity, and storytelling, which eventually contributed to LEGO’s major comeback and growth. The campaign’s impact was significant in reinforcing LEGO's core message that these simple blocks could become anything a child imagines—no words were needed to convey this idea, just the visual of the bricks and their shadows. This brilliant approach helped LEGO regain relevance by resonating with audiences on a deeply nostalgic and imaginative level.
Today, LEGO's annual revenue is nearly double that of its competitors, partly thanks to strategic marketing campaigns like Shadow.
Why does it stand out?
➡ The message is clearly expressed in a way that delights you as you work it out.
➡ It is so well crafted as to not rely on any words or messaging, just one simple idea.
➡ It hangs on a deeper understanding of the audience (what will inspire them) with a ‘show don’t tell’ approach.
How often do we communicate so clearly that we don’t need words? Are we asking people to spend a lot of time with us, to hear us out as we explain in detail our issues with factory farming. Maybe there are messages that we can communicate without words that would have a strong emotional resonance. (I’m imagining an image of a chicken burger that is casting a shadow of a sick fast grown broiler.)
Heads Up Challenge: Think what can we say using only an image, no words?
(Copy the below into a working document that you can use for the challenge each week)
Think of a simple message you want to convey, ‘say it’ with only a powerful image, no words.
Your Brief:
Idea 1:
Idea 2:
Idea 3:
Set aside a weekly 15 minute slot to complete these weekly creative tasks and why not schedule a call with others on your team to talk through your thoughts on this topic and share ideas for you to try out?
Heads Up is a weekly creative digest that encourages animal advocates to take inspiration from case studies of creative campaign tactics outside of our movement.
> ~ 5 minutes read-time (but hopefully gets you thinking for longer than that)
> Demonstrates interesting tactics and use of biases that you can test
> Contains a creative challenge for you to explore independently or with your team with results that you can apply for your important campaigning work
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Open call: We’d like to extend an open call for guest writers to Heads Up. We’re particularly keen to capture great work from wider than our own global west lens. Have you seen some great ads or tactics that would make for an interesting Heads Up edition? We’d love to hear from you. If you’ve got an idea, get in touch at Letstalk@userfriendly.org.uk