Lego makes ad for girls that girls might actually like
Gone is the patronizing pink twaddle as Lego releases an ad that celebrates the relationship between girls, their mothers and their imaginations.
Lego used to think that girls just like pink.
The Harvard Business Review put this down to the company's management team, which largely consisted of people known as men.
Suddenly, though, Lego seems to have considered that women might be people too. It's recently released an ad that is very light on pink and pleasingly heavy on something akin to enlightenment.
In it, a girl speaks to her unseen mother: "I don't always want you to help me."
Girls want to figure things out on their own. They want to exercise their independence, their imagination and their ingenuity.
That's what Lego is for.
This girl doesn't want to be just another girly-girl who wears a dress and marries an investment banker.
Instead, this girl wants to be herself -- mistakes, whims, failed attempts at building things and all. Because only then does she feel she can truly make her mother proud.
Adweek speculates that Lego has been forced to wake up because of new entrants such as Goldiblox, which has taken to the Barbiefication of toys with a pickax.
Still, when you're an enormous global brand, it's worth alerting yourself to the realities of modern life before it's too late.