Through New Year's Day, we'll be counting down the best brand campaigns and ideas of the year.

No. 21: It seemed that Lego had yet another moment in 2020. The brand continued its "Rebuild the World" campaign in 2020, a message that seemed particularly appropriate during a year filled with so many trials and so much strife. The brand's Christmas spot was fortuitously timely when it broke the week of the U.S. election. The holiday ad was the culmination of a superbly creative year for the company, punctuating the new social media platform, “Let’s Build Together,” designed to inspire locked-down families to make new Lego creations for improving the world in the pandemic. Some of these designs, such as a “Dream Hospital Treehouse” and a sustainable farm, were eventually showcased on a huge brick globe at its HQ in Denmark.

Original story:

Lego’s Christmas spot this year is a continuation of its “Rebuild the World” campaign, and while the ad doesn't reference the pandemic or other current events, it may provide a welcome escape from reality for stressed-out viewers.

The spot, created by the brick brand’s in-house agency the Lego Agency, is set to a re-write of Louis Armstrong classic “What a wonderful world,” substituting the lyric, “that’s a pretty cool world.”

Directed by The Bobbsey Twins From Homicide via Blink, it plays on the imagination of children and how they see whole worlds of possibility and storytelling in their Lego bricks. In their eyes, the world is filled with blue horses, “princess knights” slaying dragons, astronaut weddings and Storm Troopers on city streets. Throw in some bewildered adults and a nearly foul-mouthed grandma, and you get an film that combines humor, charm and a bit of seasonal magic.

The "Rebuild the World" campaign launched in 2019 with a spot by BETC, with the aim of getting consumers thinking about LEGO as a brand that stands for "creativity, resilience, problem-solving and making the world a better place." In some ways, there's never been a better time than Christmas 2020 for those values to resonate, and the spot may have viewers wishing they could “rebuild the world” too. 

The spot marks the culmination of superbly creative year for the brand. At the start of the pandemic it created a new social media platform, “Let’s Build Together,” designed to inspire locked-down families to make new Lego creations for improving the world; some of the designs, such as a “Dream Hospital Treehouse” and a sustainable farm, were eventually showcased on a huge brick globe at its HQ in Denmark.