Brick by brick / Despite being a digital experience Vidiyo remains rooted in the physical brick. As Rob Lowe, senior director of Lego Life, told us when we spoke with him about the toy maker’s social platform in 2017, the key objective for the brand is still ‘to get kids to play with bricks more, and in different ways’.
By combining physical and digital elements – referred to by the brand as ‘fluid play’ – Lego can keep bricks at its core while benefiting from the opportunity to offer an enhanced, interactive experience. The brand is also aligning with behaviour as children continue to ditch toys for touch screens. A 2020 report from RoosterMoney, for example, found that kids’ spending habits have shifted to digital experiences over the past year with online games Roblox and Fortnite taking the top spots.
This isn’t the first time Lego has adapted its core product for the digital world. Its Hidden Side collection, launched in July 2019, encouraged children to build a brick model of a haunted building and use an app to hunt and trap ghosts.
Content creators / By developing an app that allows kids to shoot, edit and share videos, the brand is also tapping into the trend of content creation. Short-form video apps such as TikTok have proven to be popular among younger audiences. According to data accessed by the New York Times, the platform estimates that more than 18 million of its US users are under the age of 14, while another study suggests that children now spend an average of 85 minutes a day on the app. TikTok technically bans users under the age of 13, and has refined its content policies in recent years, but it remains largely unregulated. In 2020, the platform was accused of breaching child privacy regulations, with a group of advocates claiming that it had failed to ‘make reasonable efforts’ to attain parental consent and to protect children.
By comparison, children using Vidiyo can safely share their creations without worrying their parents. The app offers protection as it requires parental consent, uses external moderation, and guarantees to remove any content featuring ‘personally identifiable’ information.
Building a great partnership / Lego has a long history of leveraging partnerships and licences to create co-branded products, including its successful Star Wars range, which helped the brand record its ‘best year ever’ in 2015, with revenue up 25% from the previous year. This partnership can benefit the Danish toy brand by allowing access to a huge back catalogue of music as well as new releases to keep children entertained and the experience feeling fresh, while Universal Music can take advantage from the opportunity to engage a young group of fans.
