LEGO The Hobbit Board Game TV Commercial - past 2 weeks About LEGO The Hobbit Board Game TV Commercial Build and play the LEGO Hobbit Board Game for an adventure you'll never forget. Find the hiding dwarves in Hobbiton to collect rewards to win the game. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest LEGO Hobbit Board Game We’ll give you a glimpse of more of our powerful real-time ad analytics. Ready for the big time? Request a trial of the iSpot TV Ad Analytics platform. You've hit your data view limit. Time to upgrade to the full iSpot TV Ad Analytics platform. At least one social/website link containing a recent photo of the actor. Submissions without photos may not be accepted. Voice over actors: provide a link to your professional website containing your reel. Submit ONCE per commercial, and allow 48 to 72 hours for your request to be processed. Your Email (used for confirmation)Creator: Harry Potter and the Chamber of SecretsLEGO City TV Commercial, 'Alarm'
About LEGO City TV Commercial, 'Alarm' This commercial shows the LEGO City board game. Build the board game and play as thieves or policemen. LEGO LEGO City Board GameFOR generations of American children and their parents, Legos were the ultimate do-it-yourself plaything. Little plastic bricks, with scant instructions, just add imagination.In a wired world, they would now seem the ultimate anachronism, the only click being the sound of blocks snapping together. This holiday season, though, Lego is again among the hottest brands, and not just for the blocks, but a raft of Lego-related video games, children’s books and a TV spinoff — many of which are hugely popular in their categories.In leading this revival of Lego, and creating a multimedia juggernaut, executives have shown great imagination. But some parents and researchers worry that the company’s gain has come at a cost to its tiny consumers: diminishing the demand for their imagination, the very element that made the Lego brand famous in the first place.
Even when actual bricks are involved, today’s construction sets are often tied to billion-dollar franchises like “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings” — and the story lines therein — and invite users to follow detailed directions, not construct their own creations from whole brick. It’s less open-ended, some parents and researchers say, and more like paint-by-numbers. “When I was a kid, you got a big box of bricks and that was it,” said Tracy Bagatelle-Black, 45, a public relations consultant in Santa Clarita, Calif., north of Los Angeles. “What stinks about Lego sets now is that they’re not imaginative at all.” Not that she can resist the hue and cry from her children. For Hanukkah, Molly, her 11-year-old daughter, got two Lego products, neither of them blocks; her son, Alex, 5, got even more, including a Lego Darth Vader Clock, a Lego board game, a Lego sticker book — at the top of his list — and a Lego “Ninjago” video game.Oh, yes, and he also got some traditional Legos, sort of: a Lego Super Hero Captain America and Lego Marvel Super Heroes set, both of which come with detailed instructions.
For their part, officials at Lego — a privately held, Denmark-based company — say their efforts in books, television and video games are still creatively minded and aimed at driving kids “back to the playroom.” According the company’s research, parents “don’t mind the video games, they don’t mind the books, they don’t mind the TV series because it’s intensifying their child’s desire to build,” said Michael McNally, the director of brand relations for Lego’s American operations, based in Enfield, Conn. “And they love watching their kids build.”And so does the Lego Group, which nearly melted down financially in the middle of the last decade, with layoffs and huge losses. The company has since turned things around, reporting a 17 percent increase in revenue in 2011, with product lines based on “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Harry Potter” performing “considerably above expectations.” “Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes,” for instance, was the No. 1 video game in June, selling 450,000 copies in the United States alone, according to NPD, a market research firm.
(Collectively, Lego brand games have been among the top five best-selling game franchises in each of the last five years, according to NPD.)Then there is Ninjago, with Lego figures as martial arts masters, which was the biggest launch in company history. The animated “Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu” series on the Cartoon Network ranked as one of the top cable shows in America last year among boys ages 2 to 11, according to the Nielsen Company, going toe to toe with the likes of SpongeBob SquarePants (which also has a Lego version). Of course, lots of toy companies have gone the multimedia route (see: Barbie). But for parents and some researchers, there’s a narrative twist with Lego, which engenders such good will from parents because of its education-centric reputation. It was, literally and proverbially, a building block. “Parents are confusing the brand with the product and, more important, what it delivers” said Dimitri Christakis, director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at the University of Washington, whose research focuses on the impact of interaction with various media on children’s brains.
Regarding the evolution from open-ended toys to multimedia and bricks with specific building plans, he added: “Depending on how far it goes, it could wind up, quite frankly, as the opposite of blocks.” Dr. Christakis led a study, recently published in The Journal of Pediatrics, that found evidence to suggest that when small children play with physical blocks, like traditional Legos, they are doing more to stimulate the release of chemicals in their brains associated with learning than when the children watch videos.Clifford Nass, a sociology professor at Stanford University who studies how people relate to the physical world versus the virtual world, said some essential qualities were lost when Lego became more like other toys. With some of the newer products, “You sit back and the Legos say, we will do the work,” he said. “The genius of Lego was, you had to do the work.” Learning about frustration, he said, “is a hugely important thing.”The book business has also been good to Lego.
In the week of Dec. 9, 4 of the top 10 children’s chapter books on the New York Times best-seller list were from Lego, including “The Lego Ideas Book,” which has been on the list for 32 weeks, and carries the tagline: “Unlock Your Imagination.” Simon Beecroft, publisher of the licensing division of DK Publishing, a division of Penguin Books, which published “The Lego Ideas Book,” said the brand was “associated with creativity and with the development of useful skills, building and thinking logically.”Mr. McNally, of Lego, also praises the books, including a series based on the characters from “Ninjago,” saying they encourage literacy in young Lego fans.“Is it better for them to read a classic Newbery medal book? “But the fact of the matter is, they are reading.” Lego loyalists — including AFOLs, or adult friends of Legos — are also quick to defend the company. Josh Wedin, the managing editor of the Brothers Brick, a Lego blog, called complaints that they were less creative “simply ridiculous,” saying Legos had always included some instructions, though he said he missed the alternative designs that used to be on the back of the box.