LEGO® Minifigures - The LEGO Movie SeriesWarning!FIND MORE PRODUCTS LIKE THISMinifiguresTHE LEGO® MOVIE™Collect every mystery minifigure in The LEGO Movie Series!Unboxing and Building the LEGO Dimensions Wave 7.5 Sets!Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment has debuted the second batch of LEGO Dimensions Year 2 content, and sent along some of the new packs to us. You can see a full gallery of everything you’ll find with the new LEGO Dimensions Wave 7.5 sets, including the now available LEGO Batman Movie Story Pack, Knight Rider Fun Pack, and Excalibur Batman Fun Pack below! You can also watch the new LEGO Batman Movie gameplay trailer underneath!The future waves of LEGO Dimensions Year 2 sets will include The Goonies, Teen Titans Go!, LEGO City Undercover, The Powerpuff Girls, Beetlejuice and Harry Potter.All expansion packs provide players with continued compatibility to use everything from Waves 1-9 interchangeably, anywhere throughout the game. And no new starter pack is required, as all new packs will simply enhance the LEGO Dimensions Starter Pack game and work with the existing LEGO Toy Pad.Developed by TT Games and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, LEGO Dimensions is now available for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3, Xbox One and Xbox 360, and the Wii U system.
You can also check out a new trailer for the game’s latest addition of Battle Arenas below!Julian Guzman, 4, and his sister Maya Guzman, 7, look at toy reviewers on YouTube. Culver City Calif., Wednesday, December 17, 2014. (Stephen Carr / Staff Photographer) A pair of disembodied hands takes a scoop of Play Doh and rolls it into a ball as 4-year-old Julian and 7-year-old Maya Guzman gaze into their parents’ computer screen.The two siblings are watching a video by DisneyCollectorBR, currently the most popular channel on YouTube. DisneyCollectorBR is part of a growing YouTube genre known as “toy unboxing,” where toys are displayed, opened and played with in tight close-up with voice-over narration explaining how the toy works. “It’s like watching someone open a present,” the children’s mother, Kristin Guzman, said at her home in Culver City. “It’s the excitement of something new.” Guzman found it “a little strange” that adults were making toy videos for kids.
But she didn’t know that these adults (and kids) are making millions of dollars on ads and payments from toy companies.Of the five most popular YouTube channels, three are toy unboxers. , which tracks YouTube traffic.The views have attracted advertisers, which pay to run ads on the channel. They’ve also attracted toy companies eager to get their toys in front of the camera. The capricious nature of viral videos means toy unboxing may fade like a double rainbow, but it underscores the growing importance that YouTube plays in marketing toys to children.YouTube now reaches more young people than traditional television and accounts for about 20 percent of video ad revenues, or about $1.13 billion in 2014. That number is expected to grow by 50 percent in the next two years.Advertisers are following their audiences online, with digital ad spending expected to rise from a quarter to one-third of all ad spending by 2018, according to market research firm eMarketer. Most marketing dollars on YouTube go toward ads that run before a video plays.
But brands know that people often click past ads, look at other pages while the ad plays or simply tune out when they are directly marketed to. The most effective way to advertise a product is to put the product inside the video.By paying YouTube stars to implicitly or explicitly endorse their products, the content becomes the ad.“The brands have become smarter,” said Leo Kivijarv, a vice president at PQ Media, a research firm. “They’ve started integrating the product into the script.” Global product placement spending has grown 70 percent since 2009, to $10.5 billion, according to PQ Media figures.Product placement on digital media like YouTube represents about 5 percent of total spending, which is still dominated by television. But digital is the fastest growing segment of placement spending, with more than 25 percent growth.The Federal Trade Commission, a consumer advocacy group, encourages advertisers to tell audiences when brands have paid for content, but the FTC admittedly does not monitor YouTube and other social media.
In a 2013 interview with Newsweek, the father of the 8-year-old toy reviewer Evan from EvanTubeHD, whose 390 videos have received nearly 1 billion views, said the majority of Evan’s revenues come from advertisements that run before the videos.The most successful YouTube stars have contracts with talent management companies called multi-channel networks, or MCNs, which help creators grow their audience and negotiate deals with advertisers and brands.In the last year, Warner Bros., AT&T, Amazon and Food Network-parent Scripps Media have acquired or invested in the largest MCNs. Disney, which made a record $41 billion in toy licensing last year, paid nearly $1 billion in March to acquire Maker Studios, the MCN giant that represents EvanTubeHD.Branded entertainment, also known as content marketing, is when companies produce videos and other media that promote their brand. Saturday morning cartoons and films like “Transformers” and “The Lego Movie” are examples of branded entertainment.
YouTube has provided companies with an ideal platform for disseminating branded video content to potential customers. Brands typically pay to promote their videos at the beginning of a social marketing campaign. The hope is that viewers will share the video with their friends, helping the marketing message go viral. When Mattel built a series of life-size Hot Wheels cars that performed aerial stunts at the Indy 500 and the X Games, the videos were promoted on YouTube, where they garnered tens of millions of views.Another strategy involves partnering with popular YouTube stars with large followings. Mattel paid Devin Graham, the filmmaker behind the action sports YouTube channel DevinSuperTramp, to film a capture-the-flag battle in Panama that featured several slow-motion shots of Mattel’s BOOMco dart gun.The problem with this high-end content marketing is that it is expensive to produce. It is also difficult to track the financial impact of “impression-based” marketing. “Brand awareness is fine, but brand awareness needs to turn into sales,” said Chris Byrne, content director of the toy review site Time To Play Magazine.Damien Eley, founding partner and co-creative director at Mistress Creative, the Culver City agency that created the Hot Wheels For Real campaign, said the future of advertising will rely less on branded content per se, and more on the distribution channel.