Shortly after the release of The Lego Movie (2014), more than one professional marketer went on record to say that it was the best piece of content marketing they’d seen in a long time.
Well, I finally saw the movie, and I don’t buy that claim. Why?
To be honest, I have a hunch it won’t pass a simple test — a test I’m calling “The Six Marks of Effective Content.”
And what exactly are those six marks? They are:
- A headline that instantly commands attention
- An opening that hooks your audience
- An element of education, inspiration, or entertainment
- A persuasive story
- A single, focused moral
- A well-crafted call to action
Seems easy enough to pass, but before we dive in, do me a favor if you have seen the movie: Think through how you would grade the movie based on these six marks. And then let’s see how we compare at the end. Cool?
Here we go.
1. A headline that instantly commands attention: A+
If we were to evaluate the title of the movie based on the four U’s of headline writing, The Lego Movie is a below-average headline:
- Is it useful? No.
- Is it urgent? No.
- Is it unique? Yes.
- Is it ultra-specific? Not really — all we know is that it’s a movie about Lego bricks.
A headline I would write for the movie using the four U’s might look something like:
- Soap Bubbles and 44 Other Surprising Things You Can Make with Lego Pieces
- The Fellowship of the Brick
- Lord Business Is No Megamind
However, the headline doesn’t have to do much because of the hefty value of its brand name. Except for space aliens, everybody knows what Lego bricks are.
See, The Lego Movie as a headline is equivalent to announcing “Free Money” or “Sex.” Few people need to be told the value proposition behind those headlines (that first headline was once used by a bank, the second one by a bookstore).
The creators of the movie didn’t have to be clever — just clear and concise.
That’s because we’ve all been waiting forever (whether or not we knew it) for a Lego movie. Just hearing those three words — The Lego Movie — made us all squirm in anticipation like a batch of soft, fluffy, yowling puppies.
But there is a lesson that shouldn’t be missed here: unless you have an A+ brand name, write magnetic headlines.
The movie seems to be off to a good start.
2. An opening that hooks your audience: A
The second mark of effective content is a strong introduction that immediately hooks your audience member — and keeps her reading or watching.
For your content, use short, engaging sentences that could:
- Tell a story.
- Ask a question.
- Share a metaphor, analogy, or simile.
- Invoke the mind’s eye.
- Quote a statistic.
The Lego Movie gets an A here because the movie grabs and keeps our attention when we meet the hero of the story, Emmet — an average guy who religiously follows an instruction booklet.
Then, his world is turned upside down. (I will stop there, for those who have not seen the movie.)
That’s the essence of a well-told story.
3. An element of education, inspiration, or entertainment: A
Effective content marketing educates, inspires, or entertains an audience.
A balanced piece of content will usually have a mix that is 40 percent education, 40 percent inspiration, and 20 percent entertainment:
- Educational content might teach people about a topic (What Is Content Marketing?), how to do something (A Brief Guide to Fixing Your Old, Neglected, and Broken Content), or warn them about potential risks (Digital Sharecropping: The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy).
- Inspirational content will cheer people on (The 7 Things Writers Need to Make a Living) or give them a swift kick in the rear (The Aggressive Work Ethic of Highly Creative People).
- Entertaining content aims to captivate and charm an audience, often with something silly (Why Copyblogger Is Killing Its Blog) or ominous (The Secret of Life).
So, how does The Lego Movie fare? It’s clearly full-scale entertainment, but there is an educational element, too: there is a time to follow rules, and there is a time to break them.
Ancient wisdom, if you think about it. The movie gets an A in this category.
4. A persuasive story: A
A captivating novel, movie, or TV series begins with a character in conflict, then amplifies that conflict so that life becomes miserable, and eventually ends in a satisfying resolution.
The same is true for your marketing story. You need a hero, a goal, an obstacle, a mentor, and a moral.
You can also use metaphors, case studies, examples, and other techniques to engage your audience and illustrate a point.
Of course the movie aces this one.
5. A single, focused moral: B
Yes, great content tells stories that show people just like you overcoming obstacles and attaining their goals. It shows how customers become better versions of themselves — how customers can overcome external and internal obstacles to gain what they’re searching for.
But great content also always states its purpose.
In the sea of distraction that is the web, don’t be afraid to spell it out. Be clear and direct. Clarity is golden.
Here are a few examples of morals in content marketing:
- In How to Earn $250 Per Hour As a Freelance Writer, Linda Formicelli focuses on five particular habits she uses to make good money freelancing as a copywriter, but her article’s moral is about urging writers to not “compete in a race to the bottom of the barrel for el cheap-o clients.”
- In How to Write 16 Knockout Articles When You Only Have One Wimpy Idea, Stefanie Flaxman summarizes the moral, “build your own blogging arena,” after her list of 16 ideas.
- In How to Decide If You Should Go Wide or Deep with Your Content, Jon Nastor ends his article with this moral: “Your goal is to either find new audience members or form deeper connections with existing audience members.”
So, how did The Lego Movie do?
While the message wasn’t necessarily direct, it certainly was clear: You are special. Believe in yourself.
That’s certainly a moral, but I think it’s a lame one because when everyone is special, aren’t we all really just average then? 😀
6. A well-crafted call to action (CTA): F
Every piece of content has one goal: to get people to act. You might want them to:
- Sign up for a content library.
- Subscribe to an email newsletter.
- Start a free trial.
- Download an app.
- Buy a product.
This is where The Lego Movie fails — as a piece of content marketing. And I’m sure the film’s creators don’t care because their primary goal was to make an entertaining movie, not push more Lego products.
Content marketers may occasionally create content that is sheer entertainment without a CTA — but for the most part, when you market your business or ideas, your goal is to get people to act.
The best way to get people to act is to tell them what to do. Forget the CTA and you fail. Simple as that.
Final results
Okay, so the movie scored better than I thought it would on this little test. You’d think it didn’t really stand a chance since I created the rules, but it got five good marks out of six!
I think the last poor mark is the most damaging one, though. If content marketing had been the movie’s main purpose, the execution was average at best.
Have you seen the movie? Did you think it was the best piece of content marketing you’ve ever seen?
What do you think of my six marks of effective content? Any you would add to the list? Subtract?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
Reader Comments (19)
Ah. I’m gonna be “that guy” aren’t I….
Ok.
Huge amount of flaws in this article. I think most of them are stemming from the fact you are taking the concepts of content marketing in online articles, and trying to apply that to a film. A film.
Your 6 questions are wrong for a film. These could apply to clikbait articles and content marketing a la buzzfeed, but this is a film. It does not follow the same rules. It would be like taking the rules for neighbourhood watch and applying them to the Navy Seals.
But Ok, let’s take those 6 questions… otherwise i’m just an idiot ranting:
– Headline “The Lego Movie”. No one has ever done this headline. No one. Immediately, you know what it is, how important it is (THE, the only one). A headline does not need to be “26 reasons…” for it to work for the product. I think the sole factor of whether this headline works would be, maybe, sales of tickets?
– An opening that hooks the audience: Did we watch the same film? Did you miss the entire first 10 minutes with the song everything is awesome ? It has 45Million non paid views on youtube as a result of the film. And that’s not counting the thousands of pieces of UGC created with that music. It was a building block of the film, on which people built some more. It did more than hook, it engaged and stimulated the audience to participate in the brand story.
– Education / Information Persuasive story: No one expected this from the film, but it delivered. So I concur that this was covered brilliantly.
I think I would roll up your point about moral in the above.
– A well crafted call to action. I think you missed the point, because you were focused on the structure of an article. The entire movie is a call to action for Lego. The title, the animation, the story, the moral, the music.
Just do a Google trends to see the impact the film had on search for “Buy Lego” and “Lego Shop”. Both of these were stagnating until 2014. Then their next xmas peak was roughly 20% above. So the call to action was incredibly strong, and worked really well for Lego.
Writing the above, I thought that maybe your 6 rules could apply, but for a trailer for the film. Not the film itself.
Sorry if I came across inconsiderate, I didn’t mean it, I am French.
Thanks Eloi, good input.
I’m digging these rules Demian.
I agree that the movie drops the ball (as content marketing) due to a lack of CTA. If you were in charge of correcting that problem, what kind of call to action do you think we be effective…without detracting from the entertainment value of the movie?
In other words, how would you sell Lego’s without the CTA just seeming tacked on to the end of the story?
*Also, I think we’re all special in different ways. That doesn’t necessarily make us all average. ?
Anthony, you’ll always be above average in my book. And I wouldn’t sell Legos. I’d send them online to play “The Lego Movie” game. There I’d sell them hard to buy more bricks. 😀
Hi Demian,
that was a very interesting take on it! I love these 6 marks and will definitely use them in the future.
As you explained, it looks like Lego successfully passed 5 out of 6 marks. And regarding the last one… Well, it depends on how you define ‘successful’ content marketing.
On the one hand, yes, you should finish with a strong, clear call-to-action. On the other hand, if you take Gary Vaynerchuk’s approach to content marketing (jab, jab, jab, right hook), this movie was probably the greatest and strongest jab that Lego has ever made.
It doesn’t explicitly ask the audience to go and buy lego, but the ending (father’s dialogue/reconciliation with his child) had a very strong subconscious message – Lego helps parents bond with their children.
And so if we look at the core audience of the movie, which was primarily dominated by children and their parents, I think the ending is spot on. I am sure there were many adults that left the movie and thought about buying some Lego, just so that they could spend more fun time with their little ones.
Which is why I’d give the 6 mark a solid “A” as well. 🙂
Adomas
Great thoughts, Adomas. Appreciate you sharing.
Love your writing, your points are valid, and I deeply respect your knowledge.
However, I disagree with you here on one key point.
It seems the analysis is mistaking the trees for the forest. The real formula of content marketing is traffic times conversion equals profit. Everything else mentioned is a detail on how to obtain that result.
So the only relevant question is whether or not the movie attracted traffic (A+) and converted that traffic into consumers (dunno the hard data, but my daughter did).
I would argue that The Lego Movie doesn’t even belong in the same conversation as the content marketing we are creating rules for.
Content marketing, as we see it, needs a call to action because it is free-to-consume, and serves another purpose. This type of content marketing functions like a TV commercial would have. Hooking the consumer, and driving them to make another, separate action.
In this case, The Lego movie was not free-to-consume. It was paid content, similar to a novel. There doesn’t need to be a call to action because the action of simply viewing the movie creates value for Lego.
If anything, this is product placement, or native advertising: a branding play. Placing your product within paid content of another kind in order to solidify brand loyalty with the audience of the film.
In this scenario, I would argue that The Lego Movie is the best piece of Native Advertising that I’ve ever seen.
Agreed. And don’t forget the fact that the movie racked in a whopping $468 million worldwide!
Which is a win for Warner Bros. who made the movie.
As a person who spent $100 on “Benny’s Spaceship Spaceship Spaceship” I think their call to action was subtle and persuasive.
Haha.
Demian,
I think these points are very strong and worthy of anyone’s time.
I would argue, however, that there’s no single way to do content marketing. It depends on your goals and on the context, on what it is you want to achieve and the channels through which you plan to do it.
I have my own checklist for creating content that includes the following:
Human Connection: Does it resonate, connect on a human level?
Inspiration: Does it inspire action? Unlock some potential in the reader? Lift them up? Empower them?
Business relevance: Does the content help my reader’s business? Does it help my own? What is the strategy?
Information: What does the reader take away? Does that create value for her? What can she doe after reading that she couldn’t do before?
Actually the checklist is much longer than these points but I think the point is that it depends on what you want to achieve and how you want to do it.
I think a move would necessarily work from a different set of requirements than what either of us has outlined.
Great insights as ever and good discussion, too.
Great checklist, Ken.
It’s funny to take advice from someone who makes grammar/lexical mistakes:
4. A persuasive story: A
Use can also use metaphors, case studies, examples, and other techniques to engage your audience and illustrate a point.
Lesson: Proofread!
Nevertheless, having not seen the film I think that probably the title misses something too.
I would probably add a subtitle to say that (from the description) it seems to be an adventure film.
Like the author wrote, the title should catch attention of the prospective viewer.
Moreover, the categories whether a film is of good value should not depend on delivering a moral.
I like the conclusion about the message:
“While the message wasn’t necessarily direct, it certainly was clear: You are special. Believe in yourself.
That’s certainly a moral, but I think it’s a lame one because when everyone is special, aren’t we all really just average then? ?”
Thanks for the catch Callum: corrected.
Aren’t you glad comments are back? 😉
I am. Weird, huh?
Great article Demian. Thanks for your time.
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