Cool Marketing Thoughts

The International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is marked every year on 21 March with activities led by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, New York and at the field-presences. This year’s theme WAS Fighting Everyday Racism. The campaign has been taken offline, due to critical voices worldwide who were first suggesting Lego is now a politically charged toy and next that the puzzle looked like Denmark. So… all PDF documents I linked to in the previous post have been pulled. You can’t download the campaign anymore. No more images are available on the website.

I didn’t know Denmark looked like this, and does this also mean that every kid in the world who enjoys playing with Lego now becomes a racist?

In fact we have to look at it this way: everybody who enjoys puzzles is a racist. And everybody who plays with Lego is a victim if I interpret the situation correctly. So, if you enjoy puzzling, I hate you. That would make me a racist too. So we’re all racists. Man, this campaign is confusing. (tip about the pull: Luc)

Or as the brand builder blog nicely puts it:

End-result:

1. Denmark gets slapped in the face (as if the Danes needed any more negative attention).
2. Lego is stoked to find itself directly associated with racism around the world. (What company woudn’t!)
3. The UN now has to go through the process of having its giant foot surgically extracted from its own big mouth… But it’s hard to admit having made an error when you can only speak in vowels.
4. Money well spent rocks my world.