Capturing the Spirit of Play: Marketing Effectiveness in Action at The LEGO Group
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At the Festival of Marketing 2025, Inés Nadal, Senior Director, Global Marketing Performance, The LEGO Group and Matt Andrew, General Manager & Partner at Ekimetrics, presented The LEGO Group’s journey to a strategic vision for global, unified Marketing Effectiveness.
Not only does The LEGO Group enjoy an amazing and unique ecosystem that few other brands can rival, its long history and continued brand extension continues to fuel growth. In 2024 revenues grew 13%, with sales up 12% and operating profit up 10%, despite an overall declining toy market.
It has numerous owned touchpoints, from the LEGO Play App to the LEGO print magazine and DUPLO World. It creates incredible entertainment content, like the Ninjago or DREAMZzz series on Netflix and YouTube, as well as the successful LEGO Master series. The brand is brought to life in LEGOLAND parks and stores, with millions of visitors enjoying experiences and products. And enjoys partnerships with the likes of Fortnite and Nike and franchises, such as LEGO Star Wars. All of which are designed to support long-term engagement and drive sales.
What’s more, The LEGO Group uses activations such as adding global celebrities such as Tom Holland to seasonal campaigns, long-form entertainment content on Netflix and its partnership with the Formula 1 Driver’s Parade at the Miami Grand Prix, creating a huge spike in PR, social and influencer attention.
To drive incremental business growth when both short- and long-term effects overlap, it is critical to understand how these huge cultural moments ladder up to commercial impact. But media mix modelling doesn’t typically isolate the impact of individual investments.
We’ve worked with The LEGO Group since 2023 to deliver a transformative, strategic vision for global, unified Marketing Effectiveness.
This has resulted in one of the most comprehensive measurement and effectiveness capabilities of any multinational business to consider the external and internal influences on performance. It means The LEGO Group can steer for long-term performance, ensuring their long-term bets are adequately funded and balancing and conducting the mix across channels, with the right levels of conversion activity to capture demand over the long-term and from the strength of the brand.
Learnings Along the Way
Inés shared five key learnings from this journey with the Festival of Marketing audience:
1. Find the right measurement partner – think true partnership and a common vision
2. Bring people on the journey with you – the journey isn’t to be underestimated, explain what to expect and how it will support decision-making
3. Don’t try to do everything on day one – don’t overestimate how much change an organisation can absorb at once
4. Have a clear roadmap for measurement innovation – think years ahead to avoid BAU taking over
5. Measure your impact – measurement is only as good as the decisions it drives.
The impact
“LEGO and Ekimetrics built a system that measured both short- and long-term brand effects across each channel and campaign, to work out their sales contributions. As a result the brand can optimize media budgets by reallocating spend away from underperforming channels, and determine what proportions of its marketing should be paid or earned. This has already led to double-digit media efficiency improvements.” Inés Nadal, Senior Director, Global Marketing Performance, The LEGO Group, as featured in Marketing Week.
