Wonder

Research Outline

Prepared for Luke S. | Delivered August 14, 2019

Toy Companies Digital Marketing

Goals

To assist with structuring the digital marketing department at a toy company, understand how Lego, Hasbro, and MGA (LOL Surprise) structure their departments, the annual budget for content marketing, what platforms are used most often and with the most success, and any details on the ad agencies they work with.

Early Findings

LegoIn late 2017, AdWeek name Lego "the number one brand on Social Media and YouTube in the toy industry."
Lego has successfully gotten their customers to do some of their marketing. For every video the company uploads to YouTube, customers create and upload 20.
Lego created Lego Ideas to allow fans to suggest new building sets and vote on the suggestions of others. Lego believes that their customers are the most creative members of their marketing team.
For 2018, Lego spent DKK 10,740 million ($1.61 billion) on sales and distribution. In their annual report, the digital portion of this was not broken out.
 Julia Golden is the Chief Marketing Officer at Lego.
 Edelman Digital worked with Lego to create a chatbot that helped customers choose gifts.

HasbroHasbro Studios was launched in 2009 and is responsible for producing entertainment content based on the toys in Hasbro's portfolio.
The company has over 3.5 million subscribers to its YouTube Channel.
In 2017, Hasbro launched its first digital only series, “Hanazuki: Full of Treasures.” The series was put on YouTube Kids and then used ads on YouTube to target parents.

MGA (LOL Surprise)The LOL Surprise Doll came about because of the success of unboxing videos on YouTube. The company realized that if they could tap into what the kids were enjoying from the experience of unboxing (or watching someone unbox), they might have a hit. Since late 2016, LOL Surprise has sold over 800 million toys.
A search for Hasbro marketing on LinkedIn uncovered 303 people. However, in order to determine how many of those people are on the digital marketing team would require going through each profile as many of the titles do not have digital or content in the title. This would be very time-consuming.