After a long ‘grey area’ phase, product placement has recently been regulated in Germany, banning it under some conditions, but also explicitly allowing it in most formats. In cinemas, product placement has always been legal, and still is. Branded entertainment as the creation of genuine entertaining content with an advertising background has never been restricted and still isn’t.

First, we transformed the Star Wars main theme into a matrix. Using this matrix as a blueprint, we built a Star Wars diorama onto the organ barrel. Over 20,000 LEGO bricks were arranged precisely in such a way that they touched mechanical levers, which struck the keys of a keyboard and played the Star Wars main theme.The challenge was to combine the structures’ musical requirements (to be positioned correspondingly to the multi-voice musical score) with a fascinating and detailed LEGO Star Wars landscape – consisting of the most iconic places (Hoth, Endor, Naboo and the Death Star) and scenarios from the Star Wars episodes.

At the first weekend, 60,000 people in cinemas were fascinated by the organ. Major cultural blogs from all over the world (eg. wired.com, huffingtonpost.com, engadget.com) reported about the organ, exciting the global Star Wars community as well as millions of other readers and leading all of them to the microsite. In one weekend, we gained more than 250,000 views on YouTube.

During the time of the promotion, 5 of the sets from the organ landed among the top 20 best-selling toys in Germany – making Star Wars the best-selling LEGO segment.