TV in the UK remains one of the most highly-regulated advertising markets in the world.

Product placement on TV remains off limits for many brands and for those that can, screen time is limited by a requirement to only appear when editorially justified. This over-regulation, combined with broadcasters’ protracted processes for commissioning programmes results in very few pieces of quality branded content being transmitted on TV.

In short, to achieve any sort of branded content on television is a monumental task for any brand to undertake.

That’s why for Warner Bros, we approached the problem from a different angle.

TV was still the perfect medium, but we looked to the ad-break rather than the programming to create a Branded Content event.

We collaborated with a number of other brands to ‘LEGO-fy’ their ADVERTISING in the run up to the launch of The LEGO Movie, giving each brand an association with the hottest movie release of the year-to-date and, in turn, making four well-known ads promotions for the movie.

All of this rolled up into a piece of content in its own right - a 3½ minute break entirely made of LEGO.

We approached and secured four LEGO-friendly brands – the British Heart Foundation (BHF), British Telecom, Confused.com (an insurance aggregator) and Premier Inn hotels - and remade the familiar TV ads they had on air at the time in LEGO, interspersing the break with imagery of the movie’s characters and ending it with a trailer.

(N.B. Such was the appeal of this unprecedented idea that these four brands paid their own production and media costs to ensure they could be part of it. Warner Bros. did not pay for anything other than their own media costs.)

Managing the combination of four different brands whose original ads were created by four different ad agencies and bought by three media agencies, we sourced production companies to recreate the ads in LEGO and co-ordinated all of this into a single 3½ minute break, supporting it with a full PR launch and social media strategy.

6 Million people saw the LEGO break live on TV, and social media went into meltdown, leading to an additional 1 million seeking it out on YouTube

The movie smashed box office targets. Post-launch tracking indicated that the ad break influenced an incremental 5% of the opening week’s box office revenue, resulting in a Return on Marketing Investment of £5.96 for every £1 Warner Bros. spent.

And international market research company YouGov, described it as the best performing ad break they’ve ever measured with ‘enjoyment’ scores for the break outperforming the industry average by 14%