What you need to know:

• Lego global Chief Marketing & Product Officer Julia Goldin says brands, platforms must make metaverse safe for kids – or deny them their rights.
• She urges brands to build on its Web3 framework with Epic Games and to align with World Economic Forum initiative to create rules and governance.
• Lego continues to focus on DE&I, with more sets to come for all people.
• But struggling to find suitable materials to tackle its plastic problem.

Brands and platforms must act now to avoid the next version of the web repeating the anarchy of web one and two, or children will be denied the right to play safely, according to Lego global CMO, Julia Goldin.

“We want to protect children's rights to play. Kids are in digital spaces all the time. Whatever happens with the metaverse, they'll be there. The internet was not designed with safety of children in mind and right now, many places where they participate are not safe for them, where there could be predatory behaviour, issues with monetisation,” Goldin told Cannes.

“If protection comes last, children are denied the right to be in many spaces.”

Goldin urged those creating the metaverse to build-in safety by design. Lego in April inked a partnership with Epic Games to create a safety-first metaverse framework, “and we hope it will become more of a global framework that will help ensure that many more spaces for kids are created in the metaverse – or metaverses – of the future in a way that is easy for creators but also easy for parents to understand.”

Goldin was asked if building a safe web3 for consumers and brands is the next great challenge facing CMOs.

“It's a problem that is being much more widely recognised – and not just by CMOs and brands, it's also being recognised by industry and by technology platforms that will be driving the creation of web3 and these experiences,” said Goldin.

She pointed to the Metaverse Initiative by the World Economic Forum, which is attempting to create governance frameworks for web3.

“I'm participating in that as well as the COOs of big platforms like Microsoft, Google, Meta as well as brands and also smaller [technology development] players. That’s a very important step forward, because it's recognition of the fact that web1 and web2 were completely unregulated. Everyone created what they wanted. We ended up with everybody designing their own rules and that's why we inherited so many issues,” said Goldin.

“I think it is a responsibility of brands, but also the responsibility of big platforms, to come together to design something that is safe by design and has the right principles and frameworks in order to protect consumers, protect their rights, protect their privacy – protect them from all kinds of different things that are happening right now.”

She flagged another safety initiative called ‘Ritec’ that Lego is undertaking with Unicef. Ritec stands for 'responsible innovation technology for children'.

“The idea there is again to work more at a global level to design, to research and learn how kids will actually participate in some of these experiences that are being created and then figure out what that framework of safety needs to be,” said Goldin. “So there is a lot of work happening [on web3 frameworks] – we all need to play a part.”

Building diversity

Lego has deep commitments to DE&I within its product sets. “Children are born pure. They're super inclusive and they believe anything is possible for them. But society very quickly, starting with their parents, unfortunately starts to define what girls do and what boys do. We want to break that,” said Goldin.

Lego’s push for diversity within its product sets is also core to “super inclusive” marketing efforts.

“We are very lucky that we have our own in house agency and the agency works very closely with product and marketing development. They all sit in the same team and [with] my leadership team, and we audit everything that we do,” said Goldin.

The firm is aligned with the Geena Davis Institute on DE&I and has “audited every single campaign” as part of that work, said Goldin.

“We make sure that every campaign in front of the scenes, but also behind the scenes in terms of the makers of the campaign, is by the playbook of diversity and inclusivity. We break the stereotypes in terms of the different roles. We always feature representation from all kinds of different diversity standpoints, whether it's race, whether it's sexual orientation, makeup of families, or gender,” she added.

Next up, the toymaker is developing braille brick sets for blind kids, along with audio instructions, said Davis, with its current sets already including wider doors to accommodate wheelchairs. “We're also focusing on neuro-diversity, how we can actually help kids that are autistic or on the spectrum or dyslexic,” she added.

Meanwhile, Lego’s work with LGBTQIA+ communities continues with a new ‘A-Z of Awesome’ campaign.

“It's an alphabet program, but it's really to introduce a language because we realise that people don't have the same language to be able to understand LGBTQIA+ communities,” said Goldin. “So [we see it as] an opportunity to educate the world [so that] families, children, adults understand the same language, have the same understanding of each other.”

Sustainable bricks when?

Sustainability – or more broadly ESG – is another major challenge facing brands. Lego’s core product is plastic, producing upwards of 75 billion bricks each year. The firm has set itself a 2030 deadline to find an eco-friendly alternative, but though it has trialled using recycled plastic bottles, has so far failed to crack the conundrum.

“It's a very difficult thing to find a proper sustainable material that will deliver the same functionality, but we are very committed to finding one,” Goldin admitted. “In the meantime we're introducing new sustainable elements into Lego ‘system in play’, as we call it, all the time. We're also changing all of our internal packaging to paper by 2025 that will be a change that you'll start seeing next year.”

Either way, sustainability concerns do not yet appear to be hurting the brand. Lego sales jumped 27 per cent in 2021 and group revenues have doubled over the last seven years. The firm two weeks ago confirmed it will invest a billion dollars to build a new manufacturing plant in the US and increase capacity at its Mexico facility, with a new production facility also underway in Vietnam.

While the new sites are committed to carbon neutrality, that means tens of billions more plastic bricks every year.