Copyfighter

The second photo (“It’s as one of a kind as she is”) is a new LEGO ad found in this month’s Real Simple. It’s a clear callback to the old “What it is is beautiful” ad that circulated around the web in recent years and seemed to represent a (perhaps imagined or idealized) bygone era of marketing where little girls were children, not toddlers in tiaras or trophy-wives-in-training.

I applaud this new ad from LEGO, but I have to ask: can you put out an ad like this one, and a television ad like this, for the same product? One insists that a girl can be anything she wants to be (“an explorer, a builder, a designer, a creator and an inventor”), the other tells girls that life is about hair styling, home decor, and cupcake baking. What’s the message?