If you have played and owned a LEGO set before, you will know that it matters not what age you were when you started playing with it. The experience will always leave a satisfying, gender-less and creative imprint in your brain.
This is what a LEGO endorser 33 years ago who started as 4-year old model with pigtails and baggy jeans will tell you.
Back in 1981, Rachel Giordano was the toy manufacturer’s public face and starred in a very iconic LEGO ad – in a time when toys did not yet scream pink or blue. Today she's a 37-year-old doctor (still with thick red hair and a proud grin), recreating her ad to send the message that creativity is not a boy thing or a girl thing.
Last month, when HuffPost Parents resurfaced the 1981 ad as an example of what toy advertising should be, it was popping up all over social media. Educational psychologist, parenting coach and HuffPost blogger Lori Day saw it shared numerous times on her Facebook page, which is how she found out that the little girl in the ad was now the all-grown-up friend of a friend.
Day contacted Giordano and asked her opinion of the change in advertising to children over the past three decades, then wrote about their conversation for the website Women You Should Know.
"In 1981, LEGOs were simple and gender-neutral, and the creativity of the child produced the message," Giordano told her. " In 2014, it’s the reverse: the toy delivers a message to the child, and this message is weirdly about gender.”
Specifically, Giordano was talking about set from the new LEGO Friends line that was made specifically for girls – a very pink news van marketed with this description: "Break the big story of the world’s best cake with the Heartlake News Van!"
This is what a LEGO endorser 33 years ago who started as 4-year old model with pigtails and baggy jeans will tell you.
Back in 1981, Rachel Giordano was the toy manufacturer’s public face and starred in a very iconic LEGO ad – in a time when toys did not yet scream pink or blue. Today she's a 37-year-old doctor (still with thick red hair and a proud grin), recreating her ad to send the message that creativity is not a boy thing or a girl thing.
Last month, when HuffPost Parents resurfaced the 1981 ad as an example of what toy advertising should be, it was popping up all over social media. Educational psychologist, parenting coach and HuffPost blogger Lori Day saw it shared numerous times on her Facebook page, which is how she found out that the little girl in the ad was now the all-grown-up friend of a friend.
Day contacted Giordano and asked her opinion of the change in advertising to children over the past three decades, then wrote about their conversation for the website Women You Should Know.
"In 1981, LEGOs were simple and gender-neutral, and the creativity of the child produced the message," Giordano told her. " In 2014, it’s the reverse: the toy delivers a message to the child, and this message is weirdly about gender.”
Specifically, Giordano was talking about set from the new LEGO Friends line that was made specifically for girls – a very pink news van marketed with this description: "Break the big story of the world’s best cake with the Heartlake News Van!"
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