OLA — Our LEGO Agency
OLA, LEGO's internal global creative agency, came to Astral City with a brief as simple as it was enormous: get the world playing again. We designed LEGO QUEST — a 10-day global treasure hunt fronted by Tom Holland — across four interconnected surfaces: web, game, mobile and IRL. The brief was world-scale. The game system we designed was precise, repeatable and built to last.
The world was playing 40% less. Our brief was to fix that.
Research showed children were playing 40% less than previous generations. Screen time was up; meaningful, active play was down. The United Nations and LEGO had co-created World Play Day — an annual global event on 11 June — to reclaim play as a fundamental human right. For 2026, OLA wanted something bigger than a campaign: not something that told people to play more, but something that made them play, together, right now.
A two-layer game system built to turn one day into a movement.
We designed LEGO QUEST as a connected game across four surfaces: web, game, mobile and IRL. Every element was built to reinforce the others. The digital game made the real-world moments matter. The real-world moments made the digital game feel tangible. The game was designed to hold two kinds of player: someone with five minutes who wanted a quick win, and someone who wanted to go deep across the full ten days. Every action — playing, sharing, inviting — contributed to your city's score.
A live leaderboard and campaign hub that tracked every city's collective play in real time across postcode, city and nation. The leaderboard served both casual players with five minutes and committed players going deep — simultaneously, without compromise.
A daily LEGO build puzzle revealed a real-world clue on completion and unlocked a deeper game world — where players used their creation to solve mini-games, hunt Easter eggs and accumulate play time for their city. The casual and committed layers coexisted without one undermining the other.
An animated reward sequence designed to be genuinely satisfying to share, paired with a city-invite mechanic that let players recruit their community and add to the collective score. Engineered to spread because people wanted to share it — not because they were told to.
Ten physical treasure drops across key markets, each tied to a digital clue, culminating in a helicopter delivering Tom Holland's mystery build to the winning city live on World Play Day. The digital game made the real-world moments matter.
"The digital game made the real-world moments matter. The real-world moments made the digital game feel extraordinary. One without the other is just a campaign."
Designed for 2026. Built to run every year after.
The most significant output was not any single mechanic but the repeatable architecture. Every design decision was tested against one question: does this still work in 2027 with a different celebrity and a different story? The answer, by design, was yes. OLA came in wanting something world-scale for one year; we designed a system that could evolve the talent, the treasure and the tone each year while keeping the competitive structure intact.
World Play Day is not a product launch. It is a cultural statement — a signal from one of the world's most beloved brands that play is not optional, it is essential. In a world of brand activations that ask audiences to watch, we built one that gave them every reason to play: a system across four surfaces, held together by one mechanic, and built to last.
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