Our Lego Agency Names 72andSunny’s Carlo Cavallone as Its First Ever VP of Creative
When little Carlo Cavallone was tipping out his crate of Lego pieces onto a towel, selecting just the right pieces for his busy little city, he had no idea that he was playing with the building blocks of his creative career. But right there, in his home in Milan, Carlo was learning how to tell stories.
“Lego, for me, was not just ‘the build’. I loved to build with Lego but it was an opportunity for storytelling. I loved to play with Lego to create stories,” a now adult Carlo recalls. “It’s a toy that, for me, meant a lot of self expression, which I think is the great thing about the toy: it keeps going.”
How fitting, then, that Carlo has just been revealed as the first ever VP of creative at Lego’s internal agency OLA (Our Lego Agency). Carlo is joining Lego from 72andSunny, where he has been since 2010 and most recently was global chief creative office. Before that he spent nearly a decade at Wieden + Kennedy, where he worked on brands like Nike, Coca-Cola and EA Sports.
Carlo’s arrival at the Lego Group’s headquarters in Billund, Denmark, marks an Avengers Assemble moment for Nic Taylor, SVP and global head of OLA. For the past year and a half she’s been carefully building up the team to meet Lego’s creative ambitions. Notably, there’s Pia Chaudhuri as global creative play lead, play inclusion and Hazel Tracey who joined as creative director of social earlier this year. This month, OLA announced a further trio of new hires: Andy Grant as global creative lead of brand; Clarence Chiew as creative director for China; Rudi Anggono as creative director for Americas. As a proven winner with the experience of operating on a global stage, Carlo’s appointment speaks volumes about Nic and Lego’s ambitions for OLA.
“I think that this is representative of Lego’s position in the world,” says Nic. “We’ve grown in a really positive way over the last few years. According to one study we are the world’s most highly regarded brand [Global RepTrak®100 survey]. We have this incredible creative DNA and the ambitions for the agency are set in terms of creating amazing campaigns for the brand and for the products, that are in their own right magical things. That’s been a gift so far. We get these amazing products to communicate so we want, obviously, the creative and marketing to go with that. I think that all the conditions are right for us to have a senior, global creative leader with an amazing reputation to join the agency. So I’m super excited because I think it will take us to the next level.”
From Carlo’s perspective, the opportunity was irresistible. On a personal level he’s got that relationship with the brand that goes right back to his youth - he cites 1979’s iconic Galaxy Explorer as a pivotal Lego set from his childhood. But beyond that, he revels in pop culture and has a deep respect for culture created for kids. Before heading into advertising, Carlo translated Batman comics into Italian - and he still loves comics. During the interview process, he and Nic connected over their mutual love of the Muppets.
“I think some of the best expressions have come from things that are made for kids. And Lego has been able to deliver some of the most incredible ideas for kids, from ‘The Lego Movie’ to the new IP products and the collaboration with Star Wars,” says Carlo. “For a nerd like me, it’s amazing.”
That ability to connect with children, to recognise the things that children will love was one of the key criteria that Nic was looking for. As a values-based organisation with a unique culture, Nic also knew she needed someone who would embody the humility of Lego, something that isn’t necessarily always found in global creative leaders of the calibre she sought. It was when a good friend suggested ‘someone like Carlo Cavallone’, that Nic figured that perhaps she didn’t need to settle for someone ‘like’ Carlo, but Carlo himself.
The pair had immediate chemistry, with Carlo’s sense of fun bouncing off what Nic calls her Australian brashness (“hopefully with charm and a smile, of course!”). The process of bringing that team together has seen Nic take on a role that’s part Nick Fury and part magpie, pulling together these people with diverse backgrounds and skills and personalities. “This is the part of the job that I love the most, especially as my career has developed,” says Nic. “What’s the cast? What group of people are we going to bring together to make magic happen?”
And Carlo is really excited about embedding with the team that Nic has been gathering around Lego. “I’m excited because… the idea of bringing together diverse people in the deepest sense is what’s really attractive. Culturally diverse people that come from different places. Putting together an agency is not a cold process, it cannot be a cold process. It needs to be done by instinct,” he says, reflecting on what lies ahead of him and the team as they start working together. “It can be clunky at the start as you are getting to know each other, but when that cultural thing starts to work, it’s incredible, it’s the best thing in the world, and we get all the weirdness and the interesting things people can bring as well.”
The people are only half of the equation - environment and culture is the other side of that. Nurturing fun and creating a platform for playfulness within OLA is a real priority for Nic. She says that the pressures of pitching and new business have made that spirit of fun harder to achieve in the external agency world. “Here, we can genuinely focus on our culture, on the experience we create for our people and the world that we create. And it should be fun, right? We work for Lego. So I want this group of people to make sure that we recognise that our job is to bring the fun, and that the work should feel fresh and interesting to people as a consequence of the experience we go through to create it.”
As we chat, Carlo is readying himself for the big move from New York to Billund and Nic has plenty of advice for him, including getting used to Danish sandwiches and reading Helen Russell’s ‘The Year of Living Danishly’. And the switch of culture is one that he is looking forward to - and it’s not simply about the move from the US to Denmark, but the evolving culture of OLA itself. “New York is New York and you have to play by New York rules,” he says. “What’s interesting about what we’re facing is that we can create our own rules, our own culture. That’s what I find exciting.”
He’s raring to go, speaking excitedly about the chance to immerse himself in Lego’s heritage and more traditional products as well as getting stuck into the innovative side of Lego, exploring the future of play. But, he grins, what he is really curious about is finding out all the tantalising top secret things that he hasn’t been allowed to see yet.
