Toronto-headquartered toy and entertainment company Spin Master is celebrating 50 years of the Rubik’s Cube with a multifaceted year-long “Make Your Move” marketing campaign, timed to coincide with the July 13th birthday of its inventor, Erno Rubik.
The campaign is the company’s largest Canadian spend since its 2021 takeover of the popular toy. It’s designed to inspire the next generation of problem solvers, and its hero spot is filmed with frenetic pace and topsy turvy camera angles against familiar everyday backdrops for kids.
The milestone year will include new launches and product collaborations, and the debut of a new mobile game this fall, titled Rubik’s Match, developed by Nørdlight Games, Spin Master’s Stockholm-based digital game studio.
“This new campaign extends beyond the toy, showcasing its benefits,” says Erica Green, Spin Master’s VP of global creative development. “We wanted to highlight how making your move with Rubik’s can lead to unlocking other aspects of you or your child’s everyday. That level of strategy and critical forward-thinking continues to play out in everything from moves on the court or dance floor to the assembly of music.”
One in every seven people in the world have played with a Rubik’s Cube, but most people fall short on completing the elusive solution. The “Make Your Move” campaign sets out to change that, focused on inspiring solvers, Green says.
Spin Master will also introduce new Rubik’s Cube products as it targets multiple markets.
Its primary demo is kids aged 8 to 12. Seeing this demographic as digital natives, there is no local TV buy for this campaign. The secondary target is nostalgia-minded parents.
“Our goal is to drive mass awareness and it makes the most sense for us to focus our spend on a digital mix,” says Sandra Shatilla, Spin Master’s senior director of marketing, Canada.
Locally, the campaign entails a combination of paid social media and kids targeted content on YouTube, with brand safety partner, Super Awesome Youth Marketing Solutions.
“We are leveraging Super Awesome’s youth insights and compliance expertise in a plan that is an effective and efficient mix of working with influencers who are most popular with our target demo and having them create fun and exciting content featuring Rubik’s,” Shatilla says. “We then seed that content across Super Awesome’s YouTube channels and videos.”
The campaign in Canada will also include a campaign a localized playlist and extended on-platform promo through Google and YouTube, in addition to the Yoodle takeover with animation created by Canadian illustrator Mathieu Lebrecque (see, above).
Stateside, meanwhile, limited-edition collaborations will also be available throughout the course of the year, featuring entertainment and toy properties like Barbie, Stranger Things and Hello Kitty, and global brands including Levi’s, Mercedes Benz and Tetris.
Shatilla points out that it has retail partners in Canada that really lean into the brand and “allow us to use our creativity to produce exceptional retail display units that make for a unique in store shopper experience.”
The “Make Your Move” campaign was developed by Spin Master’s in-house agency.
