The Ben Mulroney Show - Has Lego won over the adult demographic? Marketing and Branding talk!

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

- Tony Chapman, Host of the award winning podcast Chatter that Matters - Samantha Dagres /  Communications Manager at the Montreal Economic Institute If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠ Twitter: ⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠ TikTok: ⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠ Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We're going to shift gears. We've had a lot of important, hard, difficult conversations today. So let's shake things off a little bit, have a little bit of fun. And who better to have that fun with than Tony Chapman, a good friend of the show and host of the award-winning podcast, Chatter That Matters, as well as founding partner at Chatter A.I. Tony, thanks so much for being here. Always a pleasure. So Lego, I think over the past 10 years, has done a really admirable job at changing how we see them, you know, by making the Lego movies and the Lego video games. I mean, all of these were really interesting ways of making a toy that could become irrelevant, the older you get, make it relevant again.

And now, according to a number of stories, but they're winning the adult consumer. Talk to me about this. Well, they're winning the adult. They're winning in a category. the toy market's in decline, and yet Legos delivered two years of double-digit growth based on four words. And this is so important when you're building a brand is to compress your entire strategy into a sentence.

In their case, is builders of all ages. And once they realized is that we grew up with Lego, and today now it's becoming sort of these three-dimensional puzzle pieces. I can create a Harry Potter setter. Or the White House or Parliament Hill. Absolutely. And you're working tactile. you're actually using your hands again and you're using your brain as opposed to just

seeing, you know, chat GPT produce something on the screen. And I think, and it's also allowing play with kids. I can't play video games with my kids because in a second, they're faster and better than me, but I can certainly sit down with them and play with blocks. And so for all of that, Legos means so brilliant. And they continue to defy the odds. And again, in a category that's in decline. and I think that they're going to continue to do it with more content, more movies,

more talking about how important play is, how important play is in terms of parents and their kids and on and on and they're just, they've won with a forward strategy of all ages. You know, one thing that I've found very funny on social media, I was trying to find it earlier today, but I couldn't find this. It's very easy for people to find on, like, Instagram, for example, is there's this trend of wives who have a large social media following, who look into the camera on Instagram, for example, and they look at their followers and they say,

all right, my husband is going to take over my Instagram for a minute and he is going to show you some of his most beautiful and most prized Lego designs. And you're going to like it. They look in the camera. You're going to like it. And then he says, thank you, honey. Here is my 4,000 piece space shuttle that took me four and a half months to build.

And it's cute and it's adorable. and it's not just one person doing it. It's a lot of wives doing that. And I have to think that Lego, who I think what they did is they took a step back from being precious over their brand and they allowed people to interpret what it meant to them

and they're leaning into it. First of all, totally great insight. I mean, let the consumer control your brand when you're something like Lego you have a lot of runway. I just love the way you presented it. It's almost like I've shown you my dog tricks in the past with Instagram,

I'm going to show you what my four-year-olds have done. Now I'm going to treat my husband in the same category. It's so fine. The women come off is tough, and they say, over to you, honey, but they dare their followers not to like it. It's adorable. It's I love it. Yeah, it's really, really well done. And it really is creativity by numbers.

It's like paint by numbers. If you can follow the instructions, you can build it. So it's not like you need to be a science or an engineer, but it's good for everybody attached it because the Lego is a lot of fun. Yeah. Well, as we are still trying to make sense of whether or not, the firing or the put on indefinite leave of Jimmy Kimmel was an assault on his right to free speech or something else. Because we don't know what to make of that, I think a lot of people

are trying to make sense of what value he has right now. And because there's so many question marks, I think the appropriate question to ask, and some are doing so, which is, would you tie yourself as a brand to Jimmy Kimmel right now? And I think that's an open question. Well, attention is the oxygen of marketing, and today most brands are starving for attention. So if they can, you know, nuzzle up to somebody that has a massive following, it makes sense. That's how the whole influencer marketing began. I'm going to use your spotlight. Here's the problem with Kimmel, though, because it's very polarizing.

You've got to decide how much is his attention worth knowing that you're going to incur the wrath of a president of United States that somehow is also now believing that he is king of content. versus content as king. Yeah. So you're not buying neutrality. You're buying a point of view. Well, you know, and it would be interesting. Like the type of person I think who would be very adept at, at channeling Jimmy Kimmel's

attention right now and you either view it as notoriety or you view it as positive attention, depending on your perspective, would be a guy like Ryan Reynolds and his company because he's been so good at taking those moments that mattered. For example, the debacle that was the. the Peloton ad a few years ago and channeling that into an ad for his aviation gin, I think he would be the right person to look at this person and determine, okay, how can we leverage him, even though some hate him and some love him, how can we use that attention in a way to promote another brand?

You know, I haven't thought of Ryan Reynolds, where my head originally meant is the Democratic Party should grab them and say you are now my spokesperson. I completely disagree. I completely disagree. If they're looking at expanding the tent, if they're looking, that's doubling down. Like, he's a known quantity for them. He bawled his eyes out when Kamala Harris lost the election, which, by the way, I'm fine with.

I mean, there's nothing wrong with somebody showing their emotions. But you're not going to build what you're not going to build a bridge. You're not going to expand that tent. You're not going to build the base wider with having him as the face of the Democratic Party. You know, I did, listen, first of all, a spokesperson versus a face is very different. I'm not saying he runs for election. but I do think he has the ability to communicate to the masses and connect with people. And where he had fans is the people that were very anti-Trump.

Right now, the Democratic Party has lost their voice. They lost their narrative. They don't know which way to turn. They feel like whack-a-mole. Every time somebody sticks up a head, it gets slammed down. So I do think they need it. But, you know, listen, the other one I would do is Spotify, which is an American saying, we're going to give you your own channel.

Yeah. Go do the next Joe Rogan. do your version of it. And I think he's got enough presence and enough talent that he could do it. And believe me, his agent's getting a lot of offers thrown his way. I'll have no doubt. I was not worried about him. I was not worried about him one bit. I am worried about all the people who worked on his show, who now have to figure out how they're going to pay their rent next month. Let's move on to one last story. We only have a little

bit of time left. But Open AI is hiring marketers, which I'm curious to understand why. I mean, everybody knows what their product does. Why do they need marketers? Well, on the enterprise side of the business, the commercial side, they're actually losing market share. So they want to demonstrate that their, like Anthropic is winning because you're saying we're safe. Where chat GPT isn't, it hallucinates, it lies. Don't go near it if you're a corporation. So I think they're going to market more business to business to establish their credibility and currency in that level. Yeah. In terms of general public chat GPT, Japanese, we're all chat GPT. Yeah. So they've got the consumer group. But if you lose the enterprise, that's where instead of getting 30 bucks a month,

you're getting $300,000 a year deals. And that's what they've got to win. And I think that's what they're investing here. Yeah. And are they paying these marketers the same as they're paying the developers? Because we're hearing these bananas, hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on the big brains that are helping chart the course of these massive AI engines. Are the marketers being paid in a similarly outrage? We should actually do a whole segment on the talent wars that meta or Facebook has created and how are these $100 million deals possible. And ultimately, all the people underneath them, the coders are all losing their jobs to AI.

So it's just the conductors of the orchestra. They're getting paid these immense sums. And part of it's coming from, I no longer need to pay this magician because I'm getting AI to do it. Are we going to get to a point where there's a select few people, like a small group of engineers at the top? and they are, all they are doing is, is guiding sort of the AI to teach itself? Until they're eating up, absolutely. That's exactly what's going to happen.

We're going to see a handful of people. And we saw that when musicians, the studio musicians lost their jobs when you could go in a recording studio, your basement could be cut. You have the drums. Right. The same thing happened with the studio musicians is going to happen with the coders. Yeah. But the thing about AI, it continues to get better and better and works 24-7 and learn

from each other. Eventually, humans are going to be better, even at the top, even the conductors, the orchestra are going to be replaced. Tony Chapman, got to leave it there. Thank you, my friend. Have a great week. You too. Bye-bye. Well, nearly 300,000 Ontarians walked out of ER's last year without getting treatment, part of more than 1.2 million patients across Canada. A new report

says they're not leaving because they're getting better, but because the system is failing them. We're going to dig in next on the Benmolrity show. sponsored by BetterHelp. Let's be honest. We've all shared our problems in some pretty funny places, the group chat, your barber, maybe even a stranger on a plane. And hey, sometimes that helps. But when it comes to stuff like stress, anxiety, or relationships, it makes a big difference to talk to somebody who's actually trained to help. That's what BetterHelp is all about. They connect you with credentialed professional therapists online. And what makes them stand out

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tellus.com slash total security to learn more. Conditions apply. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show every now and then a press release comes out that you got to read and you got to read to believe. And then you got to figure out what it actually means to you, especially as it relates to our health care system. We as a nation believe that healthcare as an institution is so important as a government, as a government policy, as a government service, that it is actually definitional to who we are as Canadians. Poll after poll suggested healthcare is one of these things that defines us as a nation. So what does it say about us as a nation if nearly 300,000 Ontarians left an emergency room without treatment last year? So they went in and they left,

not because they got treatment, not because they felt better, but because they couldn't get help. And as far as I can tell, the emergency room is supposed to be that place where everybody gets help. So to break this down what it means and hopefully how we can find our way out of this into a better place, we're joined by Samantha Dagger's, Communications Manager at the Montreal Economic Institute and friend of the Ben Mulroney show. Samantha, thanks so much for being here. Great to be back, Ben. Okay, so nearly 300,000 Ontarians, but across Canada, over 1.2 million patients left emergency rooms untreated last year. So even though we're looking at Ontario numbers, this has...

applications across the country. Yeah, absolutely. We're seeing this get worse across the country. About 5% of all ER visits in Ontario are represented by patients leaving without treatment. And just to really, you know, illustrate the severity of this, it's, you know, it's not just that so many people are leaving without treatment. It's the people with urgent needs, right? In other provinces, you see people who need, you know, prescription renewals leaving or, you know,

people who, like, just need a, you know, a cut cleaned up. But in Ontario specifically, what we're seeing is that half are P3. So P3 are people with urgent needs. And the fact that half of the people leaving are in that urgent category is super alarming. Yeah. And this is worsening. The ratio in Ontario has surged by 31% since 2019. So look, we know that one of the reasons that there's so much pressure on emergency rooms in a place like

Ontario is that people don't have access to the family doctor that they used to, and therefore they are going to the one place that they know that they can get help, which is the emergency room. So that's placing pressure on them. But I would think, Sam, that there would be some sense of triage in the emergency room, and these P3s that you speak of would be, I don't know, accelerated to the front of the line over the cuts and bruises and people who might have, you know, a fever that Advil could take care of. Yeah, but the thing is, you know, there are still, you know, folks in the emergency room that are like P2, which are, you know, conditions that, you know, are a potential threat to life or limb, right? And they obviously will take priority. But like you said, you know, the ER is now like a place where all kinds of people show up because they lack family doctors. So again, like prescription renewals. Nobody should be going into the emergency room for a prescription renewal. We saw that across Canada, 10% percent. percent of emergency room visits are for prescription renewals. That's, you know, that's kind of

unacceptable. So you're getting a bunch of people with all different kinds of needs. And we know that, you know, emergency rooms are really expensive to operate. You know, if they're not like collaborative care centers where, you know, there are doctors of all kinds, they're ready to take patients as they come. So it's inefficient. It's costly. But ultimately, these are people that have no other choice. The ER is a last resort for many, many people. Okay. Yeah. But So what happens? So if it's the last resort and you're saying that a lot of the people who are going in and they're giving up and they're walking away, what's happening to these 300,000 people in Ontario?

I mean, you're saying that in a lot of cases, they have real issues that need to be addressed by a doctor. And you're saying they're leaving without having those healthcare issues addressed in any way. Well, unfortunately, in a lot of cases, their conditions worsen. They become more complex to treat. and in some cases they, you know, get bumped up in terms of urgency level, right? There was a study conducted in the states that looked into this phenomenon of people showing up, not getting treated, you know, within a reasonable time frame, and then leaving, and they saw that more than half of those patients went back for the same ailment.

Yeah. So these could be people that are coming in and out of the system, sometimes being treated, sometimes not. It's not comprehensive. So, yeah, so either worsening or these people are coming. back again and again until you know they're urgent enough to be seen unfortunately is there any data that lets us know like okay they tried one emergency room it didn't work so they went to a different hospital no i don't have that data in front of me um but we did actually look a couple months ago

we looked at um you know the lengths of stay right to just like you know fill in this picture of like how long are people in ontario specifically waiting and the median like to stay in the province is four hours which uh that means half of the people are waiting more than four hours um but But in like really concentrated areas like, you know, Toronto, say the Sunnybrook Health Science Center, the median, say, is over eight hours. Oh my God. So that's a full, that's a full work day. Full work day, they're just waiting in the emergency room in the hopes of being seen. Exactly.

And so if you're waiting for something like a prescription renewal or something that's urgent but not life threatening, yeah, maybe, you know, 12 hours in the emergency room, like you got, you got to leave. You know, people have kids, people have responsibilities. And not to mention the offshoot of that, you know, in Canada, like you said in the intro, like our healthcare system is a national pride, you know, actually I think our reputation now is that our health care system isn't working. Oh, I know. We've got to start looking at things as they are, not as we want them to be. Exactly.

And this, the echo of the, if it was great in the past, it is not anymore. And I've said many times never before have we put more money in and the outcomes been, outcomes have been this bad. So, okay, we only have a little bit of time left, Sam. So let's, let's talk solutions. What do we do? Because I'm, by the way, I'm not somebody who thinks the solution begins and ends with more money, right? No, no, no. No, like you said, we've, we've actually been spending more money. So if that was the solution, we would see better outcomes. We didn't see this, you know, problem surging by 31%. Yep. So solutions is, like you said, a triage system. Of course, we need more doctors train, but, you know, frankly, it takes 10 years to train a doctor.

What can we do right now? And so we're suggesting unleashing the full potential of our health care experts, you know, nurse practitioner clinics, pharmacist-led clinics. You know, if 10% of ER visits can be, you know, reoriented towards pharmacist-led clinics, let's do it. And these are people who are already trained. We just have to make sure that we don't have this top-down approach, you know, like our health care system is super bureaucratic. It's super centralized. for Ontario specifically, the fact that more than half have urgent non-life-threatening needs, why don't we open immediate care centers, this is something they have in France,

is something that was doctor-led, saying, you know, like if you have non-life-threatening urgent needs, come here. So tell me, what is that system you're talking about? Yeah, yeah. So in France, a couple years ago, they experienced the same problems. All these people showing up in ER is not getting treated in a proper time frame. and they said, how can we ease the strain, right? How can we reduce the bottleneck?

And so they opened what are called immediate care centers. So these are specifically for people with urgent needs that are not life-threatening, because obviously if it's life-sarning, you go to the emergency room. And that has really eased the strain on their emergency department, has really increased efficiency and made sure that people aren't getting worse in the meantime. And where are these new facilities located? Are they on the grounds of the hospital, or are they separate facilities? Yeah, in France, they're separate facilities, but there's no reason that they can't be, you know, close to an emergency room.

But wherever the need is, and that's what we really try to, like, you know, say at MEI, we need to give the flexibility to these workers to meet the needs because they know they're in their communities, right? Yeah, well, and that's, as you said, you know, the system that we've developed has hardened into this centralized, immovable, bureaucratic, top-down mess. And I think part of the solution, yes, if it requires more funding, sure, but that funding should go towards finding ways to make the system more nimble, more elastic, and more responsive to the changing needs of the population. Amen, Ben. And, you know, other countries with universal systems, they don't spend more money than us, but they have better outcomes. What are they doing right? And we have to stop. We have to stop.

We've got to get off the high horse that we have solved the problem here, that Canada is this paradise for healthcare. It is not. It is increasingly a mess. It is increasingly doing a disservice. And we're seeing worse health outcomes. And until we admit to ourselves that we need to take some bold steps to improve it, the voices that are going to win in this debate are the ones that just want to throw more money at the problem. And we can't keep doing that.

And so I want to thank you very much, Sam, for being here. That was Samantha Daggeras, Communications Manager at the Montreal Economic Institute. This is some, yeah, this is some disappointing news, but we have to look at it with our eyes open and appreciate that if we are going to find solutions, we have to be willing to consider things that we never would have considered years ago. But that's my humble opinion.

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