A horrible, unwanted war. And yet, here I am, taking notes. Not on strategy or diplomacy, but on what is likely the most unexpected comms masterclass in recent memory. Don’t judge me, just read on.
Iran told its story through Lego videos: AI-generated, rap-soundtracked, golden-toilet-featuring Lego videos. And people, myself included, were not just watching. They were waiting for the next one. Think about what that means.
Every conflict from this region has arrived in the Western imagination through the same visual grammar. Grainy footage, solemn spokesmen, and grievances in a tone that felt alien, distant, not designed for you. Most viewers switched off before the message had a chance. Iran didn’t abandon that playbook entirely; the spokespeople are still there. What it did was add a completely new frequency alongside it. Lego for the internet. Rap for the scroll.
What struck me wasn’t just the creativity, but also the precision. This wasn’t “speaking to the West” in the broad, lazy way brands often claim to. These videos seemed built for a very specific kind of internet user, someone doomscrolling late at night, already carrying a set of beliefs, frustrations, and curiosities.
We don’t read the way we used to. We skim, scroll, skip. These videos understood that contract. They were short enough to finish, strange enough to hold attention, and specific enough to spark conversation before they were even over.
Importantly, they weren’t just watched; they were widely shared.
But the question that stayed with me wasn’t just what they did. It was why these videos appeared to be working with such precision.
I studied psychology before I chose a career in communications, and it never really left me. So I dug a little deeper, and as always, research by well-known social psychologists had some insights. Rolf Reber, Norbert Schwarz, and Piotr Winkielman’s work on processing fluency tells us that stimuli that are easier to process feel more true, not because the content is more credible, but because the brain experiences less resistance decoding it. Familiarity lowers the drawbridge before the message has even arrived.
Robert Zajonc’s mere exposure effect goes further: Repeated contact with something, even without conscious awareness, builds positive feeling toward it. You don’t decide to like what’s familiar, you just do. And Lego, as a childhood object, is familiar to almost everyone on the planet.
Then there’s Richard E Petty and John Cacioppo’s elaboration likelihood model: When cognitive load is high, such as when you’re scrolling with 17 tabs open, persuasion doesn’t travel through argument. It travels through cues like humour, recognition, and likability. You’re not evaluating rationally; you’re “feeling” instead.
The hyper-specific cultural references, the golden toilet, the bruised hand, and more did something more precise than inform. They signalled: We know what you know. And that signal, that moment of unexpected recognition from an unlikely source, is where the real persuasion lives. Henri Tajfel and John Turner’s social identity research shows we apply far less critical scrutiny to messages that perform in-group membership. The sender stops being foreign. They become, for a moment, one of us. The psychological immune response, the scepticism we reserve for sources we distrust, quietly stands down.
Humour lowers defences, and familiarity bypasses scrutiny. In-group signals manufacture trust. When all three arrive together, the message is not simply received, but also forwarded.
And that’s the uncomfortable part, because none of this should exist. Not the videos, not the conditions that made them necessary, not the war itself. Real people are living through real consequences that no amount of Lego playfulness can soften.
The fact that some of the most effective communications to come out of this conflict are also the most absurd is not a triumph. It’s a reflection of how we now consume the world. We struggle to sit with the weight of reality unless it’s shaped into something we can scroll through. I’ll take the lesson. But I’m not celebrating it.
If there’s a question worth asking — for anyone who works in communication — it’s not “what do I want to say?” It is “what does someone need to feel before they’re even willing to hear me?”
Iran answered that question with unsettling clarity. The lesson is real, even if we wish the classroom wasn’t.
The writer is a communications professional with 20 years of experience across India and APAC
