Lego Canada got crafty at Toronto’s Union Station recently, encouraging Canadians to tap into their inner child and help build a holiday mural brick by colourful brick.

Created by 18,000 passers-by who placed 600,000 pieces of Lego, the 40- by 10-foot mural aims to reach Canadians who might typically shy away from playing with Lego.

The mural is part of a national media buy that includes transit wraps, digital, pre-show Cineplex theatre promotion and a time-lapse video of the mural being created.

According to Ishma Alexander-Huet, VP of client advice and management at Initiative, the agency behind the execution, the population is divided into two groups: those who grew up with Lego and those who didn’t and don’t know where to begin creating.

“Surprisingly, there are a lot of millennial parents who have not grown up using Lego. Now that those millennials are becoming parents, Lego isn’t top of mind as a toy because it’s intimidating. It’s thought of something that is messy, labour intensive and hard to build,” Alexander-Huet tells MiC.

She says the challenge was finding the best way to reach low-affinity users without making it intimidating. “At first the thinking was maybe we just put a huge Lego mural up in the city, but that doesn’t allow people to actually play,” she notes.

What the team came up with was a colour by numbers-inspired design made up of 6,000 individual Lego plates that have easy-to-follow colour coding, so even novice Lego creators get the picture.

Lego Canada says it will donate a Lego set to children’s charity Toy Mountain for every plate that is completed, an element of the project that Alexander-Huet says lets people have a bit of fun while helping others out during the holidays.

The mural is now on display at Nathan’s Philips Square until Dec. 23 in support of Epilepsy Toronto. Marketing agency B Street was the activation team, with imagery and logistics executed by Lego’s in-house creative team.