Meta-marketing strategies aren't new, but the LEGO movie is a brilliant example. David Foster Wallace covered the topic in his essay, "E unibus pluram": http:

Meta-marketing strategies aren't new, but the LEGO movie is a brilliant example. David Foster Wallace covered the topic in his essay, "E unibus pluram": http://www.thefreelibrary.com/E+unibus+pluram%3A+television+and+U.S.+fiction.-a013952319 http://www.thefreelibrary.com/E+unibus+pluram%3A+television+... > You can find successful television ads that mock TV-ad conventions almost anywhere you look, from Settlemeyer's Federal Express and Wendy's spots, with their wizened, sped-up burlesques of commercial characters, to those hip Doritos splices of commercial spokesmen and campy old clips of Beaver and Mr. Ed. > Plus you can see this tactic of heaping scorn on pretensions to those old commercial virtues of authority and sincerity - thus (1) shielding the heaper of scorn from scorn and (2) congratulating the patron of scorn for rising above the mass of people who still fall for outmoded pretensions - employed to serious advantage on many of the television programs the commercials support. Show after show, for years now, has been either a self-acknowledged blank, visual, postmodern allusion- and attitude-fest,