State-sponsored propaganda has moved far beyond government-to-government signaling. It's now in your employees' news feeds, your customers' social media, and your stakeholders' sense of reality.
Lego made $13 billion last year. It also became an Iranian propaganda vehicle.
That's the headline from a recent Wall Street Journal investigation into the new information wars. Iran has been producing slick AI-enhanced videos using Lego animations, Japanese anime aesthetics, and Pixar-style visuals to sanitize combat footage, celebrate military strikes, and reframe its narrative for global audiences. The cartoonish format bypasses social media content filters. It travels freely. And it works precisely because Lego carries what Lukasz Olejnik, an independent technology consultant and a visiting fellow at the Department of War Studies, King's College London, calls "reloaded emotional associations" that bypass critical thinking.
The Trump administration is running its own playbook. Wii graphics. Call of Duty overlays. Top Gun clips. AC/DC soundtracks. Real airstrike footage spliced with Iron Man. The goal: lock in the emotional framing before the domestic audience and American voter registers what they're actually watching.
Olejnik puts it plainly: "There's no going back. Trolling is now a standard tool of statecraft."
None of this is happening in a vacuum. And none of it is happening somewhere else.
It is happening within the information environment that your leadership team, workforce, customers, and board members consume every single day.
Why is this type of communication a business problem?
Most executives still treat information warfare as something that happens between governments, on cable news, in some distant theater of conflict. That framing is dangerously outdated.
State-sponsored propaganda has moved far beyond government-to-government signaling. It's now inside your employees' news feeds, your customers' social media, and your stakeholders' sense of reality. And increasingly, consumer brands are not just bystanders—They're the vehicle.
Lego didn't consent to becoming a propaganda asset. It didn't matter. The brand's global recognition and emotional resonance made it useful. That same logic applies to every trusted company, industry association, or executive voice that state actors can leverage, mimic, or discredit.
Consider what this means for your corporate communications strategy. The assumptions underpinning it — that credibility is built over time, that facts compete fairly with disinformation, that your messaging reaches your audience in an uncontested information space — are no longer reliable.
Your communications infrastructure was built for a different era. So was your risk function.
The convergence that changed everything
Two forces collided to produce this moment. AI slashed the cost of producing high-quality propaganda to near zero. And over decades of globalization, trusted Western cultural touchstones — Lego, Pixar, Nintendo, Marvel — were exported into every major market on Earth.
The result: state actors now have access to a global cultural toolkit with built-in emotional resonance, production tools that require no studio or budget, and distribution platforms that struggle to distinguish authentic content from state-sponsored manipulation.
The Wall Street Journal piece notes that this content isn't aimed solely at domestic audiences. It travels. It reaches allied nations, neutral countries, and, yes, the offices of Fortune 1000 companies that are trying to make sourcing decisions, navigate export controls, and assess geopolitical risk in real time.
Your intelligence inputs are contaminated. If your team is concluding open-source news, social media, or unvetted digital content without a rigorous analytical framework, they are almost certainly working from a compromised picture.
What business leaders need to do
1. Audit your intelligence inputs. Where is your leadership team getting its information? Is it from primary sources, institutional media with verified editorial standards, or open feeds that are actively being manipulated? Information diet matters. Build a sourcing protocol that distinguishes signal from noise, and from weaponized noise.
2. Brief your board on information warfare. Directors are processing the same contaminated information environment as everyone else. They need to understand how AI-generated propaganda operates, what it looks like, and why it's structurally designed to bypass skepticism. A prepared board makes better decisions under pressure.
3. Protect your brand from weaponization. Review your brand's global footprint and cultural associations. What makes your brand trusted and recognizable also makes it potentially useful to bad actors who want to borrow that credibility. Work with your legal, communications, and government affairs teams to build early-warning protocols.
4. Recalibrate your corporate communications strategy. Clarity, consistency, and verified sourcing now function as competitive advantages in an environment where audiences are bombarded with emotionally engineered content. Executive communication that is sober, specific, and credible carries premium weight. Complexity is not your enemy. Vagueness is.
5. Build direct government intelligence relationships. Corporate intelligence functions that rely purely on open-source and commercial data are operating at a structural disadvantage. The most sophisticated companies are building formal channels with government stakeholders — not to lobby, but to share and receive timely, vetted threat intelligence.
The strategic frame
Tariff volatility. NATO credibility erosion. Supply chain disruption. Chinese competition. Accelerated warfare. AI and tech sovereignty. Export control tightening. Interest rate uncertainty.
Weaponization of propaganda is not a separate threat. It is the environment in which all of these other risks are communicated, processed, and responded to. You cannot make sharp decisions in a blurred information landscape.
The executives who navigate this period effectively will not be the ones who consumed the most information. They'll be the ones who have disciplined frameworks for evaluating it.
So, Lego-ganda, are you responding reactively?
A Chief Geopolitical Officer doesn't wait for breaking news. They monitor geopolitical signals daily, translate them into business implications, and prepare board members and senior executives to decide — not scramble.
Most Fortune 1,000 companies and private equity portfolio companies don't have one. Caracal Global is your fractional Chief Geopolitical Officer.
Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.
-Marc
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Marc A. Ross is a geopolitical strategist and the founder of Caracal Global, a fractional Chief Geopolitical Officer service for Fortune 1,000 companies and private equity firms. He publishes the Caracal Global Daily — what a Chief Geopolitical Officer monitors every morning. Subscribe at caracal.global/contact.
