Brands have, like many of us, been pretty obsessed with Animal Crossing: New Horizons as the game has become an iconic aspect of quarantine life in 2020. That’s not to say every marketing tie-in or stunt has been a good fit, or that the integrations even made much sense. (Inclusive new avatar skin options from…
In the marketing world, the line between embarrassing mistake and well-crafted opportunity is a notoriously blurry one. Companies (and the U.S. president) often say their gaffes were actually intentional, leaving many to decide for themselves. That seems to be the case with Ikea in Bahrain, where the retailer raised eyebrows with a storefront ad that…
The first trip a person makes to Ikea is often with his or her parents. Buzzman Paris brings that bittersweet visit to life in “My Son,” an ad that opens on a mom strolling the store with a boy who can’t be more than 10 years old.
For someone so young, the kid proves oddly precocious. He makes a beeline for a kitchen island, admiring the surface material. He lauds the practicality of slide-out drawers, and measures furniture while his mother wistfully observes.
As we’ve mentioned before, very few companies explore the topic of divorce, or its ramifications for families, in their advertising. It’s just too depressing, the thinking goes, even if it’s also, of course, relatable to so many millions of people worldwide.
A few brands have taken the risk—Honey Maid, of course, and also Ford, which rolled out this beautiful and sad short film earlier this year.
Now, it’s Ikea’s turn. Check out the spot here.
The humans sprinkled throughout the Ikea catalog traditionally have been pure background material, a supporting cast to the furniture and other brand goods for sale. But no longer!
In this spot from DDB Brussels, they speak out, during the photo shoot for the new catalog, about their hopes and dreams, display their impressive thespian chops, and most of all, are thrilled to be poised on the cusp of what will surely be worldwide fame on the A-list level.
Earlier this week, an updated take on a famous anti-drug PSA posed the classic question: “This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?”
Nope. But what about your Ikea furniture on drugs?
Hunter Fine and Alex Taylor are two veteran copywriters who met several years ago while working at BBDO New York and continue to collaborate on the occasional side project. Last year, they were discussing the shared frustrations of building Ikea furniture when a friend noted that the experience would be particularly difficult for someone under the influence of certain intoxicants.
Using the power of the pun, they then developed the idea for “Hikea,” a video series in which they recruited several willing strangers to go on camera, take substantial doses of psychedelic drugs, and attempt to construct new desks and drawers without injuring themselves in the process.
We think it’s fair to say that they experienced varying degrees of success. In the first episode, things went predictably awry for Giancarlo and Nicole once the LSD kicked in.
Acne launched a new IKEA campaign created for AOL Platforms, entitled “Let’s Relax.”
A 90-second spot imagines what the 18th century equivalent of social media would look like. As a family sits down to dinner, a hungry daughter is about to dig in when her father stops her. First, the family must wait for an artist to paint the scene. It doesn’t end there though, after the painting is finished it is rushed off to the community, up the aristocratic ranks, where it is met with approval and finally finds its way back to the family with a thumbs up. Only then may they begin their meal.
The scene returns to the modern day with another hungry daughter visibly annoyed at her father meticulously photographing their dinner. “It’s a meal. Not a competition,” reads the text on the screen, followed by the tagline, “Let’s Relax.”
While the clever approach, looking back at history to show how thoroughly tied to our time the more ridiculous aspects of social media are, is novel, the subject isn’t. Ogilvy New York documented one such social media-obsessed families with “Meet the Socialtons,” part of its “Together We Eat” campaign for IKEA U.S. last September. Acne’s effort is a bit more focused on pointing out just how absurd such behavior can get as part of its advocacy to relax and focus on just enjoying the moment, and more memorable for it.
Credits:
Client: Ikea
Agency: Acne
Creative Director: Johan Holmgren
Executive Producer: David Olsson
Art Director: Cecilia Dufils
Copywriter: Markus Bjurman
Creative (Ikea): Fredrik Preisler, Katie Copeland
Creative Director (Ikea): Morten Kjaer
Head of Planning (Ikea): Morten Lundholm
Project Manager (Ikea): Mia Malmström
Producer: Fredrik Skoglund
Director: Tompa & Rondo
Director of Photography: Anders Jedenfors
Final Art: Oliver Juan
Production Company: Acne
Follow the rolling ball!
There’s no furniture in this artsy ad for Swedish furniture store Ikea, but there is an attractive glass orb that rolls clack-clack-clack across the parquet floor of an empty, sun-splashed, high-ceilinged apartment—so that’s something.
Mother London launched a new, monkey-filled addition to its “The Wonderful Everyday” campaign for IKEA, entitled “Rediscover the Joy of the Kitchen.”
In the spot, directed by MJZ’s Juan Cabral, a group of monkeys discovers an IKEA kitchen in the middle of the jungle and have a lot of fun exploring, raiding and trashing it. The playful primates jump on light fixtures, play with water faucets, break dishes, discover a fridge full of bananas and make a mess while seemingly having a blast. The spot covertly shows off features of the kitchen while the playful primates’ entertaining hijinks play out. At the end of the ad, the tagline, “Rediscover the Joy of the Kitchen” makes for the implicit message that a new IKEA kitchen will make you as excited as the monkeys in the ad. There’s also an interesting moment where one of the monkeys presses the reverse button on the stereo and the action begins to unfold in reverse. The spot will make its broadcast debut on July 11, supported by digital, social media, OOH and print components.
Credits:
Brand: Ikea
Agency: Mother
Production Company: MJZ
Director: Juan Cabral
VFX: MPC
VFX Producer: Julie Evans
VFX Shoot Supervisor: Bill Macnamara
CG Supervisor: Fabian Frank
VFX Lead: Alex Lovejoy
Last month, Ikea launched an online wedding service. Now, it’s one step closer to offering the full honeymoon package, with a stunt that will bring breakfast in bed to guests of a temporary restaurant.
The furniture store is promoting its bedroom products with the Ikea Breakfast in Bed Cafe, operating this week in London. Reservations are available between 7 a.m. and 11 a.m., and 12 p.m. and 2 p.m. each day, with a menu the brand describes as a “classic Scandinavian breakfast” (what exactly that means—and whether it includes caviar—isn’t exactly clear).
Germaphobes can rest assured that Ikea’s staff will change the sheets between each sitting. Guests can also choose from a selection of pillows (but have to pay for the food). Single beds are not available for those who aren’t newlywed.
Via PFSK.
Does your dream wedding include getting married via webcam? You should sign up for Ikea’s newest service.
The Swedish furniture chain has launched “Wedding Online,” a (somewhat) tongue-in-cheek site that lets users pick a theme and setting—beach, boat, circus, forest, rooftop—and then hold a remote virtual ceremony by live-streaming their heads (and those of their guests) on to pictures of easily assembled wedding bodies.
“It’s love at it’s simplest,” says the launch ad. Which is true, in the same way that before the Internet, a drunken Vegas wedding with someone you just met was love at it’s simplest.
Don’t worry though, romance isn’t dead: The spot suggests you actually sit in the same room as your fiancé and the officiator—just put your laptops between you, and spare your family and friends the trouble of an actual destination.I
t’s not completely a gag. You can get married this way—for Swedish citizens, the site even supplies the proper paperwork. But mostly it’s a way to show off the brand’s products—you can click through items like bowls and light fixtures featured in the different settings to learn more and buy them.
If you do decide to tie the knot this way, instead of serving people real mediocre food, you can always just send them Ikea’s Swedish meatball emoticons.
Ikea nicely contrasts its colorful design sense with the drabness of the world at large in these print ads from TBWA in Portugal. Apparently, going with Ikea means you get a balcony in buildings that otherwise don’t have any.
The approach recalls Jung von Matt/Elbe’s outdoor ads for home-improvement chain OBI. A splash of color in a gray landscape is so good at communicating a freshness of vision.
Full ads below. Via Ads of the World.
Click the images to enlarge.
CREDITS
Client: Ikea
Agency: TBWA, Lisbon
Creative Director: Leandro Alvarez
Art Director: Julliano Bertoldi
Copywriter: Joao Ribeiro
Photographer: Yves Callewaert
Retouch: Whitelab
Just when you thought IKEA stocked every conceivable amenity for your home, the Swedish retail giant now wants to help you get married.
Yes, IKEA just delved into the business of marriage with “Wedding Online,” which lets couples pick from a handful of virtual settings (swanky rooftop, classic style or even fairy tale, anyone?), invite up to seven loved ones, and eventually tie the knot — all with a few clicks of a mouse.
To help promote its new Wedding Online service — which essentially looks like a fun Google Hangout with loved ones — IKEA turned to hometown agency Åkestam Holst to provide a quick synopsis of the offering and entice viewers to take the virtual plunge in the process. While it might not be the most romantic way to get married, Wedding Online is certainly a novel one that seemingly eliminates the financial burden and planning stress that come with, you know, a real wedding.
Client: IKEA Sweden
Title: Bröllop Online
Advertising Agency: Åkestam Holst, Stockholm
Creative Director: Andreas Ullenius
Creative Director: Andreas Ullenius
Art Directors: Erik Nordenankar and Petra Albrektson
Copywriter: Julia Sebesteny
Account Executive: Kjell Mansson
Account Manager: Agneta Oppenheim
Digital Producer: Alex Picha
Planner: Jerker Winther
Digital strateg: Anna Lundeborg
Graphic Designer: Anna Forsberg
Interactive Account Director: Henrik Adenskog
DoP: Nisse Axman
Motion Designer: Eric Karlsson
Film Producer: Frida Heder
Web Production Company: From Stockholm with Love
The viral success of Groupon’s Banana Bunker post on Facebook appears to be rubbing off on other brands. See, for example, Ikea Singapore—which has started a whole new Facebook thread clearly with the intention of replying comically to everyone it can.
The post asks people to send questions about how they might improve their bedroom and bathroom areas. A “Shelf Help Guru” then answers them. (It’s the same guy who appeared in BBH Asia-Pacific’s comical “Improve Your Private Life” video from a few years back.
The answers come in a peculiar form, though—a meme-style image, often with a pun, and a link to a product on the Ikea website that might solve the person’s issue.
It’s not quite as inspired as Groupon’s effort (the image replies are often repeated throughout the thread, and to be honest, they’re generally not that helpful). But joking with customers on Facebook one-on-one is clearly becoming a thing.
See a bunch of the replies below. Via Design Taxi.
Ikea does a ton of marketing worldwide, but its looniest ads come from one agency—BBH Asia Pacific. Just in the past year, it made the hilarious “Bookbook” ad, imaging the Ikea catalog as a futuristic gadget, and the parody of The Shining for Halloween.
Now, BBH and Ikea take you inside the bedroom, promising to “improve your private life” in this latest spot—which is quite suggestive, pun filled and faux-retro in parts.
Between Ikea and Durex, advertising is certainly bringing couples closer this week.
CREDITS
Client: Ikea
Agency: BBH Asia Pacific
Executive Creative Director: Scott McClelland
Creative Directors: Tinus Strydom & Maurice Wee
Senior Art Director: Janson Choo
Senior Copywriter: Khairul Mondzi
Business Director: Tim Cullinane
Associate Account Director: Manavi Sharma
Project Director: Lesley Chelvan
Producer: Wendi Chong
Head of Film: Daphne Ng
Social Strategist: Josie Khng
Director: Carlos Canal
Production House: Freeflow Productions
Editor: Jason Denning
Post Production House: BlackSheep Live
Audio Production: Fuse Audio
Executive Creative Director: Scott McClelland
Creative Directors: Tinus Strydom & Maurice Wee
Senior Art Director: Janson Choo
Men and women would get along better if they just had more domestically themed emojis to help them communicate properly in their text messages, says Ikea.
The Swedish furniture maker and brain-hacking home-retail maze is playing couples therapist in a new campaign from the Netherlands that announces the launch of Ikea Emoticons. These special little text-message pictures will supposedly reduce friction at home by letting you more efficiently text your significant other about having, for example, vacuumed the house.
Ridiculous as that premise may be, it’s a cute idea. And the resulting alphabet includes some clear winners, like a symbol for Swedish meatballs, as well as harder-to-explain gems, like a symbol for a green-eared dachshund. (Where in the real world does such a thing exist, without taking peyote?)
In the video, a salesman with a thick accent and expert method of smugly grabbing his white lab coat tells you where to download the emojis to your phone.
Alas, a number of reviews in Apple’s App Store pan the whole thing as a false promise. The emojis, critics claim, are not small at all but giant pictures that you have to copy and paste into your texts, which requires granting the app full access to a phone’s keyboard. (And funny thing, not everyone trusts Ikea.) Another review, which doesn’t read at all like an Ikea agency employee wrote it, blames the complaints on Apple’s coding restrictions.
Sadly, there are more fundamental flaws. For some inexplicable reason, the alphabet doesn’t seem to include a cinnamon bun emoji, or, even worse, a person tearing his or her own hair out and screaming while standing over a pile of sticks and pegs that are supposed to become a shelf emoji. Which means you’ll have to fake it with an Allen wrench and an angry face, just like in real life.
Via PFSK.
Ikea often does humorously naughty ads around Valentine’s Day. Two years ago it did a fun promotion offering free cribs for babies born nine months after Valentine’s Day. And last year it stacked a pair of chairs suggestively in an ad with hot wood-on-wood action.
Now, Ikea Singapore continues the tradition with the BBH ad above, posted to social media—showing off the chain’s new line of “beds.” Pretty cute, though I’m not convinced that bench is up to the task.
Stockholm agency Åkestam Holst created this online spot for IKEA to celebrate Valentine’s Day.
The ad features couples who have been together since 1958, when the company opened its first store. After a brief introduction showing how couples have to make decisions together while at IKEA, the spot spends the remainder of its almost four minutes on the older couples, who talk about how they met and what has kept them together through the years. While it’s a bit drawn out, you’d have to be pretty cold-hearted to be not at least a little moved by the couples’ obvious devotion and the 1958 connection is a clever idea to tie their sentiment to the brand.
Everyone else makes fun of how painful it is to assemble Ikea furniture, so why can’t Ikea? And the company does in these fun billboards, from German agency thjnk, that are themselves poorly assembled—to advertise the brand’s assembly service. Such a simple idea.
Thjnk has been doing eye-catching Ikea work for a while, including one of our favorite out-of-home ads of 2014—the RGB billboard that ingeniously turned nine square meters of ad space into 27 square meters.
Some companies might take exception to your scribbling all over its catalog. But not Ikea.
For a while now, British illustrator Sarah Horne has found the Ikea catalog to be an inspiring canvas on which to draw fantastical scenes—with mythical creatures all relaxing in minimalist Swedish homescapes. Well, Ikea saw the drawings—and loved them. And over the holidays they invited Horne to be an official children’s illustrator in residence at its Wembley store.
“As a child I was always doodling and dreaming up a never-ending number of fantastical dinner parties that featured fictional creatures from the pages of my favorite storybooks—imagining what it would be like to have dinner with a dragon or breakfast with Bigfoot,” Horne says.
“Although I’m all grown up, my mind runs riot with the fantastical meals I always wished I could be a part of, using pages from my favorite Ikea catalogue as a canvas to bring my mythical creations a little more into reality.”
Horne’s pictures gave Ikea an idea. They could use them to help reinforce the idea of the importance of family dinner times.
“We know how easy it is to get bogged down in the craziness of everyday life, so we hired our children’s illustrator in residence to put the wonder back into dining together,” says an Ikea rep. “At Ikea, we firmly believe that each and every mealtime is special in its own right, whether it’s a midweek supper for your partner, breakfast with the kids, or pizza at home on a Friday night. It’s all about spending quality time together and treasuring those moments as a family.”
Hear more from Horne below. Via PSFK.
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