The new global campaign for Ikea is a stunt. A really clever stunt.
Because after all the songs were sung…
….so many songs were sung…
and beds were flung, it still lacked something – a personality that makes you feel Ikea ‘gets you’. The Monkeys did a really good job of making Ikea human in 2013, but the online film, Make Time for Living, never achieved the massive audience it might have if it had made it onto TV.
So it was up to F&B. And now Ikea has a personality you have to love.
How it got one is hallmark F&B (startling). The agency called in hypnotist, Justin Tranz, to convince Ikea shoppers that they were experiencing their future. It used its showrooms as sets and, with help from a group of actors, it created some really human scenarios for the hypnotised couple to face.
So it doesn’t matter to Ikea if the hypnotism part presses your bullshit button and some crucial parts of the set up were edited out.
What matters is that Ikea ‘gets’ that your 12 year old daughter is going to throw princess tantrums, that your eighteen year old daughter is going to muck up her life, or that your twenty-four year old daughter is still going to be a source of torture. Ikea can smile knowingly with you.
Ikea has its interactive catalogues – several different kinds of interactive catalogues, in fact. It’s inherently useful. That’s its USP, and the reason why it’s the world’s largest furniture retailer, with 349 stores in 43 countries, seventy years after launch.
Now it might begin to have something else. It might make people feel good that they shopped there and make them want to shop there again.
The Time Travel Experiment was:
Written by Joakim Labraaten
Art directed by Adam Ulvegärde
Directed by Andreas Nilsson (who also made Epic Split for F&B)
Through Bacon Stockholm
There are three films: the stunt, an interview with Adam & Sofi who were hypnotised (much of the essential stunt detail is revealed here) and an interview with Tranz.
The release of the films coincides with the global launch of the new IKEA catalogue and this year’s theme — Where The Everyday Begins & Ends – that focuses on the bedroom and bathroom.
