Ikea

Another awesome banner campaign I’ve stumbled across recently (did you see the mobile controlled banner idea?) comes direct from Swedish mega retailer Ikea.  As anyone that has ever been to an Ikea store knows, their stores are humongous taking weeks to walk through (and months more to assemble the furniture you’ve bought!).  So is it possible to fit all 2800 products in a humble banner ad?  And I’m not talking an expandable unit I’m talking about a 300×250!  The answer is yes.  Wowsers!

The ADZAG Monday Mixtape ready to go!  There was definitely a stand out idea that I covered this week.  It came from Argentina and used a small social network that likes to truncate the world into 140 characters.  Take a guess at which one of the below you think it is and let me know what you think, its a stunning idea.

The ADZAG Monday Mixtape

1. How Is Trust In Marketing Changing?
2. Quicksilver Harness Renewable Energy To Give Their Brand A Story
3. The Worlds First Twitter Commercial Using ASCII Art
4. Inspiring Imagination With fnuggy
5. IKEA Uses Clever Content To Tell Kitchen Stories

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Russian IKEA recently released a clever content execution incorporating multiple viewpoints into a single narrative.  Consumers could jump from character to character and enjoy a unique first person view of the unfolding story, in essence creating a highly engaging web series that brought the viewer into the onscreen events.  Clever content, excellent results.

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Winter in the Northern Hemisphere can be pretty brutal at times especially for iPhone users whose little fingers can get awfully cold.  Enter Ikea who created 12,000 “BERÖRA” kits that let you sew in special conductive thread to your gloves so your iPinkies never need be exposed again!

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So often big brands over look their own assets in favour of spending big on TV, online, print et al when the answer to their particular communication problem lies much closer to home.  IKEA Australia and The Monkeys obviously recognised this with an overwhelmingly simple idea to recruit people in time for the launch of a new megastore.  By placing ‘inserts’ in the packaging of the furniture Ikea already sells by the bucketload a huge audience was reached attracting 4285 job applications resulting 280 new staff…but the kicker is that total media spend was $0!

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To help generate some summer buzz and excitement Ikea Belgium created an interactive YouTube game called ‘Catch the Swedish light’. Based around the Swedish tradition of celebrating Mid Summers Eve and the season of eternal sunshine 48 YouTube videos were created featuring unique codes stamped on each frame. Each video featured a series of Ikea products with a beam of sunlight happily dancing around them. Within a single frame of the video the sunlight hits one of the products at which point viewers could take the unique code displayed and enter it into a competition to win the piece of furniture in question.

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Retailers have led the way in social media innovation in recent years with some of the most innovative campaigns and long term initiatives coming straight out the shopping malls and high streets. In reality its not a surprise that an inherently social activity is being transported onto a more socialised web but that doesn’t mean that the innovation is any less compelling.

Below is a list of what I believe are 5 of the best retail led social initiatives and where possible video case studies;

Ikea Malmo Store Opening:
The very best marketing can change things, and in this case Ikea’s ingenious Facebook campaign actually caused the platform to re-evaluate its advertising policies. A wonderful guerrilla style initiative that exploited the standard photo tagging feature. The idea was brought to life by Gordon Gustavsson a fake Malmo store manager that had his own Facebook profile. Over the course of the campaign Gordon uploaded photo’s of his new store showrooms, all of which were naturally full of Ikea furniture. Then the first person to tag their name on a particular piece of furniture won it! So tag a lamp and get that lamp! The wonderful thing about the campaign, and the ingenious Facebook exploitation is that as soon a person tags themselves in a picture, that picture is added to their activity feed! So almost immediately the campaign became a Facebook viral sensation. As word spread about the free furniture, Gordon Gustavsson’s profile was inundated by eager Swedes begging for the next showroom picture to be uploaded, new pictures beget new exposure beget new interest and so the cycle continued. Unfortunately a brand can no longer create a fake profile so we won’t see any further innovation in this space but that doesn’t stop this being the best social retail initiative I have seen.