Ogilvy

Client: IKEA
Product: Furniture and furnishings
Title: Oddly IKEA
Media: film
Country: USA
Date Of Campaign: 8 August 2017

Background: Going back to college is more stressful now than ever. Students have too much to worry about, from classes to exams to tuition. But they’re still inundated with back to school advertising. Another 30 second commercial about furniture isn’t enough to engage with them—they’re stressed enough already. IKEA products are stylish, useful, and affordable—the holy trinity for our target. But for our Back To College campaign to succeed, we needed to cut through the usual clutter of back to school advertising and deliver something that could actually help our target audience: stressed college students who need a way to relax.

Idea: Simply put, we used IKEA products to relax college students. And we used “ASMR” to do so. ASMR is a niche YouTube genre that features whispering and tapping. Many young people watch these videos to unwind and decompress. So we used those techniques to create a video catalog on YouTube designed to help students relax.25 minutes of tapping, touching, and whispering. And over those 25 minutes, we soothed our target audience with real information about our Back To College range.Since ASMR thrives on YouTube, we started there. But we also wanted to bring the campaign to another platform immensely popular with our target: Instagram. We cut the video into short, satisfying videos to relax students in small bursts.

Results: The campaign went viral soon after it was first posted. As of today, the film has been viewed over 1.7 million times on YouTube, with 2.4 million total views across all platforms. The film also has an average of 4 minutes and 40 seconds per view – shattering the industry average of 43 seconds. Within 24 hours of being posted, the campaign had its first mention in the press. Soon after, many more publications picked up the story, from AdWeek to Architectural Digest to The New York Post. And within the first week, the campaign received over 88 million organic impressions.But most importantly, it reached our target audience – and beyond. Over 5,000 fans commented on YouTube alone about how this video helped them relax, or even decide which bedspread to buy. And as a result of the campaign, IKEA’s Back To College sales went up 27% over 2016.