Review: Richard Morgan on… Ikea

I always look for a TV ad to be the start of a great experience. The door needs to be opened a crack and I should feel compelled to fling it wide open in excitement.
A creative director at the agency Mother once said, “TV is the trailer to the bigger experience”. This stuck with me and serves as key criteria on which to judge the agency’s recent campaign “Make room for your life” for Ikea.
The TV ad plays out simply with a couple who can’t see each other across their living room amidst their copious amounts of clutter. This quickly changes as items begin to fly into neat Ikea storage spaces.  In other words, the ad reveals the power of Ikea storage to turn life’s clutter into simply-organised spaces where the viewer can breathe once again.
The ad grabbed my attention and then lost it when reaching the end frame ‘In-store * online * mobile’. This is a shame as I found out much later that there was a hidden side to the campaign to explore online, but this was poorly sign-posted.
The ad already set up a world where I can easily tidy my life up, but I didn’t know the agency had also created a brilliant series of short films on YouTube and the campaign site. These films show how cleverly the storage items can be used – whoever you are and whatever your life is. However, the TV ad needed a call to action to bridge these two experiences – the fantasy of the ad meets the reality of my own life.
If you visit Ikea’s website and view ‘Storage Ideas’ you can see real people’s lives told in videos and with links to relevant products. One video is of a record collector/DJ/parent and the other an avid collector of trainers. Both these people have a lovely collection of things that wasn’t being stored and showed off to its best. Each film had visual cues to key products, that when clicked on through YouTube or the site, took you directly to that product ready to buy. Brilliant.
A good example is the record collector clip. I can see, along with his records, he also has a collection of classic synthesisers just lying against walls. Ikea’s Stolmen shoe rack beautifully held each synthesiser so it could be used, not just displayed. Musicians may well have gone to specialist music stores to buy these racks, but here an Ikea product, that’s easy to buy and assemble, has them covered.
In my view, this campaign was an enjoyable experience on both sides – the TV and the online content. But when you have great content to support a great campaign, it’s a real shame not to connect the two.

Richard Morgan is senior creative lead at G2 Joshua