Title	ASSEMBLY FAIL
Brand	IKEA GERMANY
Product/Service	ASSEMBLY SERVICE
Category	D02. Costs/Creative Performance PR Campaign
Entrant Company	THJNK Hamburg, GERMANY
Advertising Agency	THJNK Hamburg, GERMANY

Name	Company	Position
Armin Jochum	Thjnk	Cco
Bettina Olf	Thjnk	Executive Creative Director
Georg Baur	Thjnk	Creative Director
Torben Otten	Thjnk	Creative Director
Niko Auf dem Berge	Thjnk	Art Director
Karl Wolfgang Epple	Thjnk	Copywriter
Verena Harwege	Thjnk	Account Director
Victoria Linz	Thjnk	Account Manager
Hilko Wiegmann	Thjnk	Final Artwork
Lucie/Lisann	Lucie/Lisann	Post Production

The Campaign

Task: Create a campaign that showcases IKEA’s assembly service. Idea: IKEA furniture is actually not all that hard to assemble. But as everyone knows, you can easily mix up some of the parts and end up putting it all together back to front. It can happen to anyone. Even billposters, so it would seem. Solution: Perfectly ordinary posters. But what’s different is that the motifs have evidently been mounted the wrong way round, as can happen with the products shown. Luckily, that’s where IKEA’s assembly service is happy to help. Result: A viral hit with some good old billboards!

The Brief

Perfectly ordinary posters.

Execution

So we now had our poorly assembled billboards, but we didn’t want to show them to the people directly. Instead, our plan was to put up only a few billboards at first and then we waited for people to react. We wanted to make them believe that the billposters failed at assembling the billboards. And they totally fell for it: People posted photos with the caption “You had one job” etc. The internet seized our idea. Blogs and social media increased our media penetration – without extra budget, of course. We gave them one and half week until we finally announced on IKEA Germany’s Facebook page: “Sorry guys, we fooled you all”. After that we launched the campaign all over Germany for two more weeks.

People on the streets and users on the web – everybody talked about our poorly assembled billboards. Some were sure it was done on purpose. Others were convinced: epic fail! Suddenly we had a viral hit. When all we wanted was to put up some good old billboards. What we got was an internet phenomenon people didn’t only talk about – but smiled about! Plus: the smiles of our client. A huge success, not at least because a lot of Germans got to know the IKEA assembly service – while we only used a minimum of the normal out-of-home budget, IKEA has to spend to reach so many people. People who now remember IKEA as a brand which understands them and their everyday issues.

The Strategy

Let’s admit it: IKEA furniture is not always easy to assemble. That’s why IKEA asked us to come up with an out-of-home campaign for their assembly service. The challenge: Most people complain about IKEA furniture – but they don’t know about the IKEA assembly service. Our task was to change that. For us – only having a small budget – the only proper way to make the assembly service more popular, was to go for a campaign which makes the people talking. Our idea was to create perfectly ordinary billboards. But what’s different: Somehow the bill poster got things mixed up – it can happen to anyone. Just like with IKEA furniture.