Title	MEET THE STARS OF THE IKEA CATALOGUE
Brand	IKEA
Product/Service	IKEA CATALOGUE
Category	A04. Travel, Leisure, Retail, Restaurants & Fast Food Chains
Entrant	DDB BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
Idea Creation	DDB BRUSSELS, BELGIUM

Name	Company	Position
Peter Ampe	DDB Brussels	Creative Director
Odin Saillé	DDB Brussels	Creative Director
Francis Lippens	DDB Brussels	Business Director
Annelies Nyns	DDB Brussels	Client Producer
Maria-Laura Laubenthal	DDB Brussels	Producer
Kenn Van Lijsebeth	DDB Brussels	PR Manager
Ralf De Houwer	DDB Brussels	Creative
Jonas Caluwé	DDB Brussels	Creative
Brigitte Verduyckt	DDB Brussels	TV Producer
Dominique Poncin	DDB Brussels	Head of Strategy
Amir Farhang	Caviar	Director

The Campaign

Imagine having an IKEA catalogue in your hands. Turn a few pages and browse through the gallery of the preciously set up home interiors. Did you visualize any people in those pictures? Probably not. And if you did, they’d most likely have an insignificant appearance. Behold starting point of our campaign. A 2-minute making-of film takes us behind the scenes of the 2017 IKEA catalogue photoshoot, and into the minds of the models featured in the iconic catalogue.

Creative Execution

The content approach we decided to follow was to launch a Reach & Frequency in Ad sequencing with a total of 7 posts on Facebook. We started the campaign with 2 teasers to set the scene of the campaign behind the screens of the photo studio. Up next, the hero video of our campaign was released, offering our audience a look into the world of our overly ambitious models. Lastly, a sequence of 3 carousel photos was released to reinforce anticipation and incite customers to request their catalogue. This sequential messaging approach allowed us to tell a complete story following a clear and specific order by which a user won’t have seen a post until he has seen the one before it.  The distribution of the paper catalogue followed closely after the publication of the social videos.

Next to a targeted reach on Facebook of 1.675.891 users – meaning that 62% of our predefined targeted audience (W25-54) was reached – the campaign generated a global reach of 69.4 million. It received a widespread attention in PR with more than 300 articles featured in specialized press such as Creativity-online, Adweek, The Drum and many more. What’s more, the distribution of the paper catalogue followed closely after the publication of the social videos. This generated the effect of people opening their catalogues and looking for images of the human stars – giving some recognition to the unnoticed after all.

The IKEA catalogue is a book that's read by over 220 million people worldwide, making it one of the most read books in the world. So it makes sense for the models to consider this their breakthrough moment. Their door opener to stardom. We listen in as they dream out loud of becoming household names in TV, modelling, acting, and mentally preparing themselves for a life in the spotlights. Somehow convincing themselves that their presence in the catalogue is essential and career-making. But the catch is, that by putting the spotlight on fame seekers loudly operating in the background, we’ve put the real stars of the catalogue on the foreground. Because the real stars of the IKEA catalogue are Swedish, and they have names like Billy, Pax, and Malm..