THE CHANGING CATALOGUE

TitleTHE CHANGING CATALOGUE
BrandIKEA ITALY
Product/ServiceCATALOGUE
Category B02. Promotional Item Design
Entrant STV DDB Milan, ITALY
Idea Creation STV DDB Milan, ITALY
Production WITHSTAND Milan, ITALY
Credits
Name Company Position
Luca Cortesini DDB Group Italy Executive Creative Director
Michelangelo Cianciosi DDB Group Italy Executive Creative Director
Matteo Pozzi DDB Group Italy Client Creative Director
Samantha Scaloni DDB Group Italy Client Creative Director
Pierpaolo Bivio DDB Group Italy Art Director
Camilla Nani DDB Group Italy Copywriter
Marco Flaviani DDB Group Italy Art Director
Alessandro Monestiroli DDB Group Italy Copywriter
Davide Bergna DDB Group Italy Team Account
Azzurra Ricevuti DDB Group Italy Team Account
Davide Ferazza Withstand Film Executive Producer
Sara Benvenuto Withstand Film Producer
Yuri Tartari Pucci Withstand Film Production Director
BOM BOM Director
Luca Costantini freelance DOP

The Campaign

What’s the best way to dissuade thousands of Italians from stealing the IKEA catalogue? Make it totally unappealing! And IKEA, for the first time in its history, does it with The Changing Catalogue: an absurd collection of fake covers designed to transform the catalogue into a magazine that nobody would ever steal. Horrible, boring and vaguely creepy, these covers are guaranteed to make every catalogue can feel safe and sound.

Creative Execution

For The Changing Catalogue, we’ve designed a collection of 10 fake covers that mimic real magazines which are actually on sale and cater to the smallest of niche markets. Each cover has its own identity but shares one thing with all the others: truly terrible design! From the choice of subject matter to the graphic design and colour palette, and from the logos and images to the name and the articles and columns: in these 10 covers, everything is absurd. Printed in a run of about 500,000 copies on glossy paper like real magazine covers, they are also available in digital format and customers can use a tool created on the brand’s official website to download them and print them at home.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

Over 625,000 covers downloaded and printed on the brand’s official website, which added to over 362,000 covers handed out to customers in stores (and finished in a week!) and 50,000 covers sent directly to the homes of IKEA members, makes a total of 1,000,000 catalogues saved. +165% conversations about the IKEA catalogue. +35% site traffic. 30% awareness. 98% likeability. Articles and mentions on Italian and international websites and in magazines about design, but not only design, from Adweek to Vanity Fair, via Fubiz, DesignTAXI, Not Cot and Wired.

To welcome in the new Italian positioning of “We are meant to change”, and at the same time to increase the brand’s desirability for the launch of the catalogue and the new IKEA collection, we embarked on intensive listening activities that revealed an exquisitely Italian reality: for Italians, the IKEA catalogue is a true object of desire. It is so well loved, anxiously waited for and ardently desired that 25% of users who talk about it on social networks say they steal a copy from their neighbours, colleagues and family members. This is the origin of The Changing Catalogue: the most direct and ironic creative response to an exquisitely Italian fact.