THE CHANGING CATALOGUE

TitleTHE CHANGING CATALOGUE
BrandIKEA ITALY
Product/ServiceCATALOGUE
Category B03. Use of Ambient Media: Small Scale
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
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
Marco Flaviani DDB Group Italy Art Director
Alessandro Monestiroli DDB Group Italy Copywriter

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

Launched on all the brand’s digital and social channels with an ironic and surreal video, the project involved not only IKEA fans and followers, but also customers and registered members. In fact, the release of the video was followed by a mailing of the new disguised 2018 catalogue directly to the homes of 50,000 registered IKEA members and to 100 of the top influencers and design bloggers in Italy, the creation on the brand’s official website of a tool to allow users to download and print their favourite covers in the comfort of their own homes, and the organisation of a series of events in the brand’s 21 Italian stores to distribute over 360,000 covers to customers.

Results

+165% conversations about the IKEA catalogue. +30% site traffic. 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. Over 625,000 covers downloaded from the brand’s official website. Over 362,000 covers sold out in the brand’s 21 Italian stores in less than a week.

After launching a video on SN’s that engaged with fans and followers, inviting them to get the covers, IKEA activated other channels too. It sent the new disguised catalogue directly to the letterboxes of 50,000 registered members. It engaged with 100 of the top influencers and design bloggers in Italy, sending them a special DM. It organised a series of events in its 21 Italian stores to distribute over 362,000 covers and none were left in less than a week. It created a web tool to let its customers download and print the cover from their own home.

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.