Young families love IKEA furniture for a peaceful sleep, But children often worry about monsters hiding in the dark. This fear only increases during “spooky season”.

IKEA turned this fear into a product benefit with "Monsters Not Included”: A campaign that subverted the classic Halloween ad format by showing no monsters whatsoever.

IKEA featured furniture that monsters traditionally make their homes: under the bed, inside closets and behind curtains.

The campaign literally shone a light at these products, showing them to be 100% monster free while highlighting their cosy design.

The "Monsters Not Included" campaign launched during Halloween 2023 to bring a playful twist to the typical ads brought out during “spooky season”.

The campaign played with IKEA’s typical advertising style of showing their products in the context of people’s homes, and the universal childhood fear of monsters hiding in the dark corners of their rooms.

Key pieces of IKEA furniture were showcased in spooky bedroom settings, but each piece was illuminated to show that no monster was hiding inside, behind or under it. The "Monsters Not Included" line mimicked the language of IKEA’s website, which states ”Batteries Not Included" on many of their electronic products.

As well as showing the furniture hid no monsters, the illumination technique put the key pieces of furniture front and centre in each execution, making each piece the star feature in work that showed no people - a rare sign in IKEA advertising.

Typically, Halloween is a time when brands lean into “spooky season”, using every type of monster they can think of to engage their customer base. But the fear of monsters is a genuine concern for one of IKEA’s core buyers: families with young children. The fear of monsters hiding under the bed, or in the dark corners of their room when the lights go out can cause unrestful sleep for developing children, which can cause them to lose concentration in school or stunt their developing social skills.

With this in mind, IKEA wanted to subvert the norms of Halloween campaigns and show parents that their furniture is designed for restful sleep any time of the year. So when thoughts of monsters is top of mind with their audience, IKEA would remove them from the conversation completely.

A fully integrated campaign featuring films, print ads, billboards and social media content was created, inspired by the places monsters traditionally hide: under the bed, inside closets and behind curtains.

For the digital videos on social, each piece of furniture became a beacon of comfort and light in rooms that featured a spooky aesthetic from classic Halloween films.

The three films, rendered entirely in richly detailed 3D and featuring originally created horror music, subverted the classic horror tropes halfway through with the click of a nightlight, revealing no monsters, and nothing scary, in the rooms.

Each film focussed on a different style of classic horror movie, from classic thriller to 80s style sci-fi to give the social videos a lot of variety throughout the campaign. The playfulness of the subversions of horror conventions kept viewers watching on a medium with a very high scroll rate.

The campaign captured the attention of the press on Halloween night, providing record coverage far beyond the media scope of the campaign.

The Drum magazine called it their “Best Halloween campaign”. Design Taxi covered the campaign in depth, stating that “IKEA is playing ghostbuster this Halloween”, placing the campaign into the culture of Spooky Season. The campaign was also featured in trade press, including Adweek, Campaign, Muse by Clio, B&T and Horizont.

The attention from the coverage, and the ads themselves, saw a 52% increase in online store traffic during the campaign’s run from 18th - 31st October, causing a 13% increase in all items featured in the “Monsters Not Included” adverts.

By the end of the campaign, the films alone had reached 7.3mil viewers.