Cats was the first campaign to use our new brand idea for IKEA – “Happy Inside”. The objective was to increase brand appeal and announce the launch of the 2010 catalogue. Our target audience was broad – “the many people” in IKEA-speak. The challenge was to find a simple, emotive way of showing how IKEA can make you Happy Inside.We wanted to do an experiment, not just an ad campaign. We wanted to take the planet’s best experts in comfort – house cats – and find out what they would do in an IKEA store. To produce the campaign we released 100 cats, for real, into an IKEA store and filmed, measured and recorded what they did in order to produce a range of video and interactive assets.

We wanted to prove that IKEA’s products can make you Happy Inside, so we performed an experiment.

We released 100 house cats, the experts in comfort, into an IKEA showroom, for real… and filmed them.

If they were happy - they’d settle down and go to sleep.

We captured this and created an online film showcasing a behind- the – scenes look at the experiment. We then used the footage to produce a website that allowed users to guess which piece of furniture the cat would settle down on. If they guessed right, they won it. We also cut the footage into a 60 second commercial which brought ‘Happy Inside’ to life.We even commissioned a documentary into house cats and their relationship with their owners in the home.

Finally, we used press and banner advertising to launch the campaign featuring our experts getting comfortable on IKEA furniture.

We calculated that if we ever got 100,000 people to this website then it would make it the investment in producing it, worthwhile. We got 225,000 visitors.The average visitor spent 5 minutes on the site, and the page with the longest dwell time was the product page. In addition this resulted in large numbers of people posting the IKEA Cats online experience on Facebook walls. Not only that, but the bulk of visitors were aged 25 - 44, and living in the UK. Our target audience.