So in Christmas 2023, a year with the thinnest wallets, IKEA wanted to provide a savvy solution to a huge festive expense. The poultry centrepiece that often costs more than a flight to its namesake: Turkey

The ambition was to garner media attention over the festive season, a time when IKEA is rarely at the forefront of people's minds.

We decided it was about time to rethink tradition, and swap expensive turkey for something friendlier on the finances.

And so the IKEA Turkey-sized Meatball was born.

We turned one of IKEA’s most iconic brand assets into a more appropriately sized Christmas centrepiece.

The IKEA Turkey-Sized Meatball.

Affordable. Delicious. Absolutleymassive.

Turkey is the Christmas Dinner centrepiece in 90% of UK households. It was also one of the hardest hit items in the food inflation cost-of-living crisis—a regular story for news media in the UK. IKEA is well-known by UK consumers for offering value, and UK consumers just love the IKEA Meatball. Many visit the store just to get their meatball/lingonberry jam/mash fix.

Enter the Turkey-Sized Meatball, bringing a value-based solution to the rampant inflation of Christmas Dinner, and unmistakably IKEA-branded.

We first targeted IKEA fans, via social media, which took light - and combined with the insights above - was our news hook to target media. Using our hero film asset.

We created a single video asset that was placed on IKEA UK’s Instagram and TikTok account. This singular asset blew up, within the week we were appeared on broadcast news and even the front page of the Washington Post. We had other assets in the form of stills of the meatball that helped sustain the hype as well as provide a destination for people to enter the competition where they could win one.

The IKEA Turkey-sized Meatball had an oversized impact.

From a campaign that had a tiny budget, we delivered IKEA UK’s best-ever performing social post - for reach and engagement - on IKEA’s platforms alone it received 29 million views and over 500,000 likes.

It generated over 830m editorial impressions, from over 500 positive news articles - for an investment of less than £100k, IKEA's Turkey-Sized Meatball generated media coverage worth over £2.5m.

Over 12,000 people entered the competition. Between the winners, 500kg of IKEA Turkey-sized Meatballs were consumed at Christmas.

And IKEA search activity increased by 38%, at a time of year when IKEA is usually not front of mind.