Whilst IKEA is well-known for its easy to assemble furniture and affordable home accessories, lots of people don’t think of it a specialist retailer when it comes to mattresses and sleep related products. The objective of the campaign was not only to drive awareness of IKEA as a sleep specialist but also to position IKEA as a sleep expert. We decided to do this by showcasing how their range of bedroom products can enable people to get a good night’s sleep.

We gave the expression “the stuff dreams are made off” a whole new meaning by creating a series of real-life, giant sculptures of dreamy subjects made entirely from different IKEA products for each of the bedroom variants that help us sleep - comfort, temperature and light. For ‘comfort’, a seven metre long sculpture of a sheep sleeping peacefully made from pillows and mattresses was showcased live at IKEA’s Tottenham store in London where people could interact with it and learn from IKEA’s sleep expertise. Other installations included a moon made of bed lamps for ‘lighting’, and clouds made of blankets and duvets for ‘temperature’. They were showcased in ethereal social films - showing that advertising can also be disruptive by being peaceful.

IKEA is founded on the principle of democracy. That’s why we only ever target the many, not the few. Research revealed that the many were choosing to neglect sleeping life in favour of waking life. So accordingly we came up with a big ambition; to get the many sleeping better and longer.

Working with Dr. Guy Meadows we identified light, temperature and lighting as the three sleep essentials that can enable people to sleep better and longer.

This is where IKEA’s product come in. We wanted to showcase IKEA’s sleep range in a way that would get people to reconsider IKEA as sleep experts.

The sculptures were all crafted from a vast array of manipulated IKEA products, each of them representing a different part of the retailer’s range of sleep related products. The in-store installation took place in February 2019 at IKEA’s Tottenham store in London and lasted for over a month, over the course of which thousands of visitors were impacted. The sculptures were all created in large scale - the giant sheep alone being 7 meters long - making them visually arresting and disrupting.

When you’re competing with Kermit the Frog memes and the Love Island hype machine, winning a second of people’s attention on social is no mean feat. A feat that -needless to say- gets meaner when it comes to content from brands. So we took it as quite a compliment that our Sleep films had the highest Facebook completion rate of any IKEA campaign, ever. And on Instagram, we smashed the platform’s average number of View Through Rates. (Or in non social-jargon terms, ‘stopping the scroll’.) All of which means we won people’s time – and most importantly, delivered them surprising expertise for a better night’s sleep in the process