IKEA Spain created the first catalogue to be rapped and delivered as a music video.

Why? Our conventional catalogue awareness campaigns proved not to be effective with a 18-24 y/o target that was vital for our penetration goal.

So, we moved into the music entertainment territory and, using social listening and a well-known Freestyle rap musician and influencer, created a challenge that hooked our target that up to now had been immune to our communication efforts.

The overall aim of the campaign for the new catalogue was to maintain the previous year figure of global penetration even if IKEA had decreased by 7% the distribution of the paper version of the catalogue in its areas of influence.

IKEA Spain already had a catalogue awareness campaign on air, but we needed to create a new approach that would make it possible to impulse the digital and electronic versions of the catalogue going for a new target aged 18-24 y/o (74% of whom state that they are not interested in home furnishings)

While we were researching our target and trends, we discovered that one of the biggest influencers within Freestyle rap in Spain, Arkano, had dedicated a couple of lines in one of his old songs to IKEA. (“You’d think IKEA was my sponsor, the number of times they’ve insisted I come out of the closet.”)

So, we challenged him on Twitter. If he really dared, he should rap our new IKEA catalogue live (without seeing it before).

As part of our global research, we turned to social listening to understand what music artists and music styles were trending amongst our target: urban culture, and more specifically, urban music including trap, reggaeton and rap were top. The last of these became the second most popular music style in terms of volume on social media according to Twitter Spain in 2018.

So, Arkano's lyric and tweet was a golden nugget that allowed us to spark an musical challenge with him using an organic storytelling and channel planning in real time.

Arkano tweeted using the IKEA reference. So, IKEA Spain, using their Twitter profile, challenged him in real time: if he really dared, he should go to a studio and freestyle something more difficult. IKEA proposed their new catalogue ... without seeing it before. If he suceded, we would we would furnish the San Blas socio-educational center he sponsors in his home town, Alicante.

He accepted and while we were recording and preparing the video for launch, IKEA and Arkano would use Twitter to update their followers with the status of the challenge.

We finally released the full video a week after Arkano accepted the challenge, posting and promoting it in our Facebook and Twitter profiles and our YouTube channel.

The campaign spread like wildfire in the national media linking it to Arkano's good cause.

We managed to achieve and exceed the global penetration objective with the catalogue launch thanks to this campaign. As for the results in the media, IKEA vs. Arkano reached more than 11 million unique users, and achieved 2.7 million interactions and 15 million views. But it didn’t stop there: the innovative campaign had a substantial impact in national media and presence on Vodafone Yu (194,000 views), one of the radio programs/contents platforms most relevant to and consumed by our target group.

And most importantly of all, we successfully created the first ad hoc campaign for this crucial and strategic target group, which had previously been immune to our marketing campaigns.