The mattress category has changed dramatically over the past decade. What used to be a tactile, in-person experience dominated by a handful of brands (including IKEA) is now one where the norm is to buy before you try with over 178 brands fighting for your dollars.

Sleep has become big business with direct-to-consumer disruptors like Casper opening bricks-and-mortar stores and ramping up their marketing spend. It feels like everywhere you look there’s an ad for a mattress-in-a-box.

To breakthrough in this increasingly cluttered landscape, IKEA needed to carve out an ownable way to talk about their mattress range that connected directly with consumers.

Sleep isn’t just big business, it’s also a big issue in today’s society. We’re in the midst of a sleep-loss epidemic. People overlook the importance of sleep and see exhaustion as a status symbol. As a result, over one-third of Canadians sleep less than the recommended 7 hours per night.

There are many things that keep us from sleeping. Things we tell ourselves are more important than going to bed. But most of these distractions aren’t as important as sleep.

So we decided to remind people of the importance of sleep at the exact time they were avoiding it. The result was IKEA Bedtime, a series of highly-targeted contextual messages telling people to stop acting crazy and go to sleep.

With increased competition, we knew the usual formula for an integrated campaign wasn’t enough for IKEA to stand out. So we selected channels that would allow us to intercept our audience when and where they were avoiding sleep.

After our competitors had gone to sleep between the hours of 10:30PM and 3:30AM, we got to work. We created a series of time-triggered out-of-home and digital messages asking consumers why they were still awake.

We focused our efforts in an environment we knew was one of the biggest culprits for keeping people awake at night. We’ve all been guilty of falling down a YouTube rabbit hole, watching video after video of meaningless content when we should have gone to sleep. So we partnered with Google and utilized their VOGON platform to create a series of contextually relevant ads.

The campaign took a national, always-on approach running every night from the hours of 10:30PM to 3:30AM, starting in February and ending in August 2019.

On YouTube, we created personalized videos calling out the exact time of night and the type of content they were watching, ensuring totally unique messages customized to each viewer. We even asked if they were still awake because they didn’t have a comfy IKEA mattress, telling them exactly how much time was left until IKEA opened so they could go buy one. All of this was delivered by a familiar Swedish voice that's immediately attributable to IKEA, Jonas — IKEA's spokesperson for the past 17 years.

On DOOH, we integrated our messages with a national OOH buy with minute-specific time-triggered billboards that ran through the whole night, calling out the exact time and telling people to go sleep.

By addressing our target in the right environment at the right time, we created a personalized connection. We received an outpouring of comments, tweets, and reaction videos of people shocked and truly impressed by the simplicity and accuracy of the campaign and how IKEA knew exactly what time it was and where they were, exactly what they were watching, and exactly how much time was left until IKEA opened in the morning.

But our audience wasn’t just entertained by our approach, they immediately reacted to our message. After just the first few weeks of the campaign, Google praised the campaign, announcing that they’ve “NEVER seen any product interest lift so high, EVER.” at an astounding +673% for the keyword “IKEA mattress”. Google also reported an extremely strong lift in brand measures with a +108.4% lift in brand interest and impressive top-quartile lift across all ad recall and purchase intent.