Starting a family is the start of a new life stage, where IKEA becomes super relevant.

We wanted to stay true to everyday life, but break some cultural advertising taboos by focusing on the moment you discover your family is about to become bigger – essentially, when you pee on a stick. So we made an ad you could pee on.

At first glance, the ad looked like an ordinary IKEA-ad, with a very different headline asking you to, literally, pee on the ad. Because if you were pregnant and applied a urine sample on the marked area, the offer in the ad changed right before your eyes and presented you with a new, better price, the IKEA FAMILY PRICE, reminding you to join The IKEA Family Club. You didn’t need to bring any pee soaked ads to IKEA, this was a reminder of the better Family Price.

The technique and innovation for this ad took about 4 months to complete and was developed in close collaboration with medical engineers. To make the interactive functions of this ad work, we had to make several technical advancements within the existing innovation that is a pregnancy test. Pregnancy test strips were used as a starting point, which relies on antibodies that bind to the pregnancy hormone hCG, resulting in a color change. For scaling up of this technique and adopting it to the physical format of a printed ad, our team have used their experience in development of surface active materials for microfluidics and medical diagnostics. Careful selection of materials, together with a controlled capillary flow have been crucial for the success of this ad. Technical advancements made during the process have the potential to improve medical diagnostics, according to medical engineers at Mercene Labs.

This activity ( the ad ) cost us less then €30 000 including media and total production. Awareness/Observation in Sweden was 33% (!) which is approximately 2 million people (18-65 y.o) and in this segment women with kids/5 y.o we hade over 50% observation.

In comparison we usually need a media investment in Sweden around €750 000 to create that kind of awareness/observation.

The brand preference in the Target audience that had seen or heard about the activity had increased from 65% to 79% (+14%).

Product liking in the Target Audience that had seen or heard about the activity increased from 59% to 69% (+10%).

The Crib is completely out of stock in Sweden.

The ad also created approx 12 Million dollars in earned media.

Over 1650 other publications ”republished” the ad in editorials and articles.