For decades, city-dwellers have had to venture outside of the downtown core to get to IKEA. After years without a downtown presence, IKEA was at risk of being seen as a suburban brand catering only to suburban people, losing share to more accessible brands located downtown. As we launched a new IKEA store in downtown Toronto, we needed to powerfully demonstrate that our new outlet was designed with downtown living in mind. And as the cost of living has gone up around the world, downtown living has come to mean paying more money for less space. We needed to show how IKEA can make small space living easier and more affordable, while authentically connecting with a new audience in the downtown core.

To help people living in small downtown spaces, we created a media model that gave back to the city. Instead of spending money on billboards, we turned real homes (with real people living inside) into IKEA showrooms. Unlike a traditional installation or advertisement, utilizing real Toronto homes with real people enabled IKEA to highlight a wide breadth of lifestyles, while showing people how to make the most of their small spaces, and celebrating the diversity of life downtown.

A key challenge that IKEA faced with its urban-dwelling target was the perception that the store offering was more suited to a suburban lifestyle. With smaller living spaces becoming the norm in the increasingly expensive downtown core, our target would need to be convinced that IKEA actually had what they needed in-store for their downtown lives. We needed to find a way to quickly and powerfully demonstrate the relevance and affordability of IKEA to small-space downtown living - and execute in a way that pulled attention away from the cluttered media environment of the downtown core.

We turned the exteriors of real homes into out-of-home ads, replacing product images with actual products inside the house. In order to replicate the IKEA design system as closely as possible, we matched the “layout” of our living billboards to the iconic IKEA guidelines. Where an image would typically be in a standard out-of-home ad, was a real live scene inside the home. The billboards themselves were affixed to the homes of our selected homes, and the window stickered with the globally-recognized ‘BBP’ (big, black price) calling out individual IKEA products, specifically chosen for small-space living within the city.

The launch campaign garnered 62+ media stories, and 31+ million impressions and made an instant splash in the city. While the campaign was in-market, the new downtown store saw foot traffic 41% higher than the baseline, not to mention the noticeable lines that formed outside the store every day. In our quarterly brand tracking isolated for Toronto, we saw a +4% in TOM awareness (our key metric), as well as an increase in brand trust by over +1%. Importantly, Toronto consumers feeling inspired by IKEA lifted by +1%.