People normally don’t admire banners, especially when they’re tapped by mistake and interfere with ones intentions. So we created the perceptive mobile banners. When people tapped on them, IKEA kindly asked if it really was their intention to visit IKEA’s website or if it was a mistake. If it was a mistake, they could stay on the site, and if it wasn’t they could choose to be sent to IKEA’s website.

The idea was born and raised as a mobile idea. In mobiles you get spammed with all sorts of ads. That is why we needed to catch your attention. How? With moving media of cute dogs getting a bath and kids in the kitchen making a mess with chocolate sauce. This was only a part of the solution of knowing the mobile behaviour. Due to the fat thumb syndrome you click on mobile banners by mistake. That is why we do not send you away directly. We implemented a chance to make the decision on your own – simply by tapping the button “back” or “to IKEA’s website”. We also needed to optimize the mobile space we were buying. That is why every message in our ads was custom made to fit their placement.

Due to the tags implemented in the banners we could see that engagement rate was 3X higher than with an average banner. People actually went back and forth to see the message again. This resulted in an amazing click through rate of 1% (compared to the average of 0,05%), which is even more impressing since people had to click twice to land on the website. 2/3 (6 millions) of the Swedish citizens saw the campaign and hundreds of blogs and sites world wide embraced the banners as “human, clever and hilarious” and many did not understand how someone could not have thought about this before. At the end of the campaign we managed to drive +400,000 additional mobile visitors to IKEA’s website and hopefully opening up a new door to how people see mobile banners.