The main problem with communicating products as newness is that, after many years, the products no longer seem new.

IKEA’s practical solutions and designs at affordable prices constituted a proposal of value that had become naturally integrated into the Spanish life for 25 years. Spanish consumers had taken IKEA for granted and, without a catalogue that could be leafed through, there was really no feeling of anticipation or attraction about the new products that the brand might launch.

But, as happens with many aspects of life, you never value something so much as when you lose it.

And Spaniards losing the catalogue was… like Spain losing IKEA.

That’s why we focused precisely on the generation of Spaniards who were born in the late 90s (25 years old or younger), called the “IKEA Natives”, that is, those who have never known what life was like without IKEA… in order to take IKEA away from them.

Depriving an entire generation of IKEA could not be done with a simple TVC, however.

Thus, we made two key strategical decisions:

1. We decided to create an experience that was 100% real in the form of a reality show.

Now, the reader might think that the idea here was the reality show. It was not. We wanted to mimic the pain that the lack of the catalogue meant for the Spanish audience and push this to the extreme.

So we built an hilarious trip to the past. We put six IKEA Natives into a house from the 90s that lacked any sort of IKEA product, mercilessly confronting them with a hostile world filled with challenges such as sleeping without a Nordic duvet using heavy and itchy blankets instead, try to organize all the beauty and hygiene stuff in one single bathroom without any storage solutions or trying to relax after a sweaty aerobics class on a vinyl-upholstered sofa.

Thus was born the reality show “Trapped in the 90s”.

2. To create an authentic reality show it would not be enough to simply lock a group of 20-something consumers into a house from the 90s. We had to make sure that everything that went on in front of the cameras was content of interest and faithful to the language of the genre, both visually and in terms of content. For this, we brought into the creative process producers and scriptwriters specialized in reality shows and selected as participants a highly authentic group of IKEA Natives, all born after 1996 and all experts in content creation themselves.

During these days of cohabitation in a pre-IKEA inferno, 20 cameras installed throughout the house recorded more than 100 hours of content that would form the backbone of a transmedia strategy of branded content, crystallized in eight episodes that were posted on IKEA’s YouTube channel.

This content was supported by a mass media audiovisual campaign, both TV and digital, as well as the diffusion and amplification of content from these episodes on social media.