IKEA has built a body of advertising that consistently punches above its category weight. 'The Lamp' - Spike Jonze's 2002 spot that made you feel sympathy for a discarded floor lamp, then laughed at you for it - is one of the most discussed ads ever made. The 'Pee Test' ad in a Swedish magazine that revealed a pregnancy discount to women who tested the page is a masterclass in media invention. IKEA advertising tends to be clever, warm, and quietly subversive - a reflection of the brand's Scandinavian roots.
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Home with Them
- IKEA
For Gen Z and younger millennials, home is defined less by the address than by the animal in it. Sofas, blankets and ordinary corners have become shared territory with dogs and cats, and staying in stopped reading as missing out. IKEA builds the work around that, casting the pet as the reason the ro
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IKEA: Deep Comfort
- IKEA
IKEA reframes wear and tear as evidence. A deep indentation in a sofa or a cushion is not the product failing, it is the physical record of someone having properly rested there. Each image isolates a human trace left behind after hours of sleep or work, so the dent becomes the proof of comfort rathe
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Love
- IKEA · Instinct · 2021
IKEA Russia addressed the reality that romantic love alone is rarely enough to survive the daily friction of living together. The campaign taps into the truth that domestic clutter and a lack of organized personal space quietly strain even the strongest relationships. To reframe home organization fr
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Sustainability Campaign
- Ikea · 2022
IKEA "Sustainability Campaign". IKEA frames affordable, sustainable living at home.
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Lion Man
- IKEA
Part of IKEA UK's Wonderful Everyday platform, Lion Man sells the living room as a place to do nothing well. The insight: lions rest up to 18 hours a day, so resting is not laziness but something a great beast is simply good at, and the film is shot as a straight wildlife-documentary parody observin
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Plantball
- IKEA · 2020
IKEA had to sell a plant-based version of the meatball to people who came specifically for the meatball. The plant ball is built from yellow pea protein, oats, potatoes, onion and apple to land as close to the original as possible, and carries a climate footprint of four percent of the classic. The
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Poäng - Friendship
- IKEA · 2016
IKEA marks 40 years of the Poäng chair by asking how it came to exist at all. The insight: a design classic earns its status through its origin story, not its longevity alone, so the film goes back to the making of the chair rather than restating that it has lasted.
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Step Siblings
- IKEA · Hjaltelin Stahl · 2018
IKEA "Step Siblings". IKEA frames blended-family life and the work of making a shared home.
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One by One
- IKEA · Acne · 2017
An IKEA story about improving home life one small change at a time, reflecting the brand's democratic-design mission that everyday living gets better through accessible, well-designed products. The idea reframes the home as something built and bettered incrementally, with IKEA as the enabler of smal
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Design is for Everyone
- IKEA · 2023
Built on IKEA's founding belief that good design shouldn't be a luxury for the few but a right for the many. The work dramatises democratic design - beautiful, functional, affordable products made for real, imperfect everyday life - positioning IKEA not as a furniture seller but as a champion of bet
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Design is for Everyone
- IKEA · 2023
Built on IKEA's founding belief that good design shouldn't be a luxury for the few but a right for the many. The work dramatises democratic design - beautiful, functional, affordable products made for real, imperfect everyday life - positioning IKEA not as a furniture seller but as a champion of bet
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Ghost
- IKEA · Triad · 2020
IKEA "Ghost". A lonely, half-empty room sets up a story about turning a bare house into a real home. IKEA frames furnishing as the cure for emptiness.
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Welcome Home
- IKEA · 2018
IKEA "Welcome Home". An everyday estate street frames home and community across ordinary lives. IKEA celebrates the homes real people actually live in.
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Infinite Play
- IKEA · Mother · 2022
IKEA "Infinite Play". IKEA celebrates imaginative, endless play in the home.
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We Are The Change
- IKEA · 2024
IKEA "We Are The Change". IKEA rallies people around sustainable change starting at home.
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Hijos
- IKEA · McCann Madrid · 2017
IKEA "Hijos". IKEA frames family and children within the everyday life of the home.
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Making Home Count
- IKEA · TBWA · 2020
IKEA's 'Making Home Count' by TBWA\Singapore: a thank-you to everyone fighting the pandemic by staying home, cut entirely from footage the creatives shot inside their own lockdown flats. The insight: the brand of the home honours the home's new job - and the production constraint is the proof of sin
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Togetherness Assembled
- IKEA · Grey Dubai · 2023
Al-Futtaim IKEA's Ramadan campaign 'Togetherness Assembled' by GREY Dubai: family moments of the holy month furnished by the brand's functional range. The insight: IKEA's assembly metaphor applied to the family itself - togetherness as the thing the furniture is actually for.
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Steps
- ikea · mother london · 2019
To launch its sustainable Greenwich store, IKEA asked customers to arrive the greenest way possible, on foot. The insight: a long walk feels daunting as a distance but manageable as a countdown, so 80 posters across South East London each displayed the exact number of steps remaining to the store, t
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Pee Ad
- IKEA · Åkestam Holst · 2018
IKEA Sweden ran a magazine ad women could urinate on like a pregnancy test. The insight: the moment a woman learns she's expecting is exactly the moment a crib becomes relevant, so if the embedded tech detects pregnancy the ad reveals a discounted price on a baby crib, turning the ad itself into the
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Can I help?
- ikea · We Are Social Milan · 2021
For International Women's Day, IKEA and We Are Social Milan wrote an open letter to the Treccani dictionary about a phrase too polite to be condemned: Can I help? The insight: the most durable inequality hides in language that sounds generous, because offering to help with housework quietly frames i
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LIKEA
- ikea · Ogilvy · 2025
IKEA's LIKEA campaign builds on everyday idioms that already colour how people talk about home. The insight: familiar phrases like home sweet home carry ready-made feeling, so pairing them with IKEA products, and folding the brand name into the word LIKEA, positions IKEA as the bridge between ordina
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Tomorrow starts tonight
- IKEA · Mother · 2020
To position its bedding range as an essential wellness tool, IKEA sought to shift consumer perception of sleep from a passive necessity to an active health benefit. The campaign targets the cultural paradox where people spend heavily on expensive wellness supplements, energy drinks, and night creams
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The Fearniture Collection
- IKEA · DDB · 2020
Three IKEA products - a stool, a desk chair, a clothes rack - lit so precisely that their shadows on the wall become a monster, a ghost and a spider. Nothing is added; only the lamp moves. The insight is that a locked-down Italian Halloween had to happen indoors, among the furniture people already o
IKEA's best campaigns work because they understand that the brand exists inside people's homes - the most intimate space there is. The advertising that earns its place in that relationship is the advertising that treats home as something worth caring about, not just furnishing. That human insight is the engine behind almost everything great IKEA has made.