IKEA encourages college students to get freaky in dorm rooms

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Client: IKEA

It's back to school already, and IKEA, the country's foremost source for low budget college student living, has prepared a coed-friendly site to promote its newest college wears.

When you click on the site, a cardboard box opens to a well-organized and lived-in dorm room. You can click on different pieces of furniture in the site to open a sketch of each. Once in a sketch, the item comes to life in 2D, and you can even look at different items of the same likeness on that very page. The user is deeply engaged, without having to navigate away from the campaign.

(click to view)
You can click on other rooms that give different examples of design possibilities, and the site also offers downloads for the curious college student. There are roommate videos available to watch, and you can even download the funky tune playing on the site as an MP3.

The site is simple, easy-to-use and engaging, just like the furniture college students have grown to depend on.
-- Krisserin Canary, associate editor, iMedia Communications

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Ikea's Roommate Living interactive promotion is a well-targeted and easy-to-understand invitation for college students to design, budget and potentially even win their own dorm furnishings. The site gets an A+ for staying on message and an A- for length and use of interactive infotainment elements to compel its call to action!

Throughout the Ikea promotion, students are provided with ways to "unpack" the items, as well as style and price points that appeal to them in a fun and clever way. Opportunities to check out various rooms seem consistent with both Ikea's variety of furnishings and college students' wishes to individualize their surroundings their first time out of the nest.

(click to view)Ikea should also be applauded for including free and special-offer promos in a fashion that compliments, rather than detracts from, the value of the stylish yet accessible brand. A might-be-missed reference to using a dorm bookshelf to store ramen noodles alongside books spoke to the thriftiness of dorm dwellers but was not insulting.

My only criticism of the Ikea campaign was the download your own video spots. I found them a bit creepy. That said, it may be my age. I am a few years beyond cool now. They are probably one of the more popular features on the site!
-- Lana McGilvray, VP of marketing, Datran Media

The folks doing the design and those doing the Flash work for Ikea are really hitting it off. What a fun site to wander through. I'm always surprised when I see a tough technical execution like this go so well. I didn't run into a single technical bug on the entire site; it's so frustrating to see a great creative concept get lost in bugs and incomplete thoughts. The creative team really did a great job on the transitions between the different furniture and pieces; it flowed extremely well. I also absolutely loved the download section. The videos were awesome, and I really had fun as folks walked into my office to find out what I was up to!

Two areas left me wanting on this site. The first was the fact that the other dorm room options didn't offer views of the products at the more detailed level; you just saw photographs. The second was the fact that Ikea's main website is fully ecommerce enabled, but I couldn't buy anything that I saw on this site. Ikea just left me hanging. Maybe there was a reason for this, but there was no creative brief with the request to review, so I have to assume that it was just overlooked or that increasing sales wasn't the goal. The Ikea folks are leading me through the room, getting me excited about how my dorm is going to look…and then nothing! No links to the appropriate ecommerce page, not even a less effective, but at least a seeming end by sending me to the "find the Ikea nearest you" type of offering. This seems very 1998, but with better graphics and animation.

So I have to give huge kudos to the interactive team for a flawless execution. But to the planning team, a "what happened?" You brought the visitors in, sold them on how great it was going to be, and then nothing, no option to buy, close the deal…something, anything. Anyone…Buehler?
-- Keith D. Pape, senior partner, FrontGate Creative