Summer time was approaching in southern Sweden, however in a small city deep within the forest, the scene was already set for Christmas. Inside a studio spanning greater than 8,600 sq. toes was a room decked out with a towering tree, stockings, fir wreaths, candles, and star ornaments.
Down the corridor, one other room was bursting with pink decorations for Lunar New 12 months. Across the nook was a kitchen painted a heat shade of blue, with baskets strung alongside the ceiling and copper pots hanging above the range.
The identical constructing additionally homes numerous throw cushions, greater than 3,600 books, dozens of flowers, just a few surfboards, a kitchen with a whole lot of bananas, and 75 sofas. These myriad home scenes are a part of Ikea Advertising & Communications (IMC), the retailer’s international advertising and content material studio.
From its distant location in Älmhult—a rural city of roughly 18,000 residents and the birthplace of Ikea—IMC is a artistic powerhouse that oversees greater than 70,000 productions annually. It makes all the things from international campaigns to 3D fashions and animations to movies, product photographs, and the meeting directions that include Ikea’s flat-pack furnishings. Its workers, hailing from 34 completely different nations, serve 63 markets and 600 shops world wide.
“We are saying that is the house of properties, the dream manufacturing facility,” stated Mia Malmström, IMC’s managing director.
Formalized in 2020, IMC is a part of a rising development of manufacturers constructing in-house artistic studios. In-housing is on the rise, with 82% of advertisers saying they’d an in-house company in 2023, up from 78% in 2018 and 58% in 2013, in keeping with the Affiliation of Nationwide Advertisers in-house company survey.
However IMC can also be evolving quick because it faces pressures just like the rise of synthetic intelligence (AI), increasing from 400 to 450 workers over the previous six months to satisfy a rising demand for content material.
“One in every of our questions is, how can we fill this new digital world with inspiration? We’re nonetheless engaged on it,” Malmström stated.
ADWEEK took an unique tour of IMC to discover the place it’s headed and what different manufacturers can be taught from Ikea’s “dream manufacturing facility.”
IMC’s management group (L-R): Niklas Lindström, Mia Malmström, Amy Leo
From Catalogues to CGI
The roots of IMC’s mission to deliver inspiration stretch again to Ikea’s early years within the Nineteen Forties, when 17-year-old entrepreneur Ingvar Kamprad started a mail-order enterprise promoting items like pens and clocks. After increasing to furnishings in 1948, Kamprad promoted his wares by way of brochures. Ikea printed its first catalogue in 1951, for which Kamprad wrote a lot of the copy.
Ikea’s catalogue—which nonetheless stirs nostalgia for generations of Swedes—demonstrates how communication and advertising have been on the middle of the enterprise from the beginning, Malmström stated. {The catalogue} helped construct Ikea’s model and have become so fashionable {that a} signal frequent on many Swedish mailboxes through the years learn: “No promoting or unsolicited mail please, simply the Ikea catalogue.”
“[Ikea] realized alongside the best way that it’s about not solely promoting a product, however placing it into context, making a house, and making it inspirational,” Malmström stated.
The final printed Ikea catalogue in 2020 marked the top of an period, however IMC had already begun adapting to a brand new digital world, venturing into rising manufacturing applied sciences like CGI beginning within the Nineteen Nineties. Its mission of bringing residence inspiration and recommendation to customers stays, even because it takes completely different shapes.
At present, IMC is an element artistic company, half manufacturing and know-how studio. Its workers consists of strategists, inside designers, builders, 3D artists, photographers, content material creators, and extra.
Just lately, the studio has been including roles that embody rising tech abilities, comparable to AI builders, copywriters with search engine marketing competence, artwork administrators with movement expertise, software program engineers, and digital product leaders.
Storytelling for Properties
Storytelling and product improvement are intently entwined at Ikea, which is why IMC and the corporate’s product groups sit close to one another, Malmström defined. Each comply with the identical international artistic path, for which the present theme is “optimistic future.”
“It’s not simply in regards to the product trying implausible and being reasonably priced. We would like the merchandise to be one thing greater than a product,” Malmström stated, including that each time Ikea develops a brand new product it asks, “how can we inform this story?”
A latest instance is IMC’s quick movie in regards to the Zebrasäv pendant lamp, a quiet and human portrait of the product’s designer, who grew to become obsessive about chasing gentle after shifting to Sweden.
IMC’s artistic groups work in another way as a result of along with a typical copywriter and artwork director duo, they embrace an inside designer who helps develop revolutionary methods of utilizing the merchandise. On tour of the studio, ADWEEK noticed an inside designer sitting beside a 3D movement artist to design a mannequin room on the web site.
“We discuss rather a lot about our residence furnishing data. Everybody within the constructing has it to an extent, however inside designers carry the torch,” stated artistic director Amy Leo.
Malmström suggested different manufacturers to take a leaf out of Ikea’s playbook by involving the advertising group as early as attainable in product improvement and launches.
“Begin collaborating from the artistic idea of a product and to work on the identical insights and to have a joint artistic path,” she suggested. “The whole lot must be linked. It takes a village.”
By no means Predictable
With the rise of social media and its calls for for content material, one in all IMC’s largest challenges is balancing model consistency with artistic flexibility, Leo stated.
IMC works with exterior companies in some markets and delivers property to native groups as steered social and digital content material. It’s at the moment collaborating with native markets on a world model marketing campaign for this yr.
One in every of IMC’s objectives is to assist Ikea be extra reactive and open to its neighborhood on social, the place the model has taken on a lifetime of its personal amongst followers sharing Ikea furnishings hacks or devoting Reddit threads to the retailer’s stuffed animals. IMC is experimenting with “extra fast, enjoyable, and lo-fi” social media content material, Leo stated.
“Folks have this neighborhood feeling [towards Ikea], and we embrace that,” she added.
Over time, Ikea has realized that manufacturers “can not management and steer” on social media, Malmström cautioned. “You need to be a bit snug and courageous in not interfering an excessive amount of with new channels, as a result of in the event you do this, it turns into predictable and boring.”
AI as Collaborator
AI presents a brand new entrance in IMC’s digital evolution. The studio “sees a variety of potential” in utilizing generative AI to maintain up with the amount of productions wanted in the present day, stated studios improvement supervisor Niklas Lindström.
“The world is demanding much more content material, and we have to work out methods to fulfill that want,” he added.
IMC is already integrating AI into its work, counting on Microsoft’s Azure AI to automate duties like producing metadata, captions, and alt texts. Creatives additionally use Adobe Firefly to provide temper and storyboards and retouch photographs; an Azure AI author’s assistant to verify that replicate complies with model tips; and different instruments that pace up 3D productions.
Crucially, whereas AI is “a serving to hand and collaborator” for IMC’s groups, it doesn’t change “craftsmanship and human spark,” Malmström stated.
“What we do is tactile and it’s about properties, which offers with emotion. That may by no means go away,” she stated. “It’s nonetheless about concepts. We need to inform a narrative, to place properties right into a context that issues for individuals—not simply write a immediate.”
Because the panorama continues to shift, IMC’s largest objective is a little more existential: retaining Ikea related for modern shoppers whereas additionally staying true to itself.
“We have now a lot extra perception and understanding, however that alone can’t drive us. We have now to navigate from our compass,” Malmström stated. “We need to dare to be much more Ikea, not simply in expression but in addition in how we behave—not attempt to be like everyone else.”
