Home Made is Best
Issue 18 | March 2011
Agency
Forsman & Bodenfors
Creative Team
Art Director: Staffan Lamm, Christoffer Persson; Copywriter: Fredrik Jansson, Anders Hegerfors; Web Producer: Eva Raberg; Account Director: Susanna Fagring; Planner: Tobias Nordstrom; Advertiser’s Supervisor: Joel Iden
Production Team
Production Company: Mad in Sweden (app), KokoKaka Entertainment (demo film)
Other Credits
Photographer: Carl Kleiner/Agent Bauer; Stylist: Evelina Bratelli; Retouch: Henrik Lagerberg; Publisher: Titel Books
Date
September 2010
Background
It’s really hard to get people excited about kitchen appliances. But if you talk about all the tasty things you can make with them, suddenly you have people’s attention. Things like cakes and cookies. That’s why they decided to do a campaign about baking (with kitchen appliances).
Idea
To concentrate on what IKEA cookers can make rather than the cookers themselves, the agency created a recipe book.
Containing 30 classic Swedish recipes for cakes and cookies, the book was designed to look like no other recipe book.
Along with the book was an iPhone app, which managed to get IKEA kitchen appliances into it, but which helped you deal with the side-effects of all the cakes and biscuits you could make with your new cooker – i.e. putting on weight.
The app helped you map out your exercise runs telling you how far you needed to go to burn off the calories you’d just baked.
There was also a website where bakers could share their training routes and compete for kitchen appliances. The person who burn off the most calories won the most kitchen appliances (and could bake even more great cookies).
Results
Their baking book has probably been the most talked about baking book in the history of baking books. To name but a few, both The Guardian and The York Magazine wrote about it.
The iPhone app was, and still is, one of the most downloaded apps in the Swedish App Store (the app was only available in Sweden).
All in all the campaign reached a bit over 40 million people without IKEA spending one dollar on media.
Our Thoughts
The first creative leap was not to show kitchen appliances. Boring. But to show what you can make with them. Then the idea of a recipe book was pretty darn neat. Then the iPhone app allowing you to measure out, literally, how far you have to run to burn off each cake you’ve eaten, that was clever too. Then to create a community of baking runners, that was great too. But the best bit about this idea, the bit that got everyone at Directory genuinely excited, is the art direction of the recipes. To reinvent food photography like this is just brilliant.
This is an outstanding example of ‘old’ craft skills and ‘new’ craft skills coming together, the art director and the software designer joyously united.