IKEA Billygram
Issue 16 | September 2010
Agency
Ogilvy Frankfurt
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director: Michael Kutschinski; Creative Director: Dr Ulf Schmidt; Creative Director: Uwe Jakob; Art Director: Daniel Schweinzer; Copywriter: Marcus Pfeiffer; Motion Design: Klaus Martin Michaelis; Technical Director: Jens Steffen; Flash Design: Valentina Kusmin; Flash Animator: Sebastian Hilbert; Typography: Daniel Schweinzer ; Typography: Tanja Oppel; Management Supervisor: Frank Apel
Date
April 2010
Background
Billy is IKEA’s (faintly strange) name for the versatile bookshelf they have been making for 30 years.
The agency was briefed to develop online activity that would get IKEA customers involved with and interested in three decades of BILLY.
Idea
To bring to life the amazing versatility of BILLY, a Facebook app was created. Called BILLYGRAM, this allowed users to post animated messages written in BILLY on each other’s walls.
Results
After just one week, over 20,000 BILLYGRAMS had been posted on Facebook and the App also generated a host of conversations among IKEA fans.
Our Thoughts
Funny how ideas of the same sort suddenly appear all at the same time but completely independently of each other. Take typefaces. There has been a spate of them. Toyota created a typeface by filming the IQ driving the shapes of all the letters of the alphabet (which you can download at nl.toyota.be/iqfont) and Grey Barcelona have created a brilliant website for Pilot Pens (at www.pilothandwriting.com/en/) where you can turn your handwriting into a font for your PC and now here’s a face made entirely out of stacked shelves.
Even though this may well win Direct awards, this certainly isn’t direct marketing as most direct marketers know it. But it’s fun and reinforces the notion that with IKEA all you need to add is imagination. And that’s good enough for me.