Ikea Sweden hides the real mess behind its own billboards

Ikea’s new outdoor campaign in Sweden hides the mess behind the billboard. Walk up to one of the brand’s new poster sites and you get the usual thing: a calm, well-lit room, nothing out of place, the sort of home nobody actually lives in. Walk round the back and you find the reason it looks like that. The frame is propped up by a wall of Ikea storage boxes, packed with everything the front of the ad politely leaves out.

The boxes are not styled empties. They hold toys, clothes, vintage records, half-finished children’s drawings and old electronics, the standard sediment of a family home. The work is by Åkestam Holst NoA in Stockholm, and the installations, billed as Tidy Billboards, started appearing in major Swedish cities at the end of August. The campaign also runs on social and digital.

“Everyday life is messy, then tidy, and then messy again,” said Tiago Pinho, art director at the agency, in comments given to Creative Review, which first reported the work. Daniel Vaccino is credited as creative director, with graphic design by Erika Nyström and Anna Forsberg, motion by Ville Askelöf, and production by Havelle with Torbjörn Christell.

What makes it worth a look is that the medium carries the argument. Furniture advertising has a credibility problem: it sells order by depicting a life almost nobody recognises, which is flattering for about two seconds and alienating after that. A two-sided billboard fixes the problem structurally rather than with a line of copy. The perfect room is still there, and the honest version is literally holding it up.

It also puts the product where the idea is. Ikea is not selling a mood here, it is selling boxes, and the boxes are the structure. For any brand in a category built on aspirational imagery, that is the transferable move: find the thing your advertising habitually crops out, then build the ad around it instead of apologising for it.