The IKEA Play Café
Role: Creative Direction
This project was developed while working with SDIMKTG
The Brief.
After the success of 2016’s award-winning “Start Fooding” Pop-up Experience, IKEA Canada wanted to re-engage Torontonians with a reframed focus on the playful side of food.
The Idea.
At the IKEA Play Café we invited consumers to interact and have fun with IKEA products in a vibrant and immersive pop-up play experience.
Based on 3 core themes: SHOP, PLAY EAT at the IKEA Play Cafe, visitors could:
Engage in a variety of one-of-a-kind games (such as a kitchen party dance off and a giant pinball machine with baking items.)
Challenge their taste buds at our offbeat café (meat/chicken or veggie balls will be served with waffles, fried onions, pickles or biscuits.)
As well as utilise our custom built RFID spoons to shop through a selection of 50 IKEA items.
Every aspect was created with a core goal in mind; to encourage guests to strip away conventional beliefs surrounding food and inspire them to relax, have fun and start playing again.
We again created a uniquely IKEA shopping experience with our RFID embedded RORT wooden spoons – this time with a difference.
While customers could still get 'tap happy' and purchase a choice of over 50 IKEA items, recipes, tips and tricks - just by tapping a reader. This year we also utilised the spoon to activate the selection of games – and offered rewards for those who did.
For the launch night, we welcomed Juno award winning group Walk Off The Earth to entertain guests in an exclusive performance of their own unique covers.
Such a playful experience required comms to match. We created a series of vibrant illustration based visuals in tandem with rhyming copy to really dial up the fun in an interpretive way.
Results
The results spoke for themselves by programme end, 40k attendees (211% of target), over $55k in sales and nearly 30M total media impressions.
The project was a Gold Winner Best Pop-Up Or Retail Activation at the Event Marketer EX Awards 2018 - the world’s largest recognition program for experiential marketing.