Inside Ikea’s ‘Dream Factory’ Powering 70,000 Productions a Year

Summer season 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 crimson decorations for Lunar New Yr. 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, a couple of surfboards, a kitchen with lots of of bananas, and 75 sofas. These myriad home scenes are a part of Ikea Advertising & Communications (IMC), the retailer’s world advertising and marketing 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 inventive powerhouse that oversees greater than 70,000 productions annually. It makes the whole lot from world campaigns to 3D fashions and animations to movies, product photographs, and the meeting directions that include Ikea’s flat-pack furnishings. Its staff, hailing from 34 totally different international locations, serve 63 markets and 600 shops all over the world. “We are saying that is the house of houses, the dream manufacturing unit,” stated Mia Malmström, IMC’s managing director. Formalized in 2020, IMC is a part of a rising pattern of manufacturers constructing in-house inventive 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, based on the Affiliation of Nationwide Advertisers in-house company survey. However IMC can be evolving quick because it faces pressures just like the rise of synthetic intelligence (AI), increasing from 400 to 450 staff over the previous six months to satisfy a rising demand for content material.“Considered one 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 unit.”IMC’s management group (L-R): Niklas Lindström, Mia Malmström, Amy LeoFrom Catalogues to CGIThe roots of IMC’s mission to carry 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 and marketing have been on the middle of the enterprise from the beginning, Malmström stated. {The catalogue} helped construct Ikea’s model and have become so in style {that a} signal widespread on many Swedish mailboxes over time learn: “No promoting or spam 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 tip 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 dwelling inspiration and recommendation to buyers stays, even because it takes totally different shapes. Right now, IMC is an element inventive company, half manufacturing and know-how studio. Its employees contains strategists, inside designers, builders, 3D artists, photographers, content material creators, and extra. Not too long ago, the studio has been including roles that embody rising tech abilities, equivalent to AI builders, copywriters with search engine optimisation competence, artwork administrators with movement expertise, software program engineers, and digital product leaders.Storytelling for HomesStorytelling and product improvement are carefully 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 world inventive path, for which the present theme is “optimistic future.”“It’s not simply in regards to the product trying implausible and being inexpensive. 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 turned obsessive about chasing mild after shifting to Sweden. IMC’s inventive groups work in another way as a result of along with a typical copywriter and artwork director duo, they embody 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 so much about our dwelling furnishing data. Everybody within the constructing has it to an extent, however inside designers carry the torch,” stated inventive director Amy Leo.Malmström suggested different manufacturers to take a leaf out of Ikea’s playbook by involving the advertising and marketing group as early as potential in product improvement and launches.“Begin collaborating from the inventive idea of a product and to work on the identical insights and to have a joint inventive path,” she suggested. “Every thing ought to be linked. It takes a village.”By no means PredictableWith the rise of social media and its calls for for content material, certainly one of IMC’s largest challenges is balancing model consistency with inventive flexibility, Leo stated.IMC works with exterior businesses in some markets and delivers belongings to native groups as urged social and digital content material. It’s at present collaborating with native markets on a world model marketing campaign for this 12 months.Considered one of IMC’s targets is to assist Ikea be extra reactive and open to its group 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 group feeling [towards Ikea], and we embrace that,” she added.Over time, Ikea has discovered that manufacturers “can’t 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 when you try this, it turns into predictable and boring.” AI as CollaboratorAI presents a brand new entrance in IMC’s digital evolution. The studio “sees quite a lot of potential” in utilizing generative AI to maintain up with the quantity of productions wanted right this moment, stated studios improvement supervisor Niklas Lindström.  “The world is demanding much more content material, and we have to determine 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 velocity up 3D productions. Crucially, whereas AI is “a serving to hand and collaborator” for IMC’s groups, it doesn’t substitute “craftsmanship and human spark,” Malmström stated.“What we do is tactile and it’s about houses, 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 houses right into a context that issues for individuals—not simply write a immediate.”Because the panorama continues to shift, IMC’s largest aim is a little more existential: maintaining Ikea related for modern customers whereas additionally staying true to itself.“Now we have a lot extra perception and understanding, however that alone can’t drive us. Now we have to navigate from our compass,” Malmström stated. “We need to dare to be much more Ikea, not simply in expression but additionally in how we behave—not attempt to be like everyone else.”