IKEA goes mega viral through a video game collab

Every 9/11 I watch “The Man in the Red Bandana”. Also, here in NYC on the sidewalk digital out of home’s, they are displaying stories of heroism on 9/11. I’ve always appreciated the way New Yorkers have such deep admiration and remembrance for the heroes of an indescribably tragic day.

what’s good: IKEA solving a real problem in a video game to promote real life furniture

I think it’s pretty widely known that the video gamer subculture is massively engaged and is a HUGE audience. That also makes it a pretty difficult group to please. You’ll see in a second, but Jay Daniells, Creative at Mother, told me that the gamer community essentially invented the idea of “silence brand”.

So what does IKEA and Mother do??? They go ALL THE WAY IN. Fuck it! We ride.

Additional context: Skyrim is a video game where you play a character that’s in this fictional sorta viking sorta Game of Thrones style universe.

Mother London came up with the idea for IKEA to partner with Bethesda Game Studios and Skyrim to create a “mod” (EDITOR’S INTERJECTION: mod = a different version of the original video game. Skyrim in particular has a very active “mod” community where you can switch up some of the elements of the original game and make it as custom as you want. It’s a big reason Skyrim particularly has such a strong community. The players can actively build new versions of the game and keep it fresh and new.).

Okay cool they made a “mod” but what’s the point. Well this new version of the game includes a Kallax bookcase from IKEA and some other IKEA-esque quests and features and easter eggs. One of the things about Skyrim is that if your character is carrying too much stuff then they move slower and are “encumbered”.

So, what better solution than an IKEA bookcase. Check out the launch video below for this new IKEA-fied version of the game that already has 3M organic views and 48k likes on Instagram.

On top of this, you’ll see dozens and dozens of creators in the gaming community discussing the collab with what appears to be primarily positive sentiment. The main response is that it’s so ridiculous that it’s funny. Like it’s pretty absurd that Matt Berry is voice acting for a speaking IKEA furniture piece that is created so players have a place to store their armor and loot. Some of these comments echo the sentiment:

I got to find out the behind the scenes details of how the team at Mother came up with the idea and was able to execute the entire project that is now a certified #banger. Here’s my conversation with Jay Daniells, a Creative at Mother London, who worked on this with his partner, Will Lancaster:

1. The campaign has already generated millions of organic views on social, so there's clearly a very real and large audience, but can you please explain why the hell this makes sense to the people who aren't tuned into the Skyrim lore?

Ikea wanted to get into the gaming world and talk about storage in a way that would really resonate in this specific group. We were like, well, gamers’ storage in the real world is kind of already solved by IKEA.

The Kallax itself is one of the most important items in a gamer's bedroom. It's like the perfect console storage. and it's the perfect video game storage and board games and everything in that same world.

So, we're kind of already solving these problems in the real world. Let's solve them in a game where this problem is rampant, and that game is The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. So it makes complete sense. The game actually punishes you for [not storing your items]. So you end up getting slowed down or over encumbered, as it's called in the game, and you start to move very slowly. It's impossible to get anywhere. You can't continue your quests. It's a genuine problem that these people deal with day in, day out and Ikea [is] coming in to help and give some respite for that was was sort of where the campaign idea at its core came from.

2. I'd love to understand the order of operations here. Like was there an existing Skyrim x IKEA partnership? Or did you have this idea first and then went to Skyrim with it? And how did Mother play a role in all this?

So there wasn't any existing relationship between Skyrim and IKEA. We came up with the idea first and reached out to Bethesda, who is the game developer of Skyrim, and they were really happy for us to do this because we were essentially creating a mod. And then we worked with an amazing team of fans who are kind of like collective of developers and musicians and writers and 3D artists who specialize in making mods for games. (EDITOR’S INTERJECTION: READ MY EDITOR’S INTERJECTION ABOVE FOR A DEFINITION ON ‘MOD’)

All of this was set up by Mother as well. So Mother handled everything from chatting to Bethesda to chatting to the mod developers. And there was so many fantastic people involved in this project and very sort of bizarre things like signing off the exact kind of size of the Allen key and things like that.

So it was a really interesting process. [IKEA is] such a great client to work with, like they always hero an idea over anything else. And they could see that opportunity that was there for them.

3. The gamer community is so tapped in, especially for Skyrim. Is the team that worked on avid Skyrim players? And if not, how do you get caught up to speed so that the execution and idea lands authentically with the audience?

There's a lot of flex in this community depending on your tone and world. What we wanted to do is meet those two communities with this mod. So you've got that side that are all about the law and sort of building upon the world already set out in the, as they call it, the vanilla game of Skyrim, which just means the version without anything in it, like mods.

And then also there is a world of people who really enjoy the joke mods. So we wanted to get something that hit right in the middle. And that's why [our mod] has a very serious quest. It has a very serious set of mechanics and genuinely helpful things included in that mod.

But at the same time, it's self voiced by Matt Berry. We've got a meatball helmet. There's Allen key weapons in there. There's a spell that'll summon a meatball. There's meatball consumable items. And it just meets those two areas of that niche within the niche in a way that just makes everybody in that community into it.

And yeah, myself and my partner Will are massive, massive Skyrim fans have been since we were very, very young. We're already in this community and we're already tapped into that world and understand it so well. But even then, we're not looking at Skyrim every single day.

We've got the base knowledge, so there was a of delving back into that world and making sure we've uncovered all those stones, and knew what people were into and what are the things that people talk about?

That was a really rewarding process as well for all of us, because everyone's come out of this as a complete Skyrim expert because you can't do a project like this without fully understanding this community on such a deep level.

4. This campaign is popping off already. When you make something, do you have a sense it'll be a banger while you're making it?

It's like a kind of cathartic moment when you see something that you've put so much work into actually work and come to fruition. But you never know if anything's 100% gonna work or you are 100% going to understand that community.

And I think there's always an inherent sense of like anxiety about that. However, there was just so much love and care and planning put into this idea that we had done everything possible to ensure this hit the right way with that community. And as I said, it's so cathartic to see that like come to life and people absolutely loving it.

5. Physical items being promoted in a digital world feels like a tension that some marketers would avoid. How did you guys view that as you were thinking about bringing IKEA into a digital world?

Gamers are a very fickle audience, and they're so easy to annoy and they turn against brands very easily. They basically invented the phrase “silence brand”. We're super aware of that, like me and Will are gamers ourselves.

And that audience itself is quite volatile. And they are very easily scorned. In orchestrating the whole campaign [we wanted] to just make sure that fans knew it was for them and that we were solving a genuine problem.

This [problem] is something that's cropped up for years and years and years. So when we built this, we didn't just stick an IKEA character in the game and call it a day. We built this proper companion with actual functional abilities all centering around inventory and storage and tidying up and stopping clutter being the thing that's stopping you from have a great time in the game.

So, all of this love and care was put into it to ensure that it wasn't gonna get a silence brand.

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