Now that many people are returning to the the office, IKEA wants to help the spaces feel like home.

To help bridge the home-life / work-life gap, IKEA Canada is launching “The Office Home,”  a collection of everyday IKEA essentials that help Canadians bring the feeling of home back into the office with them.

The social-led campaign features short and longer form video as well as static images, and runs through September 10, featuring literal creature comforts like cats milling around boardroom tables and slippers to make washroom cubicles more homey.

“While for many it was challenging at the time, we have since gotten used to not just working from home, but also this feeling of living at work,” says Kristin Newbigging, integrated media manager at IKEA Canada.

“So, we wanted to take the comforts of home and juxtapose them with a more traditional office space through a playful, humorous take on product ideas and placements.”

The spots hero armchairs and scratching mats, and according to Newbigging, it’s part of an effort by the retailer to continue to reimagine the traditional workspace. This work builds on spring creative, in which it asked people to conceptually make themselves, at home and envision their future vocational selves through ordinary, mundane household objects.

Through “The Office Home” the retailer says it wants to help Canadians through the transition of a return to the workplace, reimagining the traditional office space, in whatever iteration it becomes: Continuing to work from home, moving to a hybrid model or going back to the office full time.

“These ideas are powerful and based on common insights, so every year, we look for opportunities to take social-led campaigns and amplify them further across media,” Newbigging says.

While this campaign is paid social first, our media strategy amplifies the concept further with placements through OLV, as well as some surprise and delight OOH elements to capture our primary audience with elevator wraps and screens at offices in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver downtown cores.

Dentsu Creative, which has been working with IKEA for the past year, is leading content for its organic social channels.  Carat was in the lead for the campaign media strategy.

carat, dentsu, Dentsu Creative, Ikea Canada, Kristin Newbigging