Ogilvy Social.Lab & IKEA win 2 Silver awards at the Kinsale Shark Awards

Brussels, September 26th, 2019 – Last Sunday, Ogilvy Social.Lab and IKEA Belgium took home two awards at the Kinsale Shark Awards for their groundbreaking campaign THE IKEA (HE)ART SCANNER. They won Silver twice in the categories ‘Immersive’ and ‘Digital’.

Each year, the Kinsale Shark Awards reward the most creative and inspiring advertising campaigns. This year, Ogilvy Social.Lab and IKEA Belgium took home two Silver awards in the categories ‘Immersive’ and ‘Digital’ for their IKEA (HE)ART SCANNER campaign, created in collaboration with Oona Antwerp, Monster Boy and Playtime. 

The IKEA (HE)ART SCANNER campaign was developed in the context of IKEA’s fifth Art Event collection, that consisted of eight handmade rugs, designed by renowned contemporary artists such as Virgil Abloh, Craig Green and Filip Pagowski. The idea behind the campaign was to make art more affordable and accessible to a wider public. However, the collections are always limited and exclusive and many people just buy them for the purpose of reselling and making a profit. IKEA Belgium wanted to avoid this type of organized resale by offering true art lovers a chance to buy the limited-edition carpets. So, they appealed to Ogilvy Social.Lab to create a groundbreaking campaign, using brain sensing technology to identify these art lovers.

The technology that was used, measured whether people emotionally reacted to the rug in front of them. First, the resting brain activity was taken into consideration. After that, the emotional reaction to the rug was measured. Only people whose emotional increase was 70% or more, were allowed to buy the carpet in question. 

Although Ogilvy Social.Lab adopted an existing headset to measure emotional reaction, it did develop the software that was used during the campaign.