ikea
making a human catalogue
Capabilities:
Think about your favourite book. You know its title and who wrote it. You can probably even remember the plot well enough. But what about the seventeenth word on page 154?
Meet Yanjaa, two-time world memory champion. She memorised all 328 pages of the IKEA Catalogue, down to precisely what was on the HEMNES bookcase on page 16/17 (a trumpet and a little sculpture in blue-ish, in case you were wondering).
This is the story of how a product catalogue went viral, created $5.7m of free media and got people exploring the catalogue again, returning $18 for every $1 spent.
73m
People reached.
5.7m
Dollars in earned media.
1:18
Campaigns ROI.
The thump of a product catalogue arriving through your letterbox is hardly music to anyone’s ears. IKEA wanted theirs to be noticed.
Instead of going full tech, we went human.
We got Yanjaa, a world memory champion to memorise the entire IKEA Catalogue. The first ever human catalogue.
Even the folks at IKEA were skeptical. They tested her on Skype. But still weren’t satisfied. So they flew her to HQ and got their employees to test her knowledge.
Who looks like they could use an eye doctor? (The lady on page 176 is straining to read her book, probably because her glasses are tucked into her armchair. Unless you’re talking about the minuscule eye exam poster on page 33, lost to any casual observer in a collage of other framed images.)
Just in case this epic parlour trick seemed too cool to believe, we put Yanjaa to the test on Facebook Live in front of thousands.