- Brand - Ikea
- Spot - Playin' With My Friends
- Title - Playin' With My Friends
- Composer - Robert Cray/BB King
- Publisher - BMG Chrysalis and Wixen Music
- Artist - Masters In France
- Record Co - A&G
- Music Supervisor - Platinum Rye
- Ad Agency - Mother London
- Creative Director - Tim McNaughton
- Production Co - Blink Productions
- Director - Dougal Wison
- Post Production - MPC
- Air Date - October 27
IKEA has been playing around a lot with music video-style ads of late. The 1980 Jona Lewie track You’ll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties was a perfect match to show off the retailer’s range of culinary equipment and furniture in last year’s Xmas holiday period spot.
Now ad agency Mother has teamed a big cuddly teddy bear, a giant robot and a somersaulting monkey with a playful re-working of a lesser-known Robert Cray and BB King blues duet Playin’ With My Friends by Welsh indie band Masters In France to show that the family can sit down for meals together and have a lot of fun doing it.
According to Mother creative director Tim McNaughton, the concept is aimed at showing how adults and children interact well together around the dining table. McNaughton said, “We wanted to bring to life IKEA’s belief that children and adults behave better when they’re together. Rather than shoving kids off to one end of the table, IKEA want to create homes that work seamlessly for everybody.”
To that end, the agency dreamed up a scenario where children prepare a dining table - with helped by the giant toys, who represent the parents. The teddy, robot and monkey help gather the cutlery (with the aid of the robot’s big magnet) and cut a loaf of bread before the end reveal shows the toys have become adults enjoying the company of their children.
McNaughton said the agency went with Playin’ With... because IKEA always strives to be surprising as a brand and so its musical choices should also come as a surprise. He added, “We want to take existing tracks from the past so that, like the insights into life at home, they have a certain feel of authenticity, not like we’ve just made them up to suit our purposes. If some people remember them vaguely, then all the better. But what we don’t want is them to be overly familiar or modern tracks. If they are, then we worry there’s a danger they might become like a soundtrack we’ve whacked on, instead of a piece of integral messaging.”
He said the track in this latest ad might feel “more obscure” than the Jona Lewie song, which was a Top 20 hit, because the re-record was a lot more distinct from the original.
As with all other IKEA executions, McNaughton stressed that music has been “absolutely critical to the idea. Each spot is designed to provide an insight in life at home and the song has to bring that IKEA vision to life.”
Playin’ With My Friends wasn’t the only contender for this spot. There were others which Mother thought could showcase how IKEA products can play into this insight and make life at home easier and smoother.
“But it wasn’t like You’ll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties,” McNaughton continued. “With a song like that, the chances of finding another with the same sentiment are highly unlikely.”
Mother looked at a few tracks that said the same basic thing and and one particular title, Let’s Get Together, was in the frame for a while. But, McNaughton said, the choice of Masters In France was a no-brainer after Platinum Rye came up with the choice - something he conceded was unlikely without the music supervisor’s input.
“We wanted someone with a really unique contemporary sound to take Playin‘ With... and completely re-imagine it. Masters In France were perfect,” McNaughton said. “The recasting of parents and kids as friends really appealed to us, especially once you threw in the giant toys idea.”
