DIY furniture giant Ikea has unveiled a crazy new advertising campaign that asks customers to urinate on its print ads and then bring them in-store for a discount.
No, it’s not for weird fetishists, rather the full-page ads act as an in-built pregnancy test and if users can prove they’re “with child” they get a discount on one of the retailer’s cots or cribs for their soon-to arrive bub.
The oddball offer will appear in women’s magazines and comes with the strap line, “Peeing on this ad may change your life”. Unfortunately, the offers only available in Ikea’s home country of Sweden.
It’s the brainchild of Ikea’s creative agency Åkestam Holst who worked alongside medical tech firm Mercene Labs to develop the ads which are based on similar technology used in your everyday pregnancy test strips.
Once a woman’s urine touches the print, if she is indeed pregnant, the ad will change colour to reveal the discount on the advertised cot.
Commenting on the campaign, Jonas Hansson, head of new opportunities at Mercene Labs, said: “We had to push ourselves to come up with several clever solutions to make the concept of the ad work in reality. I think we can use some of the same solutions to help our customers create better products in their areas of life science and medical diagnostics. We will also develop a new substrate material for medical diagnostics based on what we learned in this project.”
