Ikea, the home furnishing behemoth has partnered with Shycast to promote a contest that will reward $5,000 to the consumer who creates the best video "making their bed."
On the Shycast promotion Web page it says this: "Break The Rules Bed Making We’re looking for bed-making maniacs who aren’t worried about what Mom says. If you mix and match sheets, have a special blankie for the Shih-tzu, or the craziest of quilts this contest is for you."
The idea is to encourage consumers to interact with the Ikea brand and to increase their strong connection with it.
"Ikea has a high degree of customer fanaticism. They're a customer brand. Really, what they want beyond that is to get an eye on their real world customers that are engaged and interested in their brand," says Drew Peloso, a founder of Shycast.
Besides Ikea, the other interesting part of this story is the strategy being used by Shycast to differentiate themselves from this growing, competitive space.
Instead of competing for the typical ad dollars that everybody is fighting for like online ad budgets, direct response and traditional advertising, they are instead targeting the promotional budgets of companies; that which is usually used for sweepstakes and coupons. Of course this fits in with Ikea's campaign as it is a form of a sweepstakes, just adding the user-generated video to the mix.
Essentially what Shycast is doing is trying to be a big fish in a much smaller, but potentially less competitive space. Even though promotional budgets are much smaller than other ad spending, they can still add up to significant dollars.
The contest has officially started today and the submission deadline will be March 26, 2007.
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