A printed catalogue staged as a tech reveal
On 3 September 2014, IKEA Singapore and BBH Asia Pacific released Experience the Power of a Bookbook, a two minute and 25 second film announcing the IKEA 2015 catalogue. The piece was uploaded to the IKEA Singapore YouTube channel five days before Apple's iPhone 6 reveal on 9 September. It was shot against a clean white backdrop, scored with hushed orchestral pads, and presented in the visual grammar of an Apple keynote. The catalogue itself rotated in mid-air. A presenter introduced its features in the cadence and delivery of Jony Ive. The film was watched 19 million times on YouTube within weeks and surfaced on global trade-press lists alongside that month's actual product launches.
The brief and the agency
BBH Asia Pacific, the Singapore office of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, held the IKEA Singapore creative account at the time. The annual IKEA catalogue had become the brand's largest single piece of communication with peak print runs of around 200 million copies in 2016. The Singapore brief asked the agency to drive attention for the local 2015 edition without leaning on a sale-led mechanic. BBH's response was to position the catalogue as a piece of advanced consumer technology, and to do so during the calendar week that the global tech press dedicated to Apple's autumn product event.
The film was credited to a Singapore creative team that included executive creative directors Douglas Hamilton and Scott McClelland, with creative directors Marcus Rebeschini and Khalid Osman. Jörgen Eghammer, IKEA's chief design democracy ambassador, played the presenter. He spoke in the soft, measured tone that audiences had come to recognise from a decade of Apple product films. The script was straight pastiche, but the content was accurate to the catalogue's actual properties.
The script as a strategic device
Eghammer introduced the catalogue as the "bookbook", a 328 page printed object with "no cables, not even a power cable". He described "eternal battery life", "tactile touch technology" that responded to "real fingers", and "365 day stand-by time". He declared the device pre-loaded with 328 pages of "inspirational home furnishing ideas". A stylised demonstration of bookmark function followed, then a beat on the "auto-saved" bookmark and on the absence of lag, glitches, scrolling and crashes. The script reframed every limitation of print as a feature, and every feature of an Apple product as the absence of a print quality.
The strategic device was deliberate. The film did not argue against digital technology. It argued that the printed catalogue was a coherent piece of communication design with its own affordances. By using Apple's visual grammar to make that argument, BBH borrowed credibility from the keynote category and deflected attention from the price and product detail of the catalogue itself. The brand voice stayed warm. The category was reframed.
The release and the reception
The film was uploaded on 3 September 2014. Coverage in Dezeen, Hypebeast, Mashable, Tech Times and the Christian Science Monitor began the following day. The Mashable Ad Awards September 2014 ranking placed Bookbook above Apple's and Samsung's product films of the same week. Singapore became the most-watched country for the film in September 2014, with Malaysia third. More than 6,000 people uploaded organic Instagram pictures of themselves with their own bookbook in the months that followed. By the end of October the film had cleared 13 million views on YouTube, climbing to over 19 million on the IKEA Singapore channel and several million more on re-uploads.
The trade press treated the work as a model for category-jamming brand communication. Campaign and The Drum placed Bookbook on year-end retrospective lists. The film was used in agency new-business presentations across the BBH network and was nominated in advertising awards into 2015. The piece did not collect a Cannes Grand Prix, but it became one of the most cited catalogue films of the decade and a textbook example of an owned creative platform outperforming an event-driven media budget.
What the film did for IKEA's catalogue
Bookbook arrived at a moment when the printed IKEA catalogue still ran at near-peak distribution. The brand printed 217 million copies of the 2014 edition in 32 languages across 50-plus markets, and the printed object remained close to 70 percent of IKEA's annual marketing spend. Bookbook protected the relevance of that asset. By framing the catalogue as a product worth a launch keynote, BBH Asia Pacific moved attention away from the price comparison frame and back toward the catalogue's own design discipline.
Six years later, in December 2020, IKEA announced that the 2021 edition would be the brand's last printed and digital catalogue, ending a 70 year tradition that began in 1951. Read against that ending, Bookbook now sits in the brand archive as the moment when the catalogue's editorial confidence peaked. The film is still cited in trade-press retrospectives of the catalogue era, and it remains the most viewed IKEA catalogue advertisement on the brand's YouTube footprint. BBH Asia Pacific subsequently extended the platform with further annual catalogue films in the same comic register, including a 2015 short for the 2016 edition that pastiched virtual reality.
Source: IKEA Singapore
