16
2008
Mark Malkoff Lives in Ikea
A colleague sent me an email about Mark Malkoff moving into Ikea while his NY apartment is fumigated. I checked Hitwise data and found a nice spike in traffic to the marklivesinikea.com website and in searches for “mark malkoff”, with Thursday the biggest day for visits to the website. The stunt has no doubt been good for Mark’s career. But what about Ikea. This is where things get interesting… Ikea is hosting their annual post-holiday sale and this stunt is likely cheaper than expensive TV ads.
Last week the third highest search term that included the keyword “ikea” was “mark lives in ikea” indicating that the stunt is drawing attention.
We can’t say for sure whether this marketing tactic will work for Ikea (or Mark) but so far the top viewed video in the series has over 150,000 views on YouTube. Internet usage data can be a great way to measure effectiveness of such campaigns. It is difficult to attribute sales to this type of activity, but for building brand awareness, search data can offer a useful measure. .
Hello. My name is Jonathan. I’m one of the directors on Marklivesinikea.com. I just wanted to say that IN ABSOLUTELY NO WAY WAS IKEA INVOLVED IN THE CREATION OF THIS VIDEO. Mark is a comedian here in NYC and we’ve done a bunch of stunts before. Last year we went to all the starbucks in manhattan in one day (www.171starbucks.com). Mark had wanted to do this for years and he approached Ikea on his own. Their only demand was that ABSOLUTELY NO MONEY EXCHANGED HANDS as they wanted to make sure nobody thought this was an ikea commercial. The crew all paid for their own transportation and all the of the production gear had to be donated or purhcased by mark. All ikea gave us was use of their space and some passes to eat at the cafeteria for free.