Save 50% on a 3-month Digiday+ membership. Ends Dec 5.
Even the most creative chefs can turn any ingredients into a succinct recipe. Now try that with emojis.
Ikea, ever the inventive company with equally puzzling furniture assembly instructions, asked its 48,000 followers on Instagram to share ideas for new recipes, but the caveat was that they were only allowed to use five emojis. The winning combinations were turned into 15-second videos.
Ikea asked people to post pictures of their favorite plates (they didn’t have be from Ikea) with a mixture of emojis in the caption for its #новыеидеиготовить (“new ideas for cooking” in English) campaign.
“It was a great opportunity to cook delicious dishes from the most extraordinary ingredients: Not from food, but from a variety of emoji. Right from smartphones,” said a release from Ikea Russia. The campaign was to promote its “rentable kitchens” in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where customers can rent kitchen spaces and take cooking classes.
To interpret the puzzling array of emojis, Ikea worked with Russian food bloggers to comb through the 300 submissions and make 20 videos that were posted on its Instagram account.
Emojis were interpreted pretty creatively. For example, olive oil was used when someone proposed the tram emoji (because trams need oil) and the tornado emoji was interpreted as whisking. So a chicken, clouds, snowflake, tornado and squirrel combined to make brownies (with nuts), in this example below.
More in Marketing
The case for and against AI-driven SEO in the zero-click era
As generative AI reshapes search, marketers debate the value of committing (or overcommitting) to an AI SEO strategy.
Hiring program in energy tech sector enlists military veterans to fill data center skills gap
Data center demand is projected to grow 33% annually by 2030, while the industry struggles to find qualified candidates for increasingly complex systems.
‘Regulate us like alcohol, don’t ban us’: Proposed hemp THC ban threatens to shut down countless brands
The proposed ban on THC-infused products was included in the bill Congress passed to end the government shutdown.