On Instagram, Ikea Russia turns emojis into recipes

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.

Кто бы мог подумать, что из этого набора можно приготовить вкуснейшее брауни с орехами? Мы принимаем вызов от @anzhelikaverevkina. Смотрите видеорецепт и ищите его описание в первом комментарии. Вы тоже хотите бросить вызов ИКЕА? Разместите фото любой пустой тарелки в своем инстаграме, отмечайте наш профиль @ikea_rus на фото, добавьте в описание хэштег #новыеидеиготовить и 5 любых эмоджи, которые станут ингредиентами!

A video posted by ИКЕА Россия (@ikea_rus) on

https://digiday.com/?p=156348

More in Marketing

What the rise of the niche and nano-creator means for influencer marketing

As the creator economy swells, niche creators stand out capturing user attention and advertiser dollars.

The header image features an illustration with a dollar bill that has the Snapchat logo in the center.

Ad revenue or subscriptions: What’s more viable to Snap’s success as a business?

While subscriptions are still a modest slice of Snap’s revenue pie, they’re giving the company’s top line a noticeable lift.

The pragmatist’s guide to esports in 2024

Last year, Digiday published a “cynic’s guide” to esports in 2023. This year, the industry’s outlook is decidedly more optimistic. However, many esports companies remain unprofitable, and industry leaders are still trying to find a path forward that is sustainable in the long term.