Digital Horizons

Brand News: How IKEA Turned Windows Into Viral Ads Overnight

• James Walker & Brian Hastings

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Ever wondered how IKEA turns everyday windows into cutting-edge ad space? Join us as we uncover IKEA's latest brilliant campaign, where "sleep fluencers" transform their windows with IKEA's innovative blinds. These blinds don't just block light; they double as ads, creating a unique, low-cost marketing strategy that reaches beyond social media and into real neighborhoods. We'll discuss how this clever integration of paid campaigns can revolutionize home-based advertising and why it's a game-changer for IKEA.

Shifting gears, we tackle a groundbreaking move by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) towards replacing call center staff with AI, in partnership with tech giants Amazon and NVIDIA. With 2,400 jobs potentially on the line, we explore what this bold leap into AI-driven customer service means for the future of work. Is this the beginning of a new era where AI takes over customer support? Tune in to hear our thoughts on how CBA's pioneering steps could set a precedent for industries worldwide.

To see how our experiment went with an AI Sales Reprentative went check out it on our YouTube Channel here

The Digital Horizons Podcast is hosted by:

James Walker - Managing Director Walker Hill Digital
Brian Hastings - Managing Director Nous

Speaker 1:

All right, brand news time, welcome back. So we've got two articles to run through today. We're going to start with a great campaign that James found it's by Ikea, who are famously good at doing great campaigns.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, did you want me to run through it? You go through it. I mean, this is just a great idea of thinking outside the box in terms of a way to execute a campaign, which is really cool.

Speaker 1:

So IKEA recruited sleep fluences to turn windows into ad space and it's exactly as you'd imagine using real people, real customers. They put a call out to sleep fluences, people who could take a set of IKEA blinds that on the inside looked normal, but on the outside that you could see through a window, had an ad for Ikea products like the Ikea pillow or the Ikea blinds themselves. This is just amazingly cool. It would be temporary, but it's a really good way of having everyday home customers showing that they support or are part of this brand.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I think also, like it's just a way of getting eyeballs that you wouldn't normally get. Like I mean, there's so much competition for all your social media platforms like you know, radio TV everywhere but you're basically creating advertising space out of people's homes at a very limited little cost, cause all you'd be basically selling them is not even selling them. Sending them is a blind that they're going to put up and advertise your product. That's right, yeah, and it's useful for both.

Speaker 1:

The sleep fluencer is just a person who likes to sleep without having light come in. They get sent a free set of blinds that fits their window roller blinds. They roll them down at night, and during the night and in the afternoons there's an ad on the other side of it promoting the products. But I think where Ikea do this really well is they leverage that in-market activation with paid campaign activity. So it's not just the few people who walk past you know the few hundred windows that they had this in it's the paid extension of seeing this brand ad in these windows on a paid ad that follows. I think it's fantastic work and a good way of showing that IKEA is a part of so many households. Yes, definitely, really cool.

Speaker 1:

Article number two. This one was in the AFR, the Australian Financial Review, on the 17th of September and I've heard a lot about this in news and update podcasts over the last few days because it is big news and it's really relevant to what we've been talking about recently. With our Blandai or Blandi AI generated outbound sales agents, the CBA CommBank explores replacing local call center staff with AI. Commbank has 2,400 call centre and live chat staff that their jobs are now at risk because of some public decisions and posturing to shift to an AI model that can support both live chat and, in some sources I've seen, supporting live AI voice calls. There was some news about this back in May when ComBank, who has long been a tech leader in the Australian banking market, has suggested that potential shift. They've employed the help of Amazon to create a AI factory, which is just another way of saying they host and manage their own servers and NVIDIA GPUs to do this work. But the real outcome for me the AI threat to jobs became real with this.

Speaker 2:

Very quickly, yeah, very, very quickly, because we were talking about this only a few weeks ago and when we tested out, we were so impressed and we're like, hey, this is going to be pretty big. But to already see this in such a massive, massive company in Australia already looking at this as a viable option for replacing its workforce in terms of providing customer support, I think that it's only the start of what's going to come. This is really probably a first step, and they're just talking about it right now. It may not actually go forward in the short term, but I feel that not too far off, all the big brands or everyone's going to be doing this, because it is such a powerful way that you can save costs within the business and still provide a level of support that you're probably already getting or potentially even better.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I think a brand like CBA doing this will be the stepping stone for a lot of other brands to explore it Once they know that oh, it's been publicly accepted or they've seen the results that CBA have found. If it does work for them, we're going to see a bit of a snowball effect with other big, large brands. Imagine insurance company call centers, telstra, optus, utilities call centers are going to quickly shift if a trusted big bank brand has done it and had success with it. Agree. So scary times ahead, but also showing that this thing is moving at a rate that we can't sort of put the genie back in the bottle. It's happening.

Speaker 2:

Definitely, and I think that this would have been the case back when these big businesses started shifting their call centers offshore. Right, like I feel. At the beginning it would have been all right, everyone's got their own local call center and then someone's gone oh we can save some money here, let's shift it offshore. And once one did it, then it started becoming the norm and I feel like this is going to be the path that all these businesses are going to go down, because they're going to see the cost savings that's going to be available there.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, absolutely, and I'll obviously have some risks and things to get over. At the moment, ai is not known for complete, perfect accuracy in its responses. Sometimes it hallucinates a little bit and comes up with things that you couldn't quite imagine, but I'm sure a brand like CBA will train it well. It won't be accessing a large public language model or anything like that. It'll be using data that they've trained it on about the banks, so look forward to seeing where they go in that space. And that's it for Brand News this week.

Speaker 2:

Thanks for listening. If you want to learn more about how our investigation and our test with AI call center platform, be sure to check out the video that we'll link just after this. Thank you.