Braveheart is back! But this time the battle cry in Australia is "IKEA"
With a battle scene as big as the one in this video, you need lots of extras so the Aussie agency roped in Ikea's customers . Who better to fight the battle for the brand? So if they're not wearing kilts!
The ad by prize-winning shop The Monkeys — known as Three Drunk Monkeys until recently - is an unapologetic rip-off of the epic Scottish battle movie.
The ad shows an army of customers—"every Longshanks and his brother for miles around" —brandishing Ikea products and surging from the Oz countryside into their poorly furnished homes, all set to to make war on boring interiors with Ikea's funky home furnishings. "William Wallace would be mortified, but these are the kinds of battles that get fought in the suburbs in our day and age," says Adweek magazine. The agency itself says, "Think Braveheart with furniture. And IKEA instead of (the battle cry) Freedom." Directed by Hamish Rothwell (with a name like that, he ought to be Scottish), the video roped in Ikea loyalty-card members across New South Wales as extras. The campaign will build toward the opening on Sept. 8 of the largest Ikea in the Southern Hemisphere, in Melbourne. A Sydney store follows later in the year. Adweek's comment gets our prize for wry remark of the week , "Picking furniture, of course, isn't really a life-or-death decision. But it's not without its moments of epic struggle — notably when you get the stuff home and try to assemble it." PS: And here's a taste of the original: