IKEA Wants You to Pee on Its Latest Print Ad

At first glance, this work by Åkestam Holst looks like an ordinary IKEA print ad (it’s for a baby crib). 

But look closer at the tagline and you’ll notice something slightly different. It’s asking the reader to pee on the ad. 

If you apply a small sample of urine on the marked area, the offer in the ad will change right before your eyes and present you with a new, better price, promoting IKEA’s membership club, IKEA Family. The catch? The deal for the crop will only change if you are pregnant.  

Although, it’s worth noting that you needn’t hand a pee-stained piece of paper in at an IKEA store to get the new deal. Instead, all that’s needed is to join IKEA Family.

The technique for the ad took about 3-4 months to craft and develop. It was created in close collaboration with medical tech lab, Mercene Labs.

In order to make the interactive functions of this ad work in reality, Åkestam Holst had to make several technical advancements. The pregnancy test strip was used as a starting point, which relies on antibodies that bind to the pregnancy hormone hCG, resulting in a colour change. 

For the scaling up of this technique and adopting it to the physical format of a printed ad, Åkestam Holst teamed up with Mercene Labs, who used their experience in the development of surface active materials for microfluidics and medical diagnostics. Careful selection of materials, together with a controlled capillary flow were crucial for the success of this project. Technical advancements made during the work with this campaign have the potential to improve medical diagnostics.