In less than 30 days IKEA is opening here in the Kansas City area. The city has been trying to get an IKEA store for years, so the hype around the grand opening has been pretty hot. I’m a fan of IKEA but I won’t be going to the new store until the hype wears off a bit, and massive crowds settle down. That doesn’t mean I’m not paying attention to the clever IKEA marketing ideas that the company continues to roll out though. About a week ago IKEA launched a new campaign called “The IKEA Time Travel Experiments” as an online video series. The series features customers that get hypnotized and then interact with actors that represent the future.

The two videos below show the trailer, and episode 1 that launched on August 20th. In episode 1 a couple is taken 12 years into the future. The overall theme of the campaign is to try and create an engaging form of entertainment, that captures and holds the online audience, hopefully getting them to engage by clicking through to the IKEA site at the end. With over 200,000 views in a week, the campaign has the potential to go viral. What would be interesting to see is how many people go to an IKEA store in hopes of becoming a participant, or witnessing this live.