Anti-anti-ads. We were snooping around the IKEA England website and saw this pop-up ad that looked as if it was against IKEA. But there was something funny about it...
"If my furniture did not exist, it would be necessary to create it."
See Van Den Puup's commercial Against IKEA.
IKEA seems to have launched its own humorous campaign against itself in England, featuring Van Den Puup, the Elite Designer, who is pompous and highbrow (and funny) and hates IKEA for stealing his designs and selling them for so little.
There is a whole website devoted to Elite Designers Against Ikea. Why is British advertising so much more edgy than our own? MGR
>Why is British advertising so much more edgy than our own?
It's because we have wit ;)
But seriously...
I'm from London, and lived in San Francisco for a year. I really missed the UK advertising over in the States. US stuff was consistently bland, unoriginal, themed on product (selling a truck? shoot the advert in the mountains!), lacking entirely in humour and wit in 95% of cases, and generally overly competitive.
It's legal in the US to name your competitors and tear into them in your own advertising. In the UK there are strict regulations preventing that sort of thing, which forces our agencies to be a bit more creative, and use innovotive alternatives to "We do X better than Y and Z, so buy our product" style commercials.