IKEA Feel Alive Again Reframes Home as a Human Sanctuary
IKEA's "Feel Alive Again" is a 2018 film campaign created by Memac Ogilvy & Mather, Dubai, for the United Arab Emirates market, using science-fiction imagery to position the home as the one place where people return to their authentic selves and reconnect with family.
Published in August 2018, the campaign carried a specific commercial purpose: launching IKEA's 2019 catalogue across the UAE. Rather than present a product inventory, Memac Ogilvy & Mather constructed a narrative around dehumanisation and recovery. A worker moving through a robotic, industrial environment is visually and emotionally indistinguishable from the machines around him. The transformation arrives the moment he crosses the threshold of his home — an IKEA-furnished space where warmth, colour, and human connection restore what his working day has stripped away. The tagline distils the proposition into four words: "where we feel alive again."
In the United Arab Emirates, a market defined by a high proportion of expatriate workers navigating demanding professional cultures, this narrative carries particular resonance. The campaign does not sell furniture in any conventional sense. It sells the idea that home is not merely a place of rest but a place of identity — a sanctuary where people are free to be themselves. IKEA's decision to make a single film asset carrying that argument, rather than a catalogue-led product campaign, signals a strategic confidence in emotional storytelling as a driver of brand relevance. The campaign earns a Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100, reflecting strong creative ambition within a category — household products and the house and garden sector — that rarely reaches for science-fiction as its primary register.
IKEA entered the 2019 catalogue cycle with a strategic decision to lead on human truth rather than product breadth. The insight driving "Feel Alive Again" is precise: in the United Arab Emirates, a significant portion of the resident population lives far from their countries of origin, navigating high-pressure professional environments where personal identity is frequently subordinated to workplace demands. Home becomes the only space where that identity can be reasserted. Memac Ogilvy & Mather built the campaign around that specific emotional reality rather than a generic comfort narrative.
The competitive context in the UAE home-furnishings market reinforces why IKEA needed to differentiate through brand feeling rather than price or range. UAE-specific competitors identified by Brandstruck Co include Home Centre, Pan Emirates, Marina Home Interiors, and Crate & Barrel — retailers that compete effectively on product availability and accessibility. Against that field, IKEA's sustainable competitive advantage lies in its ability to generate emotional attachment to the idea of home itself, not merely to individual products. "Feel Alive Again" is a direct expression of that advantage.
At the global level, IKEA reported retail sales of €38.8 billion in FY2018 with constant-currency growth of approximately 4.5 percent, according to IKEA's own financial disclosures. The company operated across 50 markets and 422 stores by the close of that fiscal year, per the same source. Within that global footprint, the UAE represented a market where the brand's lifestyle positioning carried particular strategic weight. The campaign's science-fiction register — stark lighting, humanoid characters, a serious and unsentimental tone — was a deliberate departure from the warm domesticity typical of household product advertising, signalling to UAE audiences that IKEA understood the specific pressures of their lives rather than simply their living-room dimensions.
Director Santiago Zannou led the production of "Feel Alive Again" for Big Kahuna Films, Dubai. Zannou's visual approach established a stark binary between the film's two worlds: the workplace rendered in cold, mechanical tones with deliberately dehumanising choreography, and the home rendered in warmth, texture, and human spontaneity. That contrast does the campaign's strategic work without a word of dialogue — the cut between environments is the argument.
Director of photography James Adey shaped the film's visual language, using lighting and framing to reinforce the emotional distance between the protagonist's professional and domestic selves. Post-production was handled by Pixelmob, with editing by David Zavadescu — a credit that matters here because the film's emotional impact depends entirely on the precision of its pacing. The transition between the dehumanised exterior world and the alive interior is a single editorial moment, and Zavadescu's cut makes it land.
The creative leadership at Memac Ogilvy & Mather brought a clear authorial voice to the project. Chief creative officer Juggi Ramakrishnan oversaw the work, with Juliana Paracencio serving as creative director. Hugo Rochette handled art direction and Aditya Hariharan wrote copy — a lean creative team whose unity of vision is visible in the film's disciplined refusal to overexplain its metaphor. The science-fiction register the team chose is genuinely unusual for the household product and house and garden category. Most campaigns in this space reach for aspirational domesticity; "Feel Alive Again" reaches for something closer to dystopian cinema, trusting the audience in the United Arab Emirates to meet the work at that level. According to shots.net, the campaign was documented as a notable production from the region in this period, reflecting the ambition of its execution relative to category norms.
No independently verified performance data — including media reach figures, catalogue request volumes, or sales uplift attributable to "Feel Alive Again" — is publicly available for this campaign. Assessment of effectiveness therefore rests on structural and contextual analysis rather than reported metrics.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates several conditions associated with high recall in film advertising. The narrative is singular and unambiguous: one character, one journey, one emotional turn. The science-fiction visual register creates immediate distinctiveness within the house and garden category, reducing the risk of generic recall — the tendency of audiences to remember an emotional response but attribute it to a competing brand. The tagline "where we feel alive again" is short, possessive, and emotionally specific, functioning as a genuine brand property rather than a descriptive slogan.
According to a search of Cannes Lions, Effies, One Show, D&AD, Clio, Webby, and WARC databases, no verified award recognitions for this campaign appear in the public record, as confirmed by clapboard.com, paisajedeideas.com, latinspots.com, adforum.com, and ogilvy.com. The absence of awards does not diminish the creative ambition of the work, though it limits independent third-party validation of its effectiveness within the industry. The campaign's decision to launch in August 2018 — positioning the 2019 catalogue before the competitive retail season — reflects sound timing discipline in the UAE market. The Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100 acknowledges the campaign's creative distinctiveness and strategic coherence while reflecting the constraints of a single-asset execution and the absence of verifiable performance outcomes.
"Feel Alive Again" is a 2018 film campaign created for IKEA by Memac Ogilvy & Mather in Dubai. Published in August 2018 for the United Arab Emirates market, the campaign launched IKEA's 2019 catalogue using a science-fiction narrative that positions the IKEA-furnished home as a place of identity, warmth, and authentic human connection.
Memac Ogilvy & Mather, Dubai created "Feel Alive Again" for IKEA. The agency team included chief creative officer Juggi Ramakrishnan, creative director Juliana Paracencio, art director Hugo Rochette, and copywriter Aditya Hariharan. Production was handled by Big Kahuna Films with director Santiago Zannou leading the film shoot in the United Arab Emirates.
The campaign centres on a worker who moves through a dehumanising, machine-like professional environment before returning home and recovering his identity. The IKEA-furnished home represents freedom and authenticity. The tagline — "where we feel alive again" — distils that proposition into a direct emotional statement aimed at UAE audiences navigating demanding working lives.
Santiago Zannou directed "Feel Alive Again" for production company Big Kahuna Films, Dubai. Director of photography James Adey shaped the film's visual contrast between cold workplace and warm home environments. Editor David Zavadescu cut the film, with post-production completed by Pixelmob. These credits are documented across shots.net and campaignlive.co.uk.
No verified award recognitions for "Feel Alive Again" appear in publicly available records. A search of Cannes Lions, Effies, One Show, D&AD, Clio, Webby, and WARC databases returned no confirmed entries or wins for this campaign, as corroborated by clapboard.com, adforum.com, and ogilvy.com among other industry sources.
"Feel Alive Again" received a Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's genuine creative ambition — particularly its unusual use of science-fiction within the household product category — alongside the constraints of a single-asset execution and the absence of publicly verifiable performance data from the United Arab Emirates market.
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