IKEA superstores are not convenience stores. They are destinations. They sit on the outskirts of cities, require deliberate planning to visit, and ask customers to invest a significant portion of a day to experience them. For most retailers, that distance from the customer is a problem to be minimised. For IKEA Dubai and Memac Ogilvy Dubai in February 2020, it was the brief.
The Problem
IKEA Dubai’s first store had been drawing customers from across the city for years. The loyalty was real and documented. People made the trip despite the distance, despite the traffic, despite the time it consumed. When IKEA opened its second store in Dubai at Jebel Ali, it did not simply want to announce the new location. It wanted to reward the loyalty that the existing customer base had already demonstrated and give them a reason to keep making the journey even when more convenient alternatives were available.
Memac Ogilvy Dubai identified the journey time itself as the asset the campaign should be built around. The distance to an IKEA store had always been framed as a barrier. Buy With Your Time made it a reward.
How It Worked
Every product in the IKEA Dubai store was given a dual price: its standard monetary price in UAE dirhams, and a Time Price. The Time Price was calculated using the average hourly wage in Dubai, confirmed at AED 105 per hour. The more time a customer had spent travelling to IKEA stores in the past, the more they had accumulated in time currency.
The verification mechanism was Google Maps Timeline, a feature built into Google Maps that records and stores a user’s historical routes with timestamps. A customer wanting to use their accumulated travel time as currency simply opened their Google Maps Timeline, found their previous IKEA visits, and presented the records of how long those journeys took. The accumulated time was converted at the Dubai average wage rate into a credit applicable at the IKEA checkout.
Customers could pay for purchases entirely in time currency, entirely in dirhams, or in any combination of the two. The checkout infrastructure was adapted to accommodate time as a payment method alongside conventional currency for the duration of the activation.
The Mechanic’s Structural Intelligence
The campaign’s creative logic operates on two levels simultaneously. On the surface, it is a loyalty reward programme. Every customer who had made the trip to IKEA in the past had been accumulating value without knowing it, and the campaign revealed that accumulated value and made it redeemable.
Below that surface, the mechanic reframes IKEA’s most significant competitive disadvantage, its distance from city centres, as a differentiator that competitors cannot replicate. A more conveniently located furniture store cannot reward customers for the time they spent getting there, because the time they spend is negligible. IKEA’s relative inaccessibility is precisely what gives the reward its value. The longer the trip, the more the customer earns. The disadvantage becomes the campaign.
Ogilvy’s own documentation describes the strategic intention: “We saw an opportunity to reward IKEA’s loyal customers who previously made the trip by turning the effort and time they went through to get there into a strength.”
The Results
The Buy With Your Time activation produced a 30% increase in store footfall at the Jebel Ali location during the campaign period, as confirmed in D&AD’s award documentation. That outcome reflects what the mechanic was designed to achieve: converting the barrier of distance into a specific, financially quantified reason to make the trip more frequently rather than less.
The campaign was documented as a Harvard Business School case study, confirming its commercial logic as a teachable retail marketing strategy. The case study noted that if the time currency concept proved successful in Dubai, IKEA planned to consider adopting it at other locations globally.
The Recognition
Buy With Your Time was recognised across multiple major advertising award shows. At Cannes Lions, it won Gold. At The Clio Awards, it won Silver. At D&AD, it received a Wood Pencil, making it the only MENA campaign to win a Pencil in the 2021 D&AD awards. At The One Show, it was awarded Silver in the Digital Craft category for Creative Use of Data. The breadth of recognition across categories confirmed what the juries identified: a campaign that used an existing consumer data tool, Google Maps Timeline, in a genuinely new way, to solve a genuine retail problem with a mechanism that was simultaneously a creative idea and a commercial strategy.
The Broader Significance
Buy With Your Time belongs to a category of retail campaigns in which the brand converts an inconvenience into a brand strength by finding the unexpected value it contains. IKEA’s stores require a commitment of time and effort that no online furniture retailer and few physical competitors require. That commitment had always been extracted from customers without acknowledgement. The campaign acknowledged it, quantified it using a third-party data tool that customers trusted, and returned it as purchasing power.
The time each customer spent getting to IKEA had always been real. Buy With Your Time was the first time the brand agreed with them that it was.
Campaign Name: Buy With Your Time
Agency Name: Memac Ogilvy Dubai / CCO: Juggi Ramakrishnan / Group CD: Youssef Gadallah / Creative Team: Nicolás López, Fernando Montero / Production: Goldmine Films
Brand Name: Al Futtaim IKEA / IKEA Dubai
Location: IKEA Jebel Ali, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (February 2020)
