A recent project by two agency vets answers a question we never thought to ask: What would it be like to try and assemble Ikea furniture while tripping your balls off?
Hunter Fine and Alex Taylor are two longtime copywriters who like to do things outside their agency jobs (W+K and freelance, respectively). Last year, a mutual friend noted how annoying and, also, universal the process of building Ikea furniture can be.
They had a minor punning epiphany: what if they got others to go through the process while really, really high?
A year later we have the debut of “Hikea,” a would-be web series in which strangers do just that. First there’s Giancarlo and Nicole … he looks like an art director, doesn’t he?
We liked the hammer and the “Like, whoa, man” moment.
The duo told us how it all went down for an AdFreak post that ran last night. From Taylor:
“We thought, ‘How do we get people to participate?’ What kind of person would do this? So we put an ad on Craigslist a year ago, and it turned out that a lot people wanted to do it. We had to sift through the applicants and determine who wasn’t dangerous.”
Once they picked these most unoffensive druggies, they turned to agency colleagues who handled production duties, setting up shoots in the subjects’ own apartments and watching as they went off the deep end. Sort of.
The two found Keith with the nice facial hair after watching him smoke weed on The Daily Show. Fine said his comfort on camera told them, “at least he isn’t going to freak out and jump out of a window.” (Have you seen that video, by the way? It is nightmare stuff.)
Taylor summed up the project as such:
“Building Ikea furniture may be the only chance most of us get to take the tools out of the closet and actually build something. We’re not carpenters or builders, so it can go a lot of different ways. But it’s something we all know; many people have built their desks after drinking a few beers or smoking a joint, and this is just the next step.”
After receiving an overwhelmingly positive response, the two plan to continue the series … assuming they don’t run out of drugs to convince other people to consume. Unfortunately, YouTube found the Keith clip to be a little too edgy, so they took it down. Appeal pending.
Now, your friendly Agency Spies may or may not have ever consumed any substances of the psychedelic variety. But we will say that, if we HAD ever done such a thing, we would have wanted to do anything other than sit in front of a camera filming a video that would later be seen by hundreds of thousands of fellow humans.
Kudos to Keith, then. Here’s hoping the grease fire in his thought box eventually went out.