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Ikea’s heritage meatball gets an eco-update

Seedballs by IKEA, Denmark

Denmark – Multinational furniture company Ikea’s latest meatball will not be served in its cafeterias, but rather in the gardens of its customers. The seed ball is a re-invention of the company’s signature snack to boost insect biodiversity.

To raise awareness of the decline of wild habitats for endangered insects, Ikea Denmark partnered with WWF Denmark to create seed balls comprising soil, clay and wildflowers that can be readily planted to rewild a given environment. Corn cockles, chamomile and poppies are among the flowers selected for the seed balls, which were picked for their appealing qualities for endangered insects. According to the company’s press release, ‘Denmark is one of the most intensively cultivated countries in Europe,’ and ‘more than 60% of Danish nature is cultivated land’, leaving little room for wild nature.

Ikea’s seed balls coincide with the revival of guerrilla gardening, something which we recently explored in the Nature-hacking market. The initiative, which takes a hyper-local approach, demonstrates how companies can factor in a location's specific characteristics when promoting eco-initiatives.

Strategic opportunity

With the rise of gardening as a hobby, companies can take inspiration from Ikea and release DIY kits that are tailored to specific areas

A guerilla newspaper exploring social justice

The Outer Work Newspaper. Design by Practice , US

US – Brand-building house Practice has unveiled an editorial project exploring social justice in collaboration with online anti-racism community Outer Work. The Outer Work Neswpaper features articles, worksheets and a poster – all offering tangible ways of engaging with anti-racist work in a format that Michelle Mattar, founder of Practice, says is ‘rooted in joy’.

Its visual style, featuring graphics of seedlings, soil and droplets, also plays reference to community gardens. Mattar says the publication uses ‘a joyful palette featuring a rich brown (soil) as opposed to an inky black typically used in offset print pieces’.

While online spaces are over-saturated with such content, the Outer Work Newspaper promotes the importance of physical materials when learning about such topics. It will be distributed across public spaces such as libraries, schools cafes and bookstores.

As more people seek to educate themselves on social issues, such projects align with the growth of Care-mmunities – a shift towards new structures of kinship that we explore in Neo-collectivism.

Strategic opportunity

Brands selling gardening or outdoor products should consider ways of promoting biodiversity education among audiences that don’t have access to nature. Why not create a community space or run educational nature sessions?

Amazon partners with IMDb to gamify streaming

US – With so much content available at our fingertips, choosing a tv show or film can often be a daunting process. To tackle decision fatigue, IMDb has teamed up with Amazon to offer a variety of entertaining games to help streamers narrow down what they want to watch.

Drawing on its vast database of reviews and film information, the games in the IMDb What To Watch app have been designed to glean information about the viewer’s mood, tastes and preferences. Through a number of interactive questions and prompts, the app also aims to determine whether the viewer is watching alone or with a group, calibrating its choices to suit particular occasions and event settings. The intention of the initiative is to save streamers from endless scrolling, as choice fatigue becomes a common concern across different platforms.

With a dizzying number of options to choose from, and giants like Netflix struggling to retain engagement, streaming companies are having to add Focus Filters to combat decision fatigue.

What to Watch by IMDb, US

Strategic opportunity

How can companies turn the task of picking a movie into an opportunity to increase engagement? Turn recommendation algorithms into games that help companies learn more about their customers

Stat: Podcasts are prompting big life changes

Anne-Iris Espinat Dief, The Netherlands

While podcasts remain a popular source of entertainment for many listeners, UK city-dwellers are also gaining career and lifestyle inspiration from the shows they’re tuning into. According to a survey by Vodafone, one in five people who live in inner UK cities say a podcast has inspired them to change careers.

Meanwhile, almost six in 10 inner-city Britons (57%) have been inspired to change something in their life after listening to a podcast. The research reveals that the biggest lifestyle changes people have undertaken after listening to a podcast include eating more healthily (17%), exercising more (16%) or learning a new skill (17%). These figures demonstrate the power that podcasts continue to have on people’s lives, beyond being a source of pleasure or education.

With traditional career journeys undergoing a drastic re-invention, work-related podcasts align with the youth-led shift of rebranding recruitment.