Ikea Wants Us to Forget Our Phones at the Dinner Table

Let’s TBT to life at the dinner table without phones and Snapchat and Instagram all that good jazz for a minute. That time when we could sit with family and enjoy some good food and just relax. Ikea and Acne’s “Let’s Relax” wants us to get back to the good ol’ days, where what we eat isn’t a competition with all the people in the social realm, where what’s on our plates isn’t just another means for Likes.

In this first spot, created for AOL platforms, a family from the 18th century gathers around the dinner table to enjoy a beautiful feast of food. But before the family is allowed to eat, a painter is summoned in to capture the decadent spread in a painfully tedious manner. The painting is then carted around and shown to other people around town. The work gets nods and thumbs-up. Once all the likes have been tallied and the painting has been deemed likable, everyone is allowed to eat.

The campaign is based on Ikea’s Life at Home Report which states that 73% of people feel more at home when they cook, kuid 42% don’t actually have time to do it. Ikea’s point is that maybe if people weren’t so obsessed with taking photos of food to get 100+ likes, they’d have more time to cook—and to enjoy the people around them in their home. Ikea wants us to focus on social gatherings and enjoying the people in our presence. In their opinion, home, and the dinner table, should be a sanctuary away from social media: “It’s a Meal. Not a Competition.”

And of course it wants us to do this while they sell the table and tableware that bring us together. We can dig in to that.