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Thomas Greve Jespersen is head of brand at Jysk, a global retailer with Scandinavian roots and more than 3,600 stores and webshops in 49 countries. The centralised brand team, led by Jespersen, provides marketing assets globally, consistent to Jysk’s look and feel.
Let’s be honest: nobody wakes up excited to research the difference between memory foam and seven-zone pocket springs. For most consumers, shopping for a mattress is a dull and complicated chore they want to avoid.
Our marketing team for Jysk, delivers creative campaigns globally from our headquarters in Denmark. Normally we have a tendency to want too much, and want to say everything, in one 30 second ad.
In this case, if we weren’t thoughtful in our approach, we could have decided to put a sleep expert — maybe even our own mattress buyer — on camera to explain and prove that we know everything about beds, and that’s why you should choose us.
That might be the truth, but it would also be incredibly boring. We could have assumed that because we care about the engineering, the customer will too.
They don’t.
We need to capture attention in a category that most people find snooze-worthy, and we need to do it whilst we build brand awareness too. That’s because the mattress is by far the most complex purchase you do in Jysk, and we would like to make sure the customer knows and remembers us when they need a new mattress.
Uncovering the truth about shopping
That’s when we turned to Google search data to understand the consumer mindset.
Our initial assumption as a retailer was predictable: we thought the primary friction point must be price. But the data told a different story. The biggest hurdle wasn’t cost. It was complexity. People were overwhelmed by the technical jargon. They were practically giving up before they even started comparing options.
We realised that an informative, traditional ad featuring our “chief mattress engineer”, for example, would simply be marketing for ourselves, not for our future customers. If we wanted to stand out, we had to make the complexity of mattress shipping easy. And we had to make sure customers would want to watch it.
We decided to focus our attention on one market to begin with, Norway. We would build an ad that was bold and different for Jysk and test the reaction.
“Jysk has always been open to feedback,” says Rico Gade, creative business partner at Google Northern Europe. “So, at the start of the year we did an overview session looking at how their past ads had adhered to the ABCDs of video creativity.”
The ABCDs are a set of data-backed creative guidelines to help marketers and creators build effective video ads. The acronym stands for Attention, Branding, Connection, and Direction.
“The analysis showed that Jysk were consistent in most areas of the ABCDs, but could do with a focus on the final, D, element,” continues Gade. “Their ads adhered to the ‘principles’ around 50-60% of the time.”
A: Leaning into the boring
To capture attention — the “A” in YouTube’s ABCD creative framework — we had to do something surprising. We decided to lean into how boring this product category could be.
Working closely with our agency, Pong, we developed a concept rooted in a simple, humorous truth: we know it’s boring, that’s why we learned all the knowledge so you don’t have to.
We created a character who was passionately, unapologetically tedious — a mattress expert who bores everyone around them with their enthusiasm for mattress specs.
By openly acknowledging the elephant in the room, we immediately got the attention of the viewer.
B and C: The power of blue and subtle wit
Attention is only valuable if it connects back to the brand.
For Branding and Connection (“B” and “C”), we had to be more strategic. We aren’t Nike or Apple; we don’t have a logo that instantly commands recognition without context. Furthermore, in the Scandinavian furniture space, it is dangerously easy to be mistaken for our competitors.
Instead of just putting a logo in every frame, we wove brand cues in smartly. We featured our store staff uniforms. We placed logos naturally on boxes and other natural places within the scene.
Most importantly, we consistently used our brand colour as much as possible. By using it on clothes, bags, etc., we are building a subconscious link. Our goal is that in a few years, whenever a consumer sees a blue-themed furniture ad, their brain instantly says, “That’s Jysk”.
We paired this distinctiveness with the emotional connection of humour. The dry, relatable wit connected deeply with our viewers, resulting in retention rates that beat our usual benchmarks.
On long-form YouTube, over two-thirds of skippable viewers watched the ad to the very end. This was a staggering response. In a world where you can skip pretty much anything, consumers voluntarily gave us their attention.
D: Fit-for-platform creatives
The final piece of the puzzle — Direction (“D”) — required a fundamental shift in how we produce content.
In the past, many brands, including ours, would shoot a 30-second hero video for TV or YouTube and chop it up for native short-form social platforms. But consumer attention doesn’t work like that. A native platform demands native execution.
We took the core theme and tried to apply it specifically for other media platforms.
For example, for YouTube Shorts, it meant creating entirely different, “CCTV-style” assets that looked native to a vertical scroll but were consistent with our overarching “boring people to sleep” theme.
Our average view time on short-form native content jumped from one second to four seconds. In a space where every millisecond counts, a 4X increase in attention is a massive victory.
Constraints fuel creative storytelling
Frameworks like the ABCDs aren’t creative straitjackets; they are diagnostic tools that fuel better storytelling.
By accepting the constraints of our “boring” product and adapting to the unique DNA of each digital platform, our team created an entertaining and effective campaign.
Our overall ABCD adherence score went up from that 50-60% baseline, to over 80% for this campaign.
Going forward, we’ll build on these learnings by thinking even bigger and bolder. We want to ensure all our product categories stand out and are remembered - all whilst making content tailored to each media channel.
We are very proud of the boundaries we have pushed today, but the real journey is proving that we can do it even better tomorrow.
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