Home Centre, the region’s largest furniture and home accessories brand, has launched their latest campaign which sneakily turns other brands’ ads into their own by putting a spotlight on the Home Centre items featured in those ads and simply saying ‘There We Are’.
With over 14,000 products, Home Centre is in homes across the region. Showcasing every single item in individual ads would be an enormous (and expensive) challenge. But ever since noticing that countless ads from across the Middle East already feature their products, Home Centre found a workaround: Instead of making new ads, let’s use the ones that already exist––quite literally taking what’s theirs and making it Home Centre’s.
The campaign, created by Publicis Middle East, identifies commercials from other brands where Home Centre furniture and accessories make an appearance. Then, with strategically targeted YouTube pre-rolls, Home Centre steals the attention, letting viewers know its products are featured in the next ad they’re about to watch, acting as a cheeky hijack of other brands’ time, effort, and money spent. Their production, their budgets, their media, their audience, is now Home Centre’s spotlight.
Call it an unintentional collab or production value robbery––ads from all over the region have transformed into Home Centre’s product catalogue. But the brands behind these ads did not go unappreciated. Every time Home Centre hijacked an ad, it also tipped its hat with messages such as “This ad may not sell this table. But the next one will.” –– acting as playful thank-yous to credit where it was due.
But the message goes deeper. For a brand often perceived as the quieter alternative to certain big-name competitors, ‘There We Are’ is also a declaration of presence against Swedish giants. And sometimes, all it takes is spotting what’s yours and saying, There We Are.