IKEA launched in New Zealand on a national be-everywhere promise, then pivoted to intimate local activations like a $19.95 inner-city sleepover and secret garage parties. That move is a signal for any Australian business pouring budget into blanket reach. Reach is buyable and countable. Relevance, the harder thing, is where the growth sits.
Impressions are what you buy. Memory is what you earn.
The Take: IKEA just handed Australian businesses a lesson worth more than its next campaign. When the flat-pack giant walks back a national be-everywhere push in favour of a $19.95 sleepover and a handful of garage parties, it is conceding that reach was the expensive part and relevance was the point. If a brand that size is narrowing on purpose, the operator spreading budget thin across too many channels should take the hint.
Why did IKEA stop trying to be everywhere?
Australia's advertising market is worth roughly $28 billion and forecast to pass $30 billion next year. Almost all of that money buys reach. Reach is the one thing relevance does not require.
IKEA arrived in New Zealand last December on a loud national campaign built around being everywhere at once. Months later it changed tack. The brand now frames its approach as as local as necessary, leaning into intimate community activations instead of blanket presence.
Look at what those activations are. A $19.95-a-night stay in an inner-city Sydney home, secret garage parties in New Zealand, beachside pop-ups. Not one of those is a line on a media plan. Each of them lands in the only place that decides anything, which is whether a real person in a real suburb feels the brand was built for them.
What does reach actually buy you?
Reach is the easy line item. It spends predictably, it reports cleanly and it asks nothing of your judgement. You set a budget, a platform serves your ad to a large number of people and a dashboard counts them. That is why platforms and agencies sell it so hard. It moves money at a known rate and produces a tidy number at the end.
Relevance is the harder trade. It needs a point of view about who you are for and the discipline to skip the people you are not for. There is no slider for that in an ad account.
Here is the money flowing through the easy option.
Australia's total advertising market grew 5.2% to roughly $28 billion in 2025 and is forecast to reach $30.7 billion in 2026 on WPP Media figures. For a sense of what all that advertising chases, Australians spent $175 billion over the 2025/26 summer, up $9 billion year on year, with $91 billion of it discretionary.
Forecast Australian advertising spend in 2026, most of it still buying reach
Should you spend on reach or relevance?
This is where IKEA's move should land for you. Reach is not a strategy. It is an expense. Being everywhere is the default because it is buyable and countable, not because it works hardest. The growth sits in the harder thing, and the harder thing is relevance.
Here is the part I can only tell you because we measure it. In New Rebellion's scoring of Australian businesses across dozens of industries, Brand and Positioning shows up as one of the weakest of the six dimensions we assess, softer on average than Digital Maturity or Data and Tracking. Read that next to a $28 billion reach machine and the mismatch is stark. Businesses can buy their way to visibility. Far fewer build a reason to be chosen.
You can rent attention by the impression. You cannot rent a reason to be remembered.
What I would do about it
Split your budget into two lines and name them honestly. Reach and relevance. If relevance is under a fifth of the total, you are buying visibility and hoping meaning follows.
Pick one place that matters more than the rest. A suburb, a category moment, a customer type. Go deeper there than a national plan would ever let you.
Cut the channels you cannot explain. If you cannot say what a line item is meant to change, it is reach dressed up as activity.
Measure the thing reach cannot show you. Branded search, repeat purchase, referral, whether people can say what you stand for without prompting.
Copy the shape of IKEA's move, not the tactic. A $19.95 sleepover is not your answer. A specific, physical, memorable idea aimed at people who can actually buy from you might be.
A note on how we score
We assess businesses on six dimensions, Brand and Positioning among them, using the same scoring methodology across the industries we cover. The reading above is directional and reflects the pattern we see in this year's data, not a single fixed figure. You can see the full method at how we score.
That is my read, not a rule. IKEA might tune the dial back toward reach next quarter. But the direction of the move is the tell. When the biggest player in the room decides that being somewhere specific beats being everywhere, the sharper response for a smaller business is to stop paying for ubiquity it cannot afford and start earning relevance it can own. If you want people who do this for a living to help you find your version of the garage party, that is the work we do inside NR Studio.
Frequently asked questions
Is reach ever worth paying for?
Yes, when you already have a reason to be chosen and you want more of the right people to hear it. Reach carries relevance further. On its own it just spends.
What does "as local as necessary" mean for a small business?
It means matching the size of your presence to the size of the relationship you need. You do not have to show up in feed after feed. You have to matter in the few places your customers actually make decisions.
How do I know if I am overspending on reach?
Look at what you would lose if you cut it. If pausing a channel changes your impression count but not your sales, your pipeline or your branded search, you were paying for reach and calling it marketing.