Furnishings subscription service Nickson is using humor to show how it can fill a room.

The brand recently launched a campaign, with the tagline “Unfinished is Unfun,” that depicts a trio of friends glued to the big game, with a camera pan out revealing a grim, spartan apartment and a jerry-rigged screen.

“From our research, we know that moving is one of the biggest stressors in peoples lives – the cost and work (and) time involved in actually moving out (or) in and the cost, work (and) time involved in buying furniture,” says Mike Davidson, co-founder and managing director of longtime agency partner, Round.

Davidson says the second insight it landed on is that many young professionals don’t necessarily trust their own skills at picking out the right stuff to make their new home comfortable – meaning, they are open to trusting design experts to do that for them.

Nickson ran its first integrated campaign in 2022, which targeted millennials.

And according to Davidson, the brand’s business grew five times in the first eight months of the campaign. In fact, Nickson needed a new influx of capital to scale their operations to meet demand, he adds. “As a new/small brand, we needed to get attention – the ads were very provocative and definitely out-punched their weight in terms of media spend.”

The focus for Nickson is primarily young, educated professionals that are moving up the ladder and need to move to new cities to do that. However, other customers include college grads, recently married couples, growing families, those going through divorce, people who are retiring and those going through financial changes.

The media mix is all digital and social, including DOOH, display and video, mobile in-app in game, streaming TV, paid social, with the company handling the buy.