The Home Depot Packs Whole DIY Projects, Start to Finish, Inside Pinterest Pins

A compact new Pinterest campaign from The Home Depot and agency 22squared offers sprawling home improvement guidance, hoping to help move DIYers past inspiration and into action by showing them how the work actually gets done. Titled "Built-In Pins," the promotional effort includes videos, images and a 360-degree interactive online shopping experience created with virtual reality advertising platform OmniVert—all tailored to fit the dimensions of Pinterest's mobile platform, itself a popular source of visual ideas, including for interior design. The various ads show makeovers of four key rooms—bedroom, kitchen, living room and bathroom—as performed by a bootstrapping couple. Time-lapsed little film clips, served in Pinterest's own format, are the perfect way to make something look easy, when surely it's not. In just 30 seconds, a man and a woman overhaul an entire space, stripping out the old carpet, painting three walls and paneling a fourth with shiplap siding, laying down hardwood-style laminate floors, putting in a light fixture, and furnishing the whole place. [kickout id="1"] "What makes this own-able for the Home Depot brand is showing all the doing that went into the beautiful 'afters,'" says Lisa DeStefano, vp of marketing at the retailer. "We don't use Pinterest as a platform just to inspire, we are there for you through the whole process of the planning of the 'before' to the 'look what I did' afters. And in this campaign, we've done just that." Interactive renderings of the rooms, meanwhile, let viewers use their mobile devices to take a spin around, and tap on orange dots scattered around for more details on the products—like Heavy Cream Sheer Curtains from Martha Stewart—via pop-up windows that come complete with handy "Shop Now" buttons, to guarantee a friction-less way to part with your money. (Pinterest will be touting the experience at CES this week, and it will roll out to select Home Depot stores.) "Built-in Pins flip the convention of just showing beautiful 'afters,'" says Alex Lukacs, associate creative director at 22squared. "Instead, we built visually inspiring rooms inside actual Pins, creating the first-ever Pinterest board where people can literally see first-hand everything that went into making it a reality and gain the confidence to do it themselves." To that end, the campaign's Pinterest posts also include guides and tip-sheets on the methods pictured in the videos—like a how-to for installing beadboard backsplash behind your kitchen stove. The answer is, apparently, with a measuring tape, a nail gun and some caulk … though it's still hard to imagine the process isn't a bit more complicated than that. In other words, it unsurprisingly falls more on the side of inspirational eye-candy than bonafide step-by-steps on how to make your dream home a reality using just a little elbow grease and the friendly neighborhood hardware chain (where underpaid employees may or may not, without offering help, let you wander around for a half hour looking for the right size toggle bolt, and scratch their heads when you do ask). While the campaign certainly makes the "doing" part clearer than would a glossy snap of the finished product alone, it also does a good job of making sure the process look like an awful lot of fun and sunshine—as opposed to say, sweaty, frustrating or protracted. That is to say, it's still advertising. It's just selling a slightly different, and to be fair, slightly more honest, kind of magic. CREDITS Client: The Home Depot Campaign Title: Built-In Pins Agency: 22squared Agency Location: Atlanta Chief Creative Officer: John Stapleton Executive Creative Director: Al Patton Group Creative Director/s: Sanders Hearne ACD/Copywriter: Alex Lukacs ACD/Art Director: Elizabeth Maloy, Louie Zuniga Senior Art Director: Katie Sheridan Art Director: Caty Coplin, Ian McAllister Animator/s: David Burns + Stephen Bridges Producer/s: Katelin Perry, Matt Silliman, Bryan Lord Project Supervisor: Allie Hansen SVP, Group Account Director: Genna Franconi Management Supervisor: Scott Cooley Account Supervisor: Mallory Adams Production Company: All Day Everyday Director: ghost+cow (John Carlucci and Brandon LaGanke) Editorial Company: Nine Mile Circle Editor: John Carlucci and Brandon LaGanke VFX Lead and Finishing: Les Umberger Colorist: Dave Pickett Post Producer: Julia Merrill Audio Record & Mix: Nylon Sound Design: Nylon Original Music: Nylon Studios Composer: Zac Colwell

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The Home Depot Packs Whole DIY Projects, Start to Finish, Inside Pinterest Pins

Mobile friendly ads include how-to tips and a mini 360 experience

Gabriel Beltrone

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Gabriel Beltrone