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.

“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