Hasta La Creative!

This cute Halloween video from Mekanism introduces a faux product called Lil' Pepsi, "the tiny treat that does the trick at any party!" We're talking about itsy-bitsy cans of soda, maybe 0.5 fluid ounces each, sized to fit in a doll's mini-mini-mini fridge, right next to the itty-bitty beers from that Dish commercial.

We're assured that Lil' Pepsis "are not available anywhere at any time," which is a shame, because most commenters seem enthralled, and Pepsi could make a bundle selling them as curios for keychains and such. (Queens, N.Y., rapper Big Baby Gandhi has a track called "Drink a Lil' Pepsi." It begins: "Drink a lil' Pepsi/Mix it with codeine … Big batch for the whole team." Gosh, I wonder why the song wasn't licensed for this ad?)

Lil' Pepsi sprang from the client's challenge to its in-house marketing execs and domestic agencies to come up with a fun ad concept. The spot is getting a fair share of spooky-week press and starting to pop on YouTube, so I guess that proves there aren't any small ideas. Or maybe it proves there are.

Does your wedding day get better, or imperceptibly worse, when Honda shows up with eight carloads of fun?

See for yourself in the video below, starring Mairead and Kevin, a young couple who (for reasons unexplained in the video) apparently asked Honda to "borrow" three CR-Vs for their wedding day—and then ended up with a whole lot more than they expected.

The video, by RPA, is meant to be one of those heartwarming tear-jerkers. And you may feel your heart warmed and your tears jerked. But the wedding setting is a tough place to pull that off—you're supposed to be unbearably happy even before Honda rolls in with the extra presents, so the upside is limited. They're not all material presents—flying in the distant cousins was a wise move. But showering a happy couple with even more happy doesn't have the tension, or the payoff, of some of other videos in the genre.

For an equally manufactured but much more fun-loving execution from Honda, you'd have to go back to last year's "Surprising Monsters Calling Home" video. Now, those are kids who really needed—and appreciated—some loving.

The new video is part of Honda's "Start Something Special" campaign, which launched in August. Two national brand TV spots break Tuesday, beginning with "Thank You" (posted below), which shows photographs and video of families and fans showing their appreciation of the Honda brand. "Thank you all for making your Honda more than a car. Thanks for making them something special," says the voiceover. The spots will air on the NHL Network and during NFL games.

CREDITS
Client: Honda
Spot: "#StartSomething Special: Mairead & Kevin's Wedding"

Agency: RPA
EVP, CCO: Joe Baratelli
SVP, GCD: Jason Sperling
AD: Suzie Yeranosyan
CW: David Sullivan
Agency Executive Producer: Gary Paticoff
Agency Senior Producer: Mark Tripp

Production:  RPA
Director: Mark Tripp
DP: Stephen Carmona
Producer: Tracy Chaplin
Production Supervisor: Andrew Scrivner

Editorial Company: Butcher Editorial
Editor: Teddy Gersten
Assistant Editor: Kelly Henson
Executive Producer: Rob Van
Producer: Justine Smollan

Telecine Company: The Mill
Colorists: Adam Scott

Audio Post Company: Margarita Mix
Audio Post Mixer: Paul Hurtubise

Music Company: Music Beyond and Position Music

Just a few months after Facebook finally eased off its restrictive contest guidelines, Pinterest seems to be taking the opposite approach. In a recent round of policy revisions and clarifications, the network has greatly limited the scope of promotions that can be hosted by brands and bloggers.

In a blog post published Thursday, Pinterest marketing rep Kevin Knight laid out the many types of promotions that Pinterest isn't cool with. Specifically prohibited are promotions that:

• Suggest that Pinterest sponsors or endorses them or the promotion
• Require people to Pin from a selection (like a website or list of Pins)
• Make people Pin the contest rules
• Run a sweepstakes where each Pin, board, like or follow represents an entry
• Encourage spammy behavior, such as asking participants to comment
• Ask to vote with Pins, boards or likes
• Require a minimum number of Pins

Worth noting: Per these rules, a Pinterest contest can never have more than one entry per person, even if someone pins 100 items or engages with the contest every day for two weeks. Also, brands can't require contest participants to pin from a specific site or set of boards—a frequent tactic for helping spread branded content.

These updates come (probably not coincidentally) as Pinterest staffers have been in a lengthy email exchange with influential mom blogger Amy Lupold Bair, who had registered the trademark for the term "pinning party." When she attempted to enforce the trademark on other virtual party hosts, Pinterest's legal team told her to stop—and that her pinning parties for brand clients were in violation of their promotion guidelines anyway.

But when Lupold Bair asked for specifics on how a Pinterest promotion could or should be run, it soon became clear that the guidelines are complicated, poorly communicated (by Pinterest's own admission) and currently being observed by almost no one. When asked by Lupold Bair for a specific promotion that actually had followed the rules correctly, Pinterest policy chief Jud Hoffman acknowledged, "It's true that there aren't many examples of contests that follow our rules and encourage people to pin things that represent their authentic interests."

One upside of this week's discussions is that Pinterest has finally provided some relatively detailed explanation of its rules and reasoning. Sifting through Pinterest's lengthy responses to both myself and Lupold Bair, here are the answers to a few frequently asked questions:

Why restrict brands from allowing multiple contest entries?

"The distinction we're trying to make is between a contest where someone who creates ten boards would be entered ten times and one where the person is entered only once regardless of the number of boards she creates. We don't allow the ten board/ten entry example because we've found that people tend to create boards and pins that feel 'spammy' to their followers." —Pinterest policy director Jud Hoffman, in an email to blogger Amy Lupold Bair

What's been wrong with the way most Pinterest contests are run?

"Done well, they can be a trigger to help people think about the cool things you're doing. But they can also motivate people to add Pins they aren’t truly interested in, which is why Pins from contests can often feel irrelevant and even spammy. We don't want people to feel like they have to Pin things they don't like because it will help them win something." —Annie Tan, Pinterest Corporate Communications, in an email to Adweek.

What would a legitimate Pinterest contest look like?

"You can imagine a contest sponsored by a canned food company that asks people to create a board representing their ideal Thanksgiving meal, with the winner getting all of the ingredients to prepare that meal. As long as they don't require pinning one of their products or from a selection of pins, that contest would be fine. People would be free to put together a board that really represents their tastes and the pinner would have a chance at a great prize sponsored by the food company." —Hoffman, in an email to Lupold Bair

Will Pinterest be enforcing these rules across the board?

Depends on who you ask:

"If we see contests like the ones you seem to be helping to organize, we will stop them and also let the contest sponsor know. Seems like a situation we all would want to avoid." —Anthony Falzone, deputy general counsel for Pinterest, in an email to Lupold Bair.

"We're a small team, so unfortunately we're not able to reach everyone running contests that break our rules. Please know that we're not asking that you alone follow them. We try hard to reach out to contest sponsors as soon as we discover they are violating our rules to ask that they correct them going forward." —Hoffman, in an email to Lupold Bair.

Tony Benna, a director at Mekanism, had some interesting ideas for a recent pitch to a client—and roped in some Mekanism co-workers to be the actors in his pitch video.

He tells AdFreak:

"The idea behind this specific pitch was to play off the idea of the incredibly stupid stuff people do when they are bored. Anyone that has ever played with a clothespin or binder clip inevitably tries to put it on their nose, or lip, or ear or whatever … So the thought was to show a montage of people doing incredibly stupid things by themselves. We see each person in a slow-motion stupid thought with a simple object, and then cut back to them doing a completely unexpected stupid action.

"This is where it got interesting, I went in to shoot the video without any real ideas for these vignettes, so I improvised! The results were unfortunately WAY too far out there for the client, and pretty much everyone that saw it. So it got killed. A few weeks ago I had a good friend in town and he asked to see some of my recent work. I stumbled across the raw footage from that pitch video and we were literally crying laughing. Not so much at the ideas, but at the torture I put my friends through. That coupled with my unapologetic monotone direction coming from off screen made it hilarious! So I decided I should repurpose the footage, and show the true madness behind a Mekanism pitch video."

Check out the inspired stupidity below. Via The Denver Egotist.

—Jeff Goodby of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners wrote "got milk?"—one of the greatest marketing taglines ever. Here, he looks back at the campaign on its 20th anniversary.

It is perhaps the most boring product imaginable.

We have all tried it. Most of us already own some. There is very little to say about it.

Milk is not new. It is not improved. It is white.

And so it was that when the California Milk Processor Board first asked us to pitch their business in 1993, we were shockingly ambivalent. A number of us simply thought the product was inherently too boring.

Oversimplifications of the history abound. Here's what really happened: Jon Steel and Carole Rankin were at a focus group when the clouds parted and a woman said, "The only time I even think about milk is when I run out of it." Goodby scrawled "got milk?" on a poster board for a meeting and decided it might be a tagline. And Silverstein set it in that typeface that has by now been appropriated ("got ____?") by lots of junk, donuts, wine and Jesus folks.

And of course, a 20-year downturn in California milk consumption leveled off and has even headed upward now and then.

Actually, there were a number of false starts before all that, as you can imagine. Someone noted that people always seem to drink milk along with something else—which was a fine insight, but they wanted to call the campaign "Milk and…" There was also a contingent that perhaps loved hard, milk-fed bodies and whiter teeth a little too much.

In the end, however, the consummate patience and advice of the California Milk Processor Board members, their directors Steve James and Jeff Manning and a cadre of artists like Kinka Usher, Noam Murrow, Michael Bay, Tom Kuntz, Jonathan Elias, Don Piestrup, Terry Heffernan, B-Reel and Method (and hundreds of others there is not room to name) made all the difference. Not to mention dozens of my favorite people ever to have worked at Goodby Silverstein & Partners (if I begin listing them, I am certainly in trouble).

Our research shows that "got milk?" has become the most remembered tagline in beverage history, outstripping those of beer and soft drink companies with budgets many times the size of ours. It is so ubiquitous, in fact, that people don't think of it as a tagline anymore. It is a piece of culture that was always just … there.

We have always felt that it's fitting that the campaign got its start in California, which is at the leading edge of experimentation and health trends. But it has been a long time since it was exclusively a GSP creation. After a period in which the California campaign ran nationally, it has been ably extended by a number of national agencies, and extended into Hispanic America by John Gallegos with a unique humor and artistry.

In short, we have all been very lucky to find each other and have this happen. When something lasts 20 years in a very pure form, it reminds us all how much serendipity and chance contribute to what we like to think is a very orderly, brilliantly orchestrated process.

I wouldn't trade it for anything. May we have 20 more, please.