Hasta La Creative!

You might think of Olive Garden as a conventional family restaurant, a little on the vanilla side, that sits somewhere near the Best Buy in suburbs across the country. You’d be wrong. It’s a dope establishment straight outta Compton. And just so you know, Holmes, the breadsticks are killer.

The Olive Garden ad account is in review, after 30 years at Grey, so the pranksters at Jingle Punks are making a play. To grab some attention, and potentially a piece of business, the music and marketing studio created a spec ad that gives Olive Garden an “O.G.” makeover. Or rather, it brings out the gangsta that was already there. Expect bling, bandanas and pit bulls aplenty in this video.

The tactic has worked for Jingle Punks before—the firm landed a multi-year deal with Yahoo after coming up with a music video on the fly when Marissa Mayer complained about the tunes on the company’s “hold” mode. The studio also works with NBC’s hit The Voice, and did an orchestral remake of the classic Meow Mix ditty that racked up 20 million views on social media.

In the current case, the targeted brand is near and dear to their hearts, according to Jingle Punks co-founder and president Jared Gutstadt, who highly recommends the fried calamari. “Whenever our company closes a big deal, we go down to the local Olive Garden, and I realized that only real gangsters call it the O.G.” 

Truth.

Twenty bucks says college students around the U.S. will be racing to their computers at 3 p.m. ET this afternoon. Why? Because Olive Garden, purveyor of sort-of Italian food, has—in a fit of PR genius—announced a Never Ending Pasta Pass.

And that’s when it goes on sale online.

For $100, you can get unlimited pasta, salad, breadsticks and soft drinks for seven entire weeks. That’s right—49 days in a row of all-you-can-eat carbs, more carbs and bunny food. Alcohol and gratuity not included. Food coma and chocolate mints likely are.

I did the math, and this is cheaper than eating two packs of Ramen noodles for every meal for those 49 days (that would be $133 if you Amazon Prime it).

But you’d better act fast right at 3 p.m. The chain is selling only 1,000 of these pasta passes. (It’s a kickoff to the annual “Never Ending Pasta Bowl” promotion, running Sept. 22 to Nov. 9., which lets you eat all the pasta you want for $9.99.)

Clever move from Olive Garden, even if all their Facebook fans are super weird.

A common lament among parents is the expense of going out after having children. Beyond shelling out the cost for dinner, there's usually also a hefty price of paying someone to tuck your kids into bed and then sit on the couch, watching The Bachelor until you come home.

So Olive Garden, known for its widely loved breadsticks and somewhat-Italian food, has come up with an ingenious campaign to get parents into their restaurant: The chain is covering your babysitting tab.

For its "Parents' Night Out" promotion, Olive Garden teamed up with MyGym—a chain that offers kids tumbling classes and birthday parties—to provide free babysitting on Feb. 7. Parents just need to reserve a spot at their local MyGym, if there's one nearby.

Of course such an idea is simple in theory but logistically quite complicated. Olive Garden fans have filed a litany of complaints about age restrictions, mandatory (though refundable) deposits, lack of convenient MyGym locations and other details. But Olive Garden has been responding to the questions with admirable diligence, and given the national exposure generated by the promotion, it's clearly a worthwhile effort.