Inside the Mini Pitch is a Caramel Pony

Inside the convoluted fun land of the MINI pitch, Business Week reports that the four finalist agencies were subjected to a Double Dare gauntlet of deeds to determine their quick thinking and reflexes. In addition to making name tags on the spot and answering grueling questions like, "If Arnold Schwarzenegger runs for President, who should be his running mate?" the competing agencies, "were sent out into nasty rainy weather to drive MINI Coopers and go on a kind of scavenger hunt for ideas and props to be used for a scrapbook. The book would tell a MINI story that the agencies and the client would all review over cocktails. Butler Shine's scrapbook centered on a story about a mannequin the team named Darlene, which it snitched from a local electronics store. Darlene and team motored in a MINI to a pumpkin patch, but the caper ended up, for real, with the team being grilled at the local police station." Sounds both 1) better than the usual staid agency review boards and 2) queer. MINI's CEO is said to have given the account to Butler because, "[h]e especially liked its work for Converse sneakers, including a campaign in which Converse enthusiasts, rather than hired hands, created short Internet films, which also ran on TV." Converse has been swinging more and more mainstream and will only continue to amp up efforts towards gaining market share while sacrificing brand identity. Likewise, McDowell task for Butler is to take the culty MINI and blow it up even bigger while maintaining its idiosyncratic "je ne sais what the fuck" -- in essence, to make MINI the Altoids of compact cars. We'll be watching to see whether Butler can keep MINI advertising innovative or whether the work ends up all "creativey." via.