IME slings and carriers are mostly for little babies (sub-6-months) especially newborns (who don’t get shown a lot in promotional photos, being nowhere near as cute as an older baby). YM clearly V, but given the option between
a)Cook dinner with one hand and a 4-month-old baby on the hip
b)4-month-old on my back while I cook
c)4-month-old in the bouncer being bounced by my foot, preventing me from moving round the kitchen
d)Bad-tempered loud baby
I found (a) to be the worst for my back, and (b) to be far more pleasant for the whole household than any other alternative.
I own two strollers too. And plenty of shoes. They’re fine tools for moving kids around - but not for every possible situation (just like slings and carriers)
Actually, it is the tried and true method of selling your product. You tell people how ugly, stinky, stupid and incompetent they are, and then you tell them that your product is going to change all that. (The classic example: Not competent enough to drain pasta from a regular pot? Try our pot with the holes in the top that will allow even an incompetent idiot like you to cook spaghetti.)
Of course that’s why I can never work up the energy to be offended by a commercial. They’re trying to sell you something and it’s to their advantage to make you think you need it, even if that means being silly, inaccurate or offensive.
The little I used a sling, I found it much better for the older set (where I could sling them on my hip) than for an infant. The baby seemed so fragile, and getting her in and out of the sling seemed impossible - and when I thought “I’m going to be doing this over asphalt in the Target parking lot” I became “not a sling mom”
I wanted to be a sling mom - I owned or borrowed no less than four slings in an attempt to become a sling mom - but every one of them left me convinced that the baby was going to fall out either being put in, taken out, or while being worn.
Successful advertisements make women “feel good” about the product. This one didn’t, for reasons that are a hard to pin down precisely, having to due with the complex nature of the female psyche. Thus, it gets yanked.
Apparently not. Admitting to any negative aspects of motherhood makes you a Bad Mommy. You’re supposed to suck it up and not complain, or else you make Mommyhood look less than The Best and Most Important Job in the World. Breastfeeding hurts like hell? Shut up and deal with it. You should relish the pain - after all, you’re bonding and making your kid smarter, right? Wearing your kid on your back hurts? Tough, keep it to yourself. Admitting pain only makes you look weak, and if you’re weak, you have no business being a Mommy!
I agree with SpoilerVirgin - virtually all advertising is based on something you lack in your life (that their product will magically supply for you). Maybe what this commercial lacked was the link between (generic) your loser life and how their product would make it perfect. But thinking about it, they didn’t miss that - Motrin will make your life perfect. I guess it is just a case of not being allowed to even hint that babies and motherhood are anything less than sublime perfection.
I don’t get this. People have been doing this fairly regularly for at least the past 25 years - my parents weren’t unusual to carry my brother around this way back then; lots of my friends’ little siblings were put in baby slings too. I haven’t noticed it becoming any more or less common since then.
I think the point is that perhaps pain medication commercials shouldn’t imply that such pain is the result of “fashion” and “being trendy” nor sarcastically dismiss something women have been doing for thousands of years as “supposedly a good bonding experience.”
I’m not a mom and I still picked up that vibe watching that commercial.
My daughter is nine, my son ten. And when I tried to be a sling mom it was definitely a counter culture not terribly mainstream thing. If you run in a counter culture crowd (I sort of do) - EVERYONE is a sling mom and has been for ages. If you are a 'burb soccer mom, slings used to be really rare - baby buckets, complex strollers that hook to your shopping cart - those were the thing.
I think you could change this ad in small ways that would make it much more successful:
Imply that going with the babywearing fad is bold and cutting edge - decidedly cool. But now and then you need just a little help to be the really with-it mom that you are - that’s where Motrin can help. We “empower” you to be the mom that others only wish they were. You can feel good about yourself and Motrin.
Throw in that staple of all good ads these days: young, thin, white, sexy models with which the viewers can identify (“Wow, if I bought Motrin I could BE that woman!”) and you have it.
Yeah, I got that vibe from the commercial too, and what’s more, the other ads in this campaign are the same! I’ve seen bus stops ads for Motrin with a picture of two pills with “Humongous Handbag” and “High Heels” written on the pills. Those fashionable bags and shoes sure hurt a lot! Better pop some pills! Umm, how about removing some things from your purse or buying better shoes? And now, to equate babies as another thing in the “fashion-induced pain” category? Offensive.
Heh, a commercial which insinuates (or rather, outright states) that people who wear babies in carriers are doing so to impress others, to look like an “official mom”, and then offers them a pill to deal with the pains caused by such behaviour? It isn’t any mystery why that causes offence.
Until I saw this outrage du jour on some feminist blogs, I had no idea that “parents who carry their spawn in some carrying device” even had a name for themselves. Which really does make it seem like something that’s become trendy and hip, which makes me think there’s people who do it because it’s trendy and hip.
It’s an ad. Save your righteous outrage for something that matters.
[pointless aside]
Hey! I just finished doing that. No colic just cranky. I don’t have any back pain and I don’t really have an opinion on this other than some people get outraged over the silliest things…
[/pointless aside]
No, the problem, as has been repeatedly stated and which you seemed to get in post 11, is that it leaves the impression that “Babywearing” is a fashion; that, like the oversized bags and high heels featured in other ads in this series, carrying your baby around in a sling is something people do for attention, not because it works as a parenting technique (as do plenty of other things, sure). It’s belittling and patronizing and portrays attentive parents as shallow twits.
A sincere, “Moms and Dads, carrying your kids around all day is hard work on your back, isn’t it? What are your options? You could get a stroller [insert picture of baby crying in stroller as a wheel falls off] or maybe a nanny [insert picture of scary looking Eastern Bloc babushka here]…or you could take Motrin! [insert picture of young model woman who’s never given birth smiling and laughing with cherubic borrowed babe].”
“Take Motrin to keep being a good mom without the pain”, not “take Motrin to keep being a good fashion plate with your child-sized accessory du jour”. Big difference. But of course that would not have fit with their entire current campaign aimed at women 'tween 18-40, which is all about how to use Motrin to ease your FASHION RELATED aches and pains.
I was a 90 lb. mom and carried the baby for a couple years. And he was a giant baby. He walked at 7.5 months and ran for a couple years after that. Carrying him was definitely hard at times, but I never had any lingering pain that required medication. It’s a stupid commercial, but a boycott? Jesus…:rolleyes:
