Earlier this month, Nestle launched its ‘Superbabies’ advertising campaign. This was timed with World Breast-Feeding week (which falls in the first week of August each year), and is designed to make the point that breast-feeding is best for children, and essential to make Superbabies of them. The creative device used held my attention immediately – the advertisement featured a baby dressed in a Superman suit, just about to take off into the skies like the famous superhero, powered of course by Mother’s breast milk.
This Nestle campaign features babies quite naturally, as the product or service being highlighted – breast-feeding – is directly related to babies. But did you know that advertisers use babies quite often to sell adult products that have little or no relevance to infants? Many of us may still recall the memorable Murphy Baby campaigns of the 1970s and ‘80s, where a baby was used as the symbol of Murphy Radios. Indeed, some of the greatest advertising campaigns in the world have featured babies – babies performing wonderful acts, or, like the Murphy baby, just appearing alongside the product, cute and with finger in mouth.
Evian’s iconic baby advertising
Iconic amongst such great “baby advertising” is a series of campaigns by Evian, a premium bottled water sourced from the Alps. Each advertisement in this series shows babies doing extraordinary things after consuming Evian water, thereby holding the viewers’ attention immediately. The “water babies” campaign, which won huge applause in France and Europe several years ago, has babies performing feats of synchronised swimming that even Olympic swimmers can feel proud of. The ‘Roller Babies’ campaign, which appeared thereafter in 2008, has a team of babies on roller skates, indulging in effortless acrobatics that is fascinating to watch. In fact, this campaign holds the world record for the most viewed online advertisement, attracting 45.2 million views on YouTube.
Each of these advertising campaigns uses babies to emphasise the fabulous impact that Evian water has on your body – this is such a refreshing water that it makes you feel so young. This ties in very well with Evian’s brand idea of “Live Young”, though the product is clearly targeted at adults. So successful have Evian’s baby campaigns been that earlier this year, the brand returned with yet another new burst of advertising titled “Baby and Me”, where adults surprisingly meet their baby versions on the road, and both then proceed to spontaneously dance together.
So Evian’s baby advertising is an excellent example of babies being used as an extreme illustration of “youthfulness”, which is the brand’s proposition. But there are also other very good reasons why babies are used by advertisers.
Breaking the clutter
To begin with, babies are still relatively rare in advertising, therefore they break the clutter immediately. We see beautiful curvaceous women and handsome men appearing all the time in television commercials, so a baby or two on screen is a welcome change and instantly catches our jaded eyes. In particular, if babies are used with products they are not normally associated with, the clutter-breaking impact is even higher. For instance, a recent international advertisement for Hyundai cars showed a newborn baby getting out of its crib, picking up the keys to the car, and driving it away effortlessly. That is so different that it will hold attention, any time. Imagine using babies cleverly in advertisements for beer or toothpaste or low-waist jeans. They will make the brand stand out by a mile.
Precious and vulnerable
Advertisers also use babies because they are a potent symbol of something that is so precious yet so vulnerable. As adults, we are most concerned about our baby’s well-being and safety at all times. I do not think that there is any other human concern which is stronger in its universal nature and appeal. Hence, using babies in this context makes some advertising ideas come alive immediately. Let me illustrate this through a brilliant campaign I have seen for Michelin tires. We don’t normally associate babies with rubber tires of motor cars, yet this advertisement featured a cute little baby holding on to a very large tire. The line in the advertisement said it all: “Because so much is riding on your tires”. The baby emphasised the safety and supreme reliability of the product instantly.
Disarming the viewer
Babies, because they are always so angelic and innocent in their appeal, tend to disarm the viewer, at least momentarily. This helps bring down the consumer’s defences, and thereby helps drive home the point which the advertisement is trying to make. If a baby were operating a highly complex washing machine in an advertisement, this would, for example, illustrate how simple the machine is. On the other hand, an adult demonstrating the simplicity of the machine may well be met with a cynical viewer response, that all these high-technology products say the same thing but end up being complicated to use.
Deep emotions
Perhaps the most important reason for using babies in advertising is that they evoke deep emotions in all of us. Babies are not merely adorable, they are one of the essential reasons why we live. They are a symbol of so many things that are most valuable to us – of love, purity, a new beginning, hope. That is why an advertisement for Johnson’s Baby Soap or Huggies diapers tugs at our heartstrings so powerfully, when we see the product being applied with such love and care by the mother to her child’s soft and sensitive skin. This deep emotion can be leveraged for a wide range of products in adult space as well. For example, an insurance brand or an adult health supplement can make the point, by using a baby in its advertisement, that the product helps the adult protect his or her priceless baby by providing financial security to the family or by remaining healthy enough to take care of the child.
Opportunistic baby advertising
Good marketers are born opportunists, and they seize natural baby moments whenever they can find them, because they know these will have wide appeal. The best examples I saw of this was during my recent visit to England, just after the birth of the royal baby to Prince William and Princess Kate. I saw advertisements offering “congratulations to the royal couple on the brilliant baby news”. Even prior to the much awaited birth, some brands ran campaigns encouraging people to guess the royal baby’s sex or name. Given that this is a very interesting crossroads of two elements which are high on consumer appeal – royalty and babies – I am sure these efforts will continue to mushroom around us for some time, until bonny Prince George Alexander Louis eventually grows up and has a royal baby of his own.
Superbabies and Spacebabies
I began this article with a reference to the Nestle Superbabies campaign. In a similar “super genre”, yet for a very different product, is an advertisement for Kia Motors, which was run as its Superbowl commercial. It shows spacebabies from a magical place called Babylandia, where parents lie to their children. The advertisement is created in a larger-than-life format, and the use of babies in a Star Wars -like sequence is quite remarkable and unexpected. This goes to show that only our imagination limits us on the advertising use of babies, particularly as computer-generated images can now enable us to use babies in new settings and stories that were earlier not possible with natural infants.
So, will it be long before we see babies starring in advertisement campaigns for airlines, sports shoes or carbonated soft drinks? If these marketing efforts are as successful as the iconic Evian baby campaigns, they may well end up giving new meaning to that wonderful advertising line “ Yehi hai right choice, baby !”
(Harish Bhat is Managing Director and CEO of Tata Global Beverages and author of Tata Log: Eight Modern Stories from a Timeless Institution. These are his personal views. bhatharish@hotmail.com )