Wired Moms Become Pain in the --- for Motrin

How many times have you seen a stupid, condescending, sexist TV commercial and wondered what corporate executives were smoking when they gave their stamp of approval for the ad?  Too many times to count?  Me too. 

But how many times have you actually done something about it?   Zero?  Me too.  I guess that's what advertising and company execs figured too -- until now. 

It seems Johnson & Johnson, the makers of Motrin, have pissed off the one particularly sensitive group with too much time on its hands and instant access to the Internet.  Moms.  In particular, moms who blog and/or Twitter - and all their like-minded mom friends. 

The offending web ad, which lives on YouTube, is an inane "mom-ologue" by a flippant hipster mom who's got some back pain due to her baby carrier - despite the fact that it "totally makes me look like an official mom."  See for yourself:

Sure it's stupid.  But some members of the target market out there found it sooooo horribly offensive that they launched a Twitter campaign to put an end to the ad.  According to Ad Age, "the beginning of the end for the Motrin push probably came (last) Friday night, when Los Angeles blogger Jessica Gottlieb said she was tipped off to the ads and started expressing her outrage over the campaign on Twitter, where she has 1,018 followers."

And as Forbes.com reports, the resulting flood of scathing Twitters, or Tweets, or whatever they're called - prompted J&J to take down its Motrin.com website for two days.  Now the site is back up and here's what it says:

"With regard to the recent Motrin advertisement, we have heard you.  On behalf of McNeil Consumer Healthcare and all who work on the Motrin Brand, please accept our sincere apology.  We have heard your concerns about the ad that was featured on our website.  We are parents ourselves and we take feedback from moms very seriously.  We are in the process of removing this ad from all media.  It will, unfortunately, take a bit of time to remove it from our magazine advertising, as it is on newstands and in distribution.  Thank you for your feedback.  It's very important to us."

Sincerely, Kathy Widmer/Vice President of Marketing/McNeil Consumer Healthcare"

So --- as a mom who carried both her now-older kids in Baby Bjorns for a few years, you might assume I'd be all a-twitter (pardon the pun) about the power of the mom and the comeuppance of some arrogant executives who thought the ad was clever.

But you'd be wrong.  Instead, I'm a little flummoxed about the whole matter on several fronts:

1)  Did J&J run this campaign by a focus group?  Were there actually any moms with infants in the room at the time?

2)  Why pick on the Motrin ad and not the equally inane commercial by the Corn Refiners Association in which a mini mommy war over high fructose corn syrup erupts over cupcakes at a birthday party?

3)  If feminists got on their soapbox over every sexist and demeaning beer ad on TV, they'd be branded as humorless witches (but with a "b") and wouldn't be taken seriously when it really counted.  The same thing could happen to moms, thus actually reducing their influence.

4)  And speaking of influence, wired moms should save their juice for something that realllllllly matters, like health care reform, or public school funding.  Imagine if the "voices" used to bring the Motrin ad down were used instead on education reform. 

and 5)  Who cares about an ill-conceived web ad????!!!!!!!  I mean, in the big picture, how high should something like that actually rank on your priority list?

In this wired world, instant reaction on a large scale is something politicians, corporations, and the rest of us are just getting used to.  Obviously, the art is knowing when to take all this chatter seriously and when not to.

Regardless, I would hate to see us moms lose our newly-discovered and highly-respected voices on things that - in the long run - don't directly impact our lives.  So - from a mom with slightly older children and obviously thicker skin, to those twittering moms of carrier-sized babies - I've got this advice:  keep things in perspective and keep your sense of humor.  You'll need it raising those babies!

Comments

[Jessica Gottlieb]

Thanks.

My kids are 10 and 7.

Cheers!
Jessica