Back Details Spot One: Opens on dad in driveway, about to put baby in car seat. Then he notices a couple of drops of water on trunk of car. He looks around as neighbor’s sprinkler guiltily recedes into the ground. Undaunted, he continues speaking gently to baby as he soaks up drops of water on trunk with baby’s diapered butt. Dad then proceeds to put baby in car seat. Message: Honda owners are obsessive, in a charming sort of way, about their cars. All well and good, except for one glaring flaw. It appears to be a disposable diaper. The shiny plastic material on the outside keeps moisture in, but is not itself an absorbent material. In reality, dad’s ploy won’t work unless baby is wearing a cloth diaper. A small but critical detail which is sufficiently distracting to sink the whole spot for anyone with any diaper experience. How did this blatant goof get missed? Spot Two: Mom, at home with barely walking toddler, gets phone call, walks down hallway, away from baby, into another room. We see baby walk past doorway and out of sight, both to us and to mom. What is the spot selling? I have no idea, because from the moment the baby vanishes (toward what? The bathroom? The stairs?) all I am thinking about is what a negligent mother she is and what jeopardy the toddler may have wandered into. Spot Three: Dad is sitting at kitchen table. To his right is baby in high chair. Baby is carrying on in a boisterous, high spirited way. Dad looks defeated, exhausted, the way he might justifiably look if he had been dealing with three or four such noisy babies for the entire weekend. Dad yearns for mom’s return. I think. Again, I have no idea what the spot is selling, because I’m so distracted by this wuss of a dad, whose state of exhaustion seems so totally out of proportion to his situation. If he weren’t Dad, but rather, the childless, single uncle or friend who was taking care of baby for the day, maybe we could buy into the scenario. Because we all know that uninitiated men are, in fact, wusses when it comes to baby sitting. Their baby noise threshold is very low. But in this spot, it’s definitely Dad. Sadly, he’s not a sympathetic character — just pathetic. So what’s going on here? How is it so much baby-centered advertising reveals so little understanding of babies and parents? When I first noticed this pattern, I leaped to the conclusion that spots like these are being created by young, single, mid-twenties writers and art directors who can only imagine what being a parent is like. Since they don’t have children of their own, they haven’t yet grown those parental antennae which keep you incessantly attuned to the nuances of life with children. While I suspect this originally leapt-at conclusion is true, I think there is more to the story. After all, this business of making commercials is extremely collaborative. Dozens of people are in a position to notice and correct glaring flaws like those I’ve described. Catching this stuff should be second nature for The Creative Director. The Account Supervisor is, no doubt, pretty anal. How did she miss such an obvious problem? If there was an account planner involved, he was asleep at the switch. And you’d think that, among the legions of probing client types micromanaging projects like these, one of them might have been smart enough, sufficiently risk averse or just plain ornery enough to “not be comfortable” or “have a concern.” Weren’t these spots tested? Are you going to tell me that not one magnifying glass-wielding focus group mother of four, having been crowned Ad Critic for two hours, protested the plausibility of any of the above scenarios? And what about the director, for Pete’s sake? Was he so caught up in getting cute shots of baby that he just didn’t think about whether the spot as a whole was going to be credible? Sadly, the advertising industry as a whole stands guilty of these crimes of gross negligence. People simply aren’t thinking hard enough, or smart enough, about the advertising they’re doing. There’s far too much attention paid to the form of commercials at the expense of the content. And that’s very bad. Because no matter how slick, how hip, how nicely propped and lighted and cast a spot is, it’s going to be a total waste of a quarter million of the client’s precious dollars, give or take, if it isn’t credible. And don’t give me that “Humor gives us license” crap. A humorous approach doesn’t permit laziness or stupidity. Quite the contrary, because humor is such a delicate, easily messed up sort of thing, extra diligence is called for. And the license you do have with humor doesn’t apply indiscriminately. The humor in the first spot rides on the guys fixation with his car. In order for his exaggeratedly anal behavior — using baby as a mop — to be funny, everything else about the spot needs to be more or less real, everyday, believable. Casting a disposable diaper in the role of a cloth diaper isn’t believable. As a result, the humor, and with it the message, is undermined. There is no shortage of attention to detail in the process of making commercials these days. In fact, there is often far too much attention paid to inconsequential, surfacy details. With all that attention to detail going on, can we please include among the details, those which actually bear on the effectiveness of the message? Thanks.