By HANNAH SELIGSON
THE hapless, bumbling father is a stock character in product marketing. He makes breakfast for dinner and is incapable of handling, or sometimes even noticing, a soggy diaper. He tries desperately to hide the crumb-strewn, dirt-streaked evidence of his poor parenting before the mother gets home.
This is an image that many fathers who attended the Dad 2.0 Summit — a meeting of so-called daddy bloggers and the marketers who want to reach them — have come to revile. They are proud to be involved in domestic life and do not want to serve as the comic foil to the supercompetent mother.
In the past, consumer-product marketers weren’t all that concerned with what fathers thought — women, after all, make the majority of purchasing decisions for households. But men are catching up: In 2012 men spent an average of $36.26 at the grocery store per trip, compared with $27.49 in 2004, according to data from Nielsen. Companies see an opportunity to reach a new demographic.
The bloggers, for their part, are using their influence to change the way marketers portray them. “The payoff is huge if you get dads right,” says Jim Lin, vice president and digital strategist at Ketchum Public Relations in San Francisco, a blogger at The Busy Dad Blog and a father of two.
To put it another way, while the mom space is crowded with players, the dad space has room for more. So there is big money to be made, both by companies looking at fathers as consumers and by daddy bloggers looking to ride a wave of brand sponsorship just as mommy bloggers have.
THE 200 or so bloggers and media professionals who attended the second annual Dad 2.0 conference in Houston from Jan. 31 to Feb. 2 were mainly in their 30s and 40s. They tended to wear well-fitting jeans, button-down shirts and blazers, and they were quick to whip out pictures of their children on their iPhones.
The 44 brand representatives at the conference tried to project a hip blend of parenthood and masculinity. At one point, Dove Men+Care, a Unilever line of deodorants, soap, shampoo and other products, set up a traditional barbershop at the Four Seasons Hotel, where the conference was held. The same space became a whiskey bar one night, complete with bracing free samples. Dove, which paid six figures to serve as the conference’s main sponsor, also offered daily sword-fighting lessons with Steven McMichael, who trained the actors in “The Hobbit.”
Another sponsor was Honda, which offered test-drives of some of its 2013 models, including, of course, a minivan. Kraft was there, with taste tests of cheese-laden meals. ConAgra Foods, which makes things as diverse as Swiss Miss and Hebrew National hot dogs, played to more traditional notions of what men enjoy by featuring cheerleaders in short skirts at its booth. On the other hand, it also sponsored an event called the Great Dad Cook-Off.
Representatives of Maclaren, the stroller maker, did not have a booth, but they came to the conference this year to do reconnaissance. “Maclaren is eyeing the dad market,” says Shanin Molinaro, the company’s global vice president for marketing. The company, she says, has taken note of evolving parental roles, including a rising number of stay-at-home fathers and fathers in same-sex marriages. Just this year, Maclaren came out with a new stroller, the BMW Buggy.
Dad 2.0 is owned by XY Media, a start-up company based in Houston that advises brands on how to appeal to fathers. The conference’s founders are Doug French, 47, who has two sons, 10 and 7; and John Pacini, 40, who has a son, 11, and a daughter, 7. They saw an opening in the market after they packed sessions on fatherhood-related topics at the Mom 2.0 Summit in New Orleans in 2011. That conference was founded, conveniently, by Mr. Pacini’s wife, Carrie Pacini.
One of the biggest laments among bloggers at this year’s Dad 2.0 Summit was that many marketers continued to portray fathers as babbling buffoons who need constant supervision. “Dads are seen as heroes as long as their kids don’t drown in the swimming pool,” says Mr. French, who has a blog called Laid-Off Dad.
Last year, the daddy blogosphere erupted when Huggies released a commercial that showed a group of fathers and their babies, with a voice-over that said, “To prove Huggies diapers and wipes can handle anything, we put them to the toughest test imaginable: Dads, alone with their babies, in one house, for five days.”
The daddy bloggers were led by Chris Routly, 37, a stay-at-home father in Portland, Ore., who blogs at The Daddy Doctrines. He started a petition calling on Huggies, which is owned by the Kimberly-Clark Corporation, to pull the ad.
“The verbiage was implying that dads need the help of a special product to overcome our incompetence,” says Mr. Routly, whose sons are 4 and 2.
The petition on Change.org drew 1,300 signatures, but Mr. Routly closed it after a Huggies representative called him to solicit advice about making the company’s marketing more acceptable to fathers.
Huggies replaced the commercial with a spot that had already been shot, with a different voice-over: “To prove Huggies diapers can handle anything, we asked real dads to put them to the test — with their own babies, at naptime, after a very full feeding.” The subtle difference in wording implied that fathers were discerning diaper experts, rather than neglectful idiots.
Kevin Brown, who oversees commercial programming for the Huggies brand in Neenah, Wis., attended the Dad 2.0 Summit and said his company learned something. “Dads do not want to be treated differently, and they do not want to be treated foolishly,” he said. “We are better marketers because of what happened last year.”
MORE marketers are paying attention to fathers because more fathers are deciding what to buy for their families. That comes as no surprise to Mr. Routly. “Before I left for Dad 2.0, I had to make sure my wife knew the way to the grocery store,” he says.
To capture that growing market, brands face a challenge: How do they appeal to fathers’ competence without making them look like mothers?
Some daddy bloggers grumbled over a 2011 ad for Procter & Gamble’s Tide detergent that showed a stay-at-home father folding laundry and referred to him as a “dad-mom.” The National At-Home Dad Network, a nonprofit group that had a booth at the summit, puts it this way in its literature: “Dads do not parent like Mom, nor are a replacement for her when she’s not home.”
Matthew Willcox, executive director of the Institute of Decision Making at the advertising agency Draftfcb in San Francisco, studies how neuroscience and behavioral economics relate to marketing. He suggests that companies and advertisers need to be very aware of the societal shift around parenting. “It’s not a question of applying the same rules that apply to moms,” he says.
Mr. Willcox, who did not attend Dad 2.0, cited a 2010 Toyota ad by Saatchi & Saatchi Los Angeles for the Sienna SE minivan as one that was particularly effective at reaching the new father demographic. The two-and-a-half-minute online spot featured a normal-looking couple rapping about parenting while nuzzling their Sienna SE, styled the “Swagger Wagon.” The video, which briefly appeared on television, has attracted more than 11 million views on YouTube since May 2010.
“The whole notion of having a minivan can be quite degrading — you talk to parents about having to swap out their car for a very practical minivan, and it can be devastating,” says Mr. Willcox, whose company did not work on the campaign. “But what Toyota and the Swagger Wagon did was make having a minivan part of a positive identity for fathers.”
In the Swagger Wagon ad, the father (played by Brian Huskey) is balding but wears thick, black, hipster-type glasses. “The dad in the video is not a cringingly cool dad,” Mr. Willcox says, but “appropriately cool.”
THE relationship between the bloggers and marketers cuts both ways. The marketers are selling to the bloggers, but the bloggers also have something to gain from the marketers, like sponsorships and branding.
Charlie Capen, 31, who blogs at How to Be a Dad, asked Honda, a sponsor of Dad 2.0, to back a project with his blog’s co-founder, Andy Herald, and David Vienna of the site The Daddy Complex. He thought it would be fun to chronicle the men’s 32-hour drive from Los Angeles to the conference in Houston. Honda provided the vehicle, a 2013 Crosstour, and covered video production costs. It will also pay for space to show the video on Mr. Capen’s blog, and for him to promote the video on social media sites, something known as sponsored content.
“The idea is us in the car having a frank and funny conversation about ourselves as fathers,” says Mr. Capen, who is also the director of online engagement at 20th Century Fox. “They are sponsoring us to talk about fatherhood in a way that is funny and consumable.” Neither he nor Honda disclosed further financial details, such as how much the bloggers were paid for the video, which has not yet been posted.
Mr. Capen, who has a 3-year-old son, says his site receives 200,000 to 300,000 unique viewers a month. He has worked with Clorox and the automaker Kia on similar projects. The collaboration with Clorox resulted in a post last December titled “The 3 P’s of Parenting,” referring, the site noted, to “pee, poop and puke.” Clorox tried to entice readers to click through and win $15,000 by sharing their messy moment in a 120-character story.
As mommy bloggers and their readers can attest, sponsorships carry risks. The Federal Trade Commission can fine the blogger and the sponsoring company for not revealing the relationship. And bloggers perceived as simply shilling for companies without regard for quality will lose respect.
But for fathers, just getting the attention of consumer-products companies has been a long time coming.
IT has been a struggle to get fathers included in family-oriented ads at all. Just look at the campaign that Procter & Gamble ran last year during the Summer Olympics, called “Thank You, Mom,” which saluted mothers for helping to nurture Olympic athletes. Surely some fathers were involved, daddy bloggers argued.
Advertisers and brands have been slow to respond to fathers as a consumer group because of a dearth of data, says Alan Kercinik, a Chicago-based group creative director at Edelman, the public relations firm.
“There is considerably more time, attention and money spent understanding how ‘she’ buys versus how ‘families’ buy — and certainly more than ‘he’ buys,” Mr. Kercinik says.
“We are just at the hello stage on this journey to reach dads,” says Barry Calpino, vice president for breakthrough innovation at the Kraft Foods Group. “Ninety-nine percent of the conversation is ‘she,’ ” he says. “I haven’t been to a food retailer who didn’t refer to the shopper as ‘she,’ so I don’t think we are even thinking about metrics at this point.”
That is changing, albeit slowly. Recently, Dove Men+Care commissioned research, in conjunction with the Center for Work and Family at Boston College, about the roles fathers play at work, at home and in their leisure time.
“Any subject related to dads, we want to know about,” says Rob Candelino, vice president for marketing at Unilever, who focuses on the Dove Men +Care product line.
This is not a social mission; it is about the bottom line. Dove Men+Care, introduced in 2010, is already a $100 million brand, and about 75 percent of its customers are fathers, according to Mr. Candelino, who is a father himself. “Men are more receptive to messages about taking care of themselves after they have children,” he says.
In the past, advertisers paid more attention to men in the so-called laddie demographic, ages 18 to 30, who are more likely to spend their disposable income on alcohol and cars. But there is a whole group of men between the beer-guzzling, Maxim-reading phase and the Viagra years.
Mr. Candelino described his target customer as a father, or an expectant one, who is in his late 30s and married, cares deeply about his role as a father and mentor, and is as comfortable having a tea party with his daughter as he is having beers with his friends.
“No brands were talking to guys at that level,” he says. “Society is ready for a new narrative about dads.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/business/fathers-seek-advertising-that-does-not-ridicule.html?partner=MYWAY&ei=5065&_r=0
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/business/fathers-seek-advertising-that-does-not-ridicule.html?partner=MYWAY&ei=5065&_r=0
