That’s true. You’re absolutely right.

Which water fountain you drink from and where you sit on the bus are small stuff when people are getting lynched.

You don’t put a band-aide on a mosquito bite when the patient is bleeding out from an amputated leg.

The ground swell of activism after the passage of California’s Proposition Eight indicates that the Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgendered (dang we need a shorter word for this, and I don’t mean the acronym GLBT) community gets this.

You take out the beast in the room and the mice go scampering.

Don’t sweat the small stuff. We’ve got a society to educate.

B’shalom,

Jeff

(I originally posted something very similar to this Thursday, but it looks like it got sucked down a black hole.)

Some body somepelace is still defending the add…I have to wonder…yeah for sure.

Something about sending a letter to the agency or the manufacturer as to rallying others to speak out vocally against the add.

Do citizen journalists list these items on their credentials…instigated 2008 public outcry against Johnson and Johnson advertising depicting baby wearing in less than a faltering manner.

You could injure you back being pregnant…you can injure your back baby wearing.

The add was annoying…the voice was annoying. The reactions prefaced with other negative reactions…it was the tone and format more than the content.

If you baby wear and get a sore back…you can get relief with Motrin.

Did you read the comments on the add many are defending that baby wearing will not hurt your back. Some take it to the extent that Johnson and Johnson is anti-baby wearing and people should boycott the product. They refer to J&J as “Motrin” what Motrin does not understand?

Culture narratives of female inferiority are responsible for a host of ills from the violence against women you describe to the premature cessation of breastfeeding among working mothers. The Motrin commercial may seem inconsequential for you, but it evokes a culture narrative that has real repercussions in real lives of real women.

Not to up the rhetorical ante, but here’s how what you’re saying would look if it were applied to race instead of gender:

“Who cares what water fountain you drink out of or where you sit on the bus? That’s all small stuff when people are getting lynched.”

Moi? Get out of something? I love diving in and getting all funky.

This fury is a distraction from issues that are much more important to humaity in general and women in particular.

We shouldn’t sweat the small stuff.

I see this as very small stuff.

B’shalom,

Jeff

Yes, we would be talking about this even without Twitter because he has nothing to do with Twitter, and everything to do with it.

J&J and its ad agency wanted to go Internet viral with that video. That was their platform of choice: an Internet video. Who watches those videos? Well, they placed them where moms would see them, Jeff. And there have been multiple studies out just in this year (including from BlogHer) about the metrics of women on the Internet, what they watch, what they read, what influences them.

It was a bad move.

Anywhere they were going to put that ad where the target audience would see it, customers would find a way to make their dissatisfaction known.

Did you hear about how Nordstrom just removed a line of shirts that were in its stores across the country because of a customer who saw it in the store and complained?

See here.

So this isn’t really about the customer, though being vocal is important, as much as it’s about the very bad decision-making and decision-making process that the people wanting to sell to moms made.

The key word here is vocal.

This is why direct Internet democracy is such a very, very bad idea. From History we know precisely how quickly mobs can be assembled and led.

Going from calm to outrage in a heartbeat is amplified by instant communication (we’ve all hit send on that email and wanted to snatch it back 30 seconds later).

In the absence of Twitter, would we even be talking about this?

B’shalom,

Jeff

Even if we take everything you say in the comment as true, that doesn’t alter the fact that the group they wanted to persuade into choosing Motrin is the group offended, or at least includes vocal members of the group who were offended.

It’s a bad ad for the targeted audience. Better to appeal to me as a human in need of pain relief than a “fashion conscious society made me have a baby I’ll suffer in need of a mother’s little helper” customer.

Allow me to insert my [commenter wisely steps away from horribly tacky and inappropriate male sexist pig metaphor] opinion into this discussion.

I think the ad is funny. It’s not going to win a Cleo, but I bet plenty of women at the agency, the company and in the focus groups got a laugh.

Women are being beaten, enslaved, raped and starved around the world and we’re talking about an ad for pain killers?

Please.

B’shalom,

Jeff

That may once have been true. But babywearing moms are no longer a fringe group, at least not among the women who are active Internet users.

Better educated and wealthier women are both more likely to breastfeed their babies for longer, and more likely to use the internet as a way to find out information and find a community. If they’re stay at home moms, they also have more time & greater opportunity to share reactions online to content they find offensive. Twitter made that communication happen even faster than email and blogging has.

(There’s abbreviation on discussion boards and in chatrooms and IM for “nursing at keyboard” [NAK]. Wearing your baby while you nurse them allows you to have your hands free for typing — although your attention is not always free, hence “NAK,” used to explain why you’re not paying full attention to an online dialogue.)

Babywearing, internet savvy women naturally resented being depicted as the practitioners of a mothering habit which “common-sense” women like the ad’s narrator secretly resent or find to be of dubious value. (I wrote about this some over on LilaTovCocktail.org.)

Advertising that ridicules is risky. In this case, J&J underestimated the size, power and commitment of the group they chose to ridicule.

And while the ad may have been visually fresh and well-executed, its approach was definitely NOT “edgy” or daring.

In fact, its underlying tactic — encouraging self-doubt in women — was around long before the first Clairol commercial appeared in a fashion magazine.