DADWAGON

We here at Dadwagon have had plenty to say about the marketing of diapers, on the grounds that it’s both ridiculous and sexist. What we haven’t seen is an ad that deals with the contents of a disposable diaper. Disgustingly.

Till now! Take a very close look, via Copyranter, at this ad. (Yes, it’s for baby food, not diapers, but I have a point to make here.) Those green blotches are little country scenes, filled with presumably sweet-smelling meadows and trees. But view the photo quickly, from a normal distance, and it’s more like the usual diaper leavings.

I’m in favor of it, frankly. The customary TV spots in which a flask of sterile blue liquid is poured into an absorbent surface have always bugged me, because all they do is scream THIS IS NOT URINE, HONESTLY, ABSOLUTELY, DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT PEE, LA LA LA, NOTHING ABOUT PEE GOING ON HERE, AND DON’T EVEN TALK TO US ABOUT FECES, WE DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT WORD MEANS! If you ask me, they’ll do a lot better with potty humor and poop jokes. Every new parent of this generation, or the next few generations for that matter, has been reared in a high-irony environment, and there’s no reason to dance around this stinkiest of subjects. Literalism has already come to feminine-hygiene ads, which have ceded those running-on-the-beach-in-gauzy-lighting moments in favor of (gasp) actually showing us what a tampon looks like, and, in one memorable ad, even showing an abstracted red dot. When it comes to diapering, we’re still stuck in 1960. I say, bring on the brown.