Great Ad 16: It’s Hard to Concentrate on a Good Book With a Wet Diaper

The ad has a single line, “It’s hard to concentrate on a good book with a wet diaper on your mind.” The rest of the copy is made up of one letter, “p”.

Who do you think the line is for? For the baby who cannot hear anything except “p” as you read him/her the bedtime story? Or is it for you who finds it tough to concentrate when you know junior’s diaper is soaked again?

Any parent – especially new parents – will know that it’s hard to concentrate on anything else unrelated to the baby when you got one in the house. Having a baby means you got a lot to learn, from the whims and fancies of the baby to the new products and technologies that supposedly make parenting an easier job. Honestly, some of these things are not stuff that you really want to know. You just need to know you’ve got the right product to deliver the results you want. So it is a small wonder that harassed parents prefer to reduce the the number of new learnings by deferring to the professionals. And that becomes the responsibility of brands not to abuse that trust.

Pampers is just about the best known brand in the baby business. So whatever this market leader says about disposable diapers, we are willing to take it on faith that they are right and their products are cool. In all honesty, we don’t really want to read a thesis or listen to a 30-second voice-over why one type of disposable diaper absorbs more pee pee than another or how it’s design properly fit the baby’s bum so snugly that there’s no leakage, etc. etc. We choose to believe them. I bet Pampers know that too.

So Pampers decided to forgo the Product A-Product B comparison advertising and the boring “oh-the-diaper-is-wet-again” story, and chose to focus the attention to the lovey-dovey parent – reading bedtime stories.

The talents behind this charming Procter & Gamble (Cincinnati) ad:

Advertising Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi, New York, USA
Chief Creative Officer:Tony Granger
Global Creative Director: Barbara Boyle
Art director: Peter Cohen
Copywriter: Jay Taub
Illustrator: Tim Jessell

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More reading on this ad: Adweek