Huggies launches baby making music station on Valentine’s Day
Published 3:26 pm Friday, February 13, 2015
- (from amazon.com)
CHICAGO — Why would Huggies brand diapers conceive a Pandora radio station for Valentine’s Day? To help couples make babies, of course.
The Huggies Baby Making Station will feature classic R&B, timeless love songs and modern romantic hits, with plenty of Barry White thrown in to close the deal.
Created by ad agency Ogilvy & Mather Chicago for Dallas-based Kimberly-Clark, the station will broadcast on Pandora for a month. It will stream its 24/7 mood music commercial-free, for uninterrupted passion.
“It’s kind of a trial run to see if we can actually make some babies,” Dave Metcalf, Ogilvy’s group creative director on the Huggies account.
Ogilvy has been the lead agency for Kimberly-Clark and its Huggies diapers for five years. In that time, the U.S. birth rate has declined. The number of U.S. births dropped to 3.93 million in 2013, a sixth straight annual decline according to data released in December by the National Center for Health Statistics. Births are down 9 percent from a 2007 peak.
The declining birth rate is not particularly good for Huggies’ business, Metcalf said, prompting the fertile minds at Ogilvy to cook up the Valentine’s Day soundtrack, with an eye toward building the brand’s potential customer base.
“We wanted to figure out a nice way to encourage consenting adults who are ready to make a baby to actually make one,” Metcalf said. “It’s a little off the wall, but we’ve got a great client and they thought it would be a great promotion for Valentine’s Day, so we ran with it.”
The station will be promoted through Facebook, Twitter and on Pandora. The online radio giant will run 15-second ads on other Pandora stations luring lovers over.
Pandora, which rolled out its free online service 10 years ago, dominates the Internet radio space with 81.5 million active listeners, according to the company. The Huggies branded station borrows heavily from Pandora’s R&B Love Songs station, with other genres added to the mix to spice things up for a broad audience, Metcalf said.
“We think we have a nice balance of classic love songs and modern pop songs that are designed to get you in the mood, one way or the other,” Metcalf said. “And of course we told them we’re a family company, let’s make sure everything is clean and nothing overly-suggestive.”
The promotion will rely on social media, with no major paid advertising to support it. Determining the return on investment may be tricky for Huggies but the brand will be looking for birth announcements on its Facebook page come November.
“We’re not sure if we’ll officially be able to track who actually made a baby on Valentine’s Day listening to our station,” Metcalf said. “We’ll do our best to follow up with those people and give them a free pack of diapers.”
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