New parents eventually get so sick of advice, they'll want to wipe their baby's butt with it. And now, infant feeding brand Tommee Tippee has made that possible—with a limited run of baby wipes made from actual parenting advice.
The new Advice Wipes—made from a recycled mix of parenting books, magazine articles, printed-out blog posts and more—aren't available for sale to the public (yet—they might be someday). Rather, they've been made in a limited edition for special distribution as part of a new campaign from McCann themed "#ParentOn," which aims to give parents the confidence to put away the baby books and trust their instincts when it comes to raising their kids.
Check out the brand's new video about the Advice Wipes here:
An established baby brand in the U.K. that is looking to expand further in the U.S., Tommee Tippee came to McCann with Eric Silver when he arrived earlier this year as North American chief creative officer. (Silver + Partners had picked up the brand earlier.) It's been a while since Silver was a new father—his daughters are 16 and 14—but he's still plenty familiar with the pressures of modern parenting, which Tommee Tippee is trying to ease.
"One of the lines we used early on with the client was, 'Humans were having babies for 200,000 years before the first baby book was written,' " he says. "We're saying to new parents, 'You got this. You know what you're doing.' "
Not only weren't there baby books in prehistoric times, there also wasn't an Internet half a century ago (when Tommee Tippee was founded) to amplify the pressure on parents, as the brand's #ParentOn site reminds us.
"When questions were raised on how to raise a child, you just figured it out," says a post on the Tumblr-like site. "There was parent and child. There was instinct. And there was Tommee Tippee. For 50 years we've made products that are smart and simple, innovative and intuitive. For 50 years, we've helped parents parent the way they were made to."
The site also includes this anthem spot:
The baby-products industry in many ways is invested in making parents feel insecure—so the products can be the antidote. And while a handful of brands, including Similac and Plum Organics, have acknowledged that fact, and turned it on its head, the Tommee Tippee campaign is one of the first to say parents can really do just fine on their own.
And it does so with an approachable, fun-loving vibe—and with elements like the Advice Wipes that could get some buzz. Says Silver: "We thought it would be funny to take all that advice and actually wipe a baby's ass with it."
For more about the avalanche of advice doled out to new parents, check out the Tommee Tippee infographic below, based on the brand's survey of 1,000 U.S. moms: