Note: I'm down in Florida this week at the Poynter Institute gettin' some journalism learnin', but tide yourself over with my latest City Paper column for now. And please keep former CP editor Brian Hickey in your prayers:
BY AMY Z. QUINN
I've always bristled at the phrase "mommy blogger," even though I've been blogging throughout most of my son's life. When I started way back in 2004, "mommy blogger" meant something a little different than it does now. People understood that blogging had potential as a method of personal expression and as a tool in social media, but it hadn't yet gone corporate. These were the days before Dooce was a registered trademark and proprietress Heather Armstrong was just a new mom with a sharp tongue who'd been fired for blogging about her co-workers.
Things are a bit different today. There are still plenty of Cool Things My Toddler Did blogs, but in 2008, thanks to what we now know about the sheer number of women reading blogs and this group's value to advertisers, the mom blogger is a marketing force, her site a place to find product reviews and giveaways and even big-time advertisers, rather than simply camaraderie and catharsis. Mom bloggers are professional, accomplished. They're adept not just at writing and storytelling, but at delivering audience, and they're rightfully taken seriously.
They can also be a serious pain in the ass, as the makers of the painkiller Motrin found out last week. On Sept. 30, McNeil Consumer Healthcare launched an online ad for Motrin featuring a "Mom-alogue" in which a woman kvetches about how "wearing your baby seems to be in fashion" but "these things — the slings, schwings, pouches and other carriers loaded with your offspring — put a strain on her neck and back and shoulders. "If I look tired and crazy, you'll understand why," it read. It wasn't especially funny or edgy, despite efforts to be both.
Sometime around Nov. 15, as accompanying print ads were running in Real Simple and Lucky magazines, some mom bloggers with big audiences noticed the ad, and were not amused. They decried the ad's "condescending tone" and railed against McNeil with a startling fervor. What ensued was a mobilization that began on the blogs but really took off on Twitter, where the so-called "Motrin Moms" juggernaut was born. Within days, YouTube was stocked with response videos made by moms furious that the drug maker would so trivialize a parenting technique used by women for millennia! Surely they were enemies not just of "attachment parenting," but of all moms, despite the fact that the lady in the ad said she was happy to deal with the pain because it was for her kid.
Read the rest at CityPaper.net, and watch the offending commercial right here:
