“The Sisterhood of Motherhood”, that is. Yeah, that sounds like it has a giant “Welcome Dads” sign held high right? Wrong; High not five Similac!
Similac, in its latest ad campaign titled “The Sisterhood of Motherhood“, created a video depicting various parent cliques coming face to face on the playground. There were working moms, stay-at-home moms, breastfeeding moms, “crunchy” moms, and even, yes, dads, all lashing out and talking down to one another.
As the lashing out reaches a climax and all of the close-minded groups charge at each other, a baby in a stroller begins to roll down a hill. Suddenly, the imminent brawl amongst clashing parent styles quickly ended as all groups rushed to save the runaway baby. The video ends with a quote saying “No matter what our beliefs, we are parents first.”
Or that’s when it should have ended. Instead, Similac went the extra mile and welcomed us in to the “Sisterhood of Motherhood.” And by us, I mean moms, apparently. Those dads in the video, they weren’t really there, or they were actually very masculine women.
Besides the dad wearing his baby facing out, which I am firmly against (click here to see why), the video was entertaining and you could even catch a smile on my face. Until that damned ending welcoming my clique, dads, into some sisterhood of motherhood. What the crap?!
So why even add a small group of dads in the video at all? Which, by the way, if I wanted to really nitpick, there’s more than just one group of like-minded dads, we have our own cliques too. But whatever, basically the ending would make more sense to read simply “Welcome to Parenthood”.
The large group of Dad Bloggers I am a part of on Facebook have all had their say on the video with most of us obviously not accepting of the closing words. One dad blogger, Chris Routly, who runs the blog Daddy Doctrines, goes into detailed analysis on where the video goes wrong and why it matters. Check out his post here.
As a caring father, I agree with Chris’ thoughts 100%. I get that dads are still the minority when it comes to ad campaigns, but that doesn’t mean we like it one bit.
So, thank you, Similac, for welcoming dads into the sisterhood to #SisterhoodUnite, but I think we’ll pass.
What are your thoughts on this video?
Do you agree the better approach would be to make the campaign gender-neutral by using “Parenthood” in place of the prefixes “Sister” and “Mother?