Twittstorm

Within days, YouTube was stocked with response videos made by moms furious at an ad that so trivialized a parenting technique used for millennia.

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.

It surely didn't help that this ruckus started smack in the middle of something called International Babywearing Week, an effort to promote the time-proven practice of kid-toting. Cue the boycott! Within days, McNeil had pulled the ad and issued an apology. As this week began, the inevitable backlash against the Motrin Mom Mob was taking hold, and everyone from The New York Times to Ad Age was ruminating on what this says about the power of social media.

Powerful? Yes. But correct in this case? While I didn't think the ad was particularly funny, I've spent enough time walking around with a baby strapped to my chest to know there was a grain of truth to the "Ow, my aching back" theme. What's more, it's difficult to take seriously the righteous indignation of a group that calls itself Babywearing International, as if your child were part of your outfit, like a handbag or a pair of oversized sunglasses. I'm not the first person to suggest that the whole thing had a feeling of being not much more than a calculated effort to illustrate to big corporations what happens when you incur the awesome wrath of the Mom Industrial Complex. One site suggested McNeil could have diffused the whole issue by offering offended moms custom-made baby carrier slings, perhaps with the Motrin logo silk-screened on the front. 

I'd like to think that this whole adventure will come to be seen as an evolutionary step. After all, the drug-maker's apology seems to have quelled the firestorm, and it seems unlikely that Motrin will suffer many economic effects. The mom bloggers, meanwhile, have moved on, and this week the talk is all about efforts to find a kidney donor for a 15-year-old Staten Island girl whose mother writes about sewing and needlecrafts for the site The Domestic Diva.

One mom blogger who was instrumental in the Motrin Moms movement and is now gung ho on the hunt for a donor match for the girl vowed yesterday that she "won't stop until this has taken over Twitter." I don't doubt her power. Perhaps this time, something good will come of it.

Amy Z. Quinn blogs at quinnchannel.typepad.com.