"Babies Are Happy..."

Last night my daughter asked me to draw a baby crawling. I did so (in my typical Disneyesque fashion), with a short-sleeved shirt, long pants and socks. Then she did her 7-year-old version (evolving from stick-figure to a beginning sense of mass and perspective), but when it came to clothing the crouching figure, she asked how to draw a diaper. Then she asked how to draw diapers by themselves, and did three of different sizes across the top of her drawing. She asked about the different kinds of diapers she had worn and then asked how spell "HUGGIES" and added that in large capitals at the bottom. She then informed us she was drawing a diaper ad, and asked what else an ad would have in it; I suggested she put a price in one corner and label the three diapers across the top "Large," "Medium" and "Small". Then she added other smiling baby faces around her full-figured baby and explained "Babies are happy when they wear Huggies!" I told her that was a great slogan ("What's a 'slogan'?") and she asked me to write it above her big "HUGGIES".

I've often thought I could have made a decent living on Madison Avenue (if I could only shed my conscience), but I attributed my fascination with advertising to certain teachers I had, especially in Jr. High, who stressed educating us as critics of media, and advertising in particular (we had to collect or journal examples we saw of "snob appeal," "sex appeal," "bait-and-switch", and other tactics). I thought I could be successful in the field because I could identify (and then master) the tricks.

My daughter, however, has largely been shielded from mass media. We don't have TV, rarely listen to radio, hardly ever purchase a newspaper, and what magazines we may have had subscriptions to have almost all lapsed. I'm not sure where she got the idea to create an ad, much less where she got her sense of layout, design, and her ease with summing up the whole appeal in such a snappy little saying.

I guess maybe it's not all "tricks" that can be learned. Partly it must be innate.