Making babies

Gillian Goodman on selling baby food, and the American dream.

⭐ This story was the winner of our “the way we work” essay contest in collaboration with Lux. This story was co-published and supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project’s James Ledbetter Fund. ⭐

It was dark when I reached hour ten of casting the babies. The auditions came one after the other in a steady loop. “Nice eyes,” I said, nodding to the screen, “But the head. Is the shape right?” 

My art director shrugged. We didn’t have to worry about offending the talent—none of them could hear us. They were in Canada, delivered to us on a large monitor. Babies in the United States are unionized and, therefore, less budget-friendly. So we usually outsourced the babies—casting in Mexico, Poland, or in this case, Toronto, where actors under two were less likely to have a SAG card. Our advertising agency was tasked with the almost religious duty of selecting Gerber babies, and I had been involved in that process for four years, ever since I joined the agency in 2018. 

Besides casting babies, my job was to write these campaigns and their associated social media ads, billboards, and television commercials—more writing than you’d expect given the talent can’t talk. 

I still have my casting notes from this time. The most cutting comments, like which babies might have weird feet or a drooping lip, were never recorded. We didn’t need to write those down—those babies were never getting the gig. But for our favorite babies, we noted their strengths, pried into their weaknesses, and gathered ammunition for the eventual negotiation between the agency, the director, and the clients:

Laniyah: Not great self-feeder, but the LICKS. 

Ethan: I’m pro-bald.

Ivy: Good feeder, but not convinced on the look

There’s an unwritten rule in baby commercials that you never put the babies in socks. Their little feet are too cute to be covered up. So of course, I was also scanning for any malformed toes. Almost all the talent was fine in this category. 

Baby commercials are about families, and families are about mothers. When the strategy departments in my agency descended on the creatives to kick off a new campaign, they came armed with data about the consumers we were speaking to. Women were unilaterally the decision-makers in the baby category, and that influence correlated directly to profits. The agency created mother “personas”—strategic frameworks for our typical consumers. They gave these mothers names like Caitlyn and calculated which other brands they liked, where they went to school, what excited and agitated them. Women determined what was aspirational and, therefore, what was purchased. 

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