Huggies baby care brand takes its first steps into Super Bowl advertising

The Background

It's the Super Bowl. It's big and it has an average of 160 million fans each year.

Using this big game spot to launch its new look and feel, Huggies have created the ultimate welcome to the world for babies with a dollop of reality and humour.

The Big Idea

It is, essentially, a warm welcome for babies, giving them a quick lesson on what they can expect from the world and their parents.

What They Did

It begins with a mix of viewpoints from the parents' world to the baby’s view on life. The segments, filmed from the babies perspective, capture how the world looks from a baby lying upside down getting confused at dad’s beard not being on his head, to crawling along the floor whilst working out what is edible or not.

This all brings a warm feeling to the spot, making it feel true to life. Realistic scenes of what babies experience, and what parents feel too. One great example of this is the screaming baby waking up in the middle of the night which seems rather unusual for a baby care brand that tends to highlight the best nights sleep its products enable, but this ad didn’t need to be like that.

The pure cuteness of the script continues to capture how great it is to be a baby in such a simple way focussing on the everyday moments that make it mesmerising through the lens of a babies experience.

The Review

A cute story all packaged up with nice editing and a perfect pace, with scene changes cut between a top-down view of a newborn, to zooming out to a world view.

The extended cut released before the Superbowl packs a lot into a 1:45” edit, with little focus on the brands' products, instead focusing on the new brand campaign message to launch their new identity.

Signing off with ‘we got you, baby’ is a fun way of showing what the brand is there for, in a playful tone, a campaign line that I’m sure will continue in further communications from the brand.

Following this, the colloquial voice that comes with it adds to the charm of the film. ‘This is us’ whilst pointing to a packshot neatly placed in the scene, and ‘we make these’ feels warm to the audience - not shouting about a new product, just highlighting the simple nature of Huggies products and how they help babies and parents alike.

But why the Superbowl?

It is the first time a big-budget Superbowl placement has been used for a babycare brand. I guess this is the main stage for getting all eyes on the new brand identity moving forward. However, it doesn’t rely on a big famous soundtrack, celebrity cameo, or joke punchline like a lot of Superbowl advertising.

Instead, it welcomes the most recently born babies into the world, with photos and commentary of these babies being a few hours old. The reprise ‘Football - that will make sense later’ turns the spot subtly into something crafted specifically for the super bowl space.

What's to come?

The extended film released before the Super Bowl acted as a teaser for the ‘play date’ that is the super bowl, and social that supported the ‘due date’ being 7th Feb, clever on category copy that gets round the implication of not being able to say the Super bowl in advertising communications.

Going forward it will be interesting to see how the brand turns this attention into further creative to push the brand’s new identity in the baby-care category.

Overall the new identity connects the brand to parents perfectly, with beautiful cinematography and craft to add great moments of charm on top of the cute visuals which bring warmth to every viewer.