I thought I’d escaped it. The . . . look, you can accuse me of insensitivity, but the friggin’ hideous image of a baby with a cleft palate that the Smile Train uses.
There is a ginormous billboard that I drive by every day on my way to the gym. It’s huge; just as wide as a normal billboard but twice as tall, and the effect is enhanced due to the fact that it’s right at ground level, right on the side of the road. Usually I ignore it like I do as many forms of advertising as I possibly can. But a couple of months ago they put up an ad that catches my attention, but just doesn’t work.
On the billboard was a baby. Well, just the baby’s head, and it’s over twenty feet tall. The kid looks to be five or six months old, has big doe-brown eyes, and the middle part of its upper lip completely missing with a disjointed snaggle tooth poking through instead. The caption: “Give a Child with a Cleft Palate a Second Chance.” It was, for lack of a better word, grotesque.
Having a cleft palate is a condition that needs medical attention, and raising money for third world children is awesome. But maybe it’s not the best marketing decision to use a deformed baby to promote your cause. Parading out disfigured children is not only off-putting; it’s exploitative. It’s probably just as exploitative to use cute babies. After all, they can sell just about anything. Shoot, last time I saw a Gerber commerical I was all ready to go out and buy some pureed peas, and I don’t even have kids. But the difference is that when the kid is all grown up, the kid with a cleft palate will probably be a lot more conflicted about the photo shoots their mom signed them up for.
The biggest reason advertising like this bugs me is that it falls in the same category of aggressive self-marketing that homeless people use. A scary guy with cheap vodka on his breath who smells like pee knows that the more offensive and garish he is, the more likely you will be to give him some money so he will just go away. This billboard seemed to have the same effect, which does not send a message that the handicapped should be treated with dignity. Intentionally or not, it triggers horror rather than compassion. One friend said cynically that the only way it would trigger donations would be just so that they would put the hideous picture away and not bring it out any more. Why can’t this group, I wondered, use pictures of smiling happy children post surgery to show what a difference people can make, instead of the parade of mug shots of children whose eyes show all to well that they are hurt and weary from being stared at and paraded around as a freak?
After the billboard had been up for a couple of weeks some vandals came by with brown paint and painted over the kid’s mouth. I had to admit I laughed. A week later a Miley Cyrus billboard went up. I never thought I would actually be happy to see one more picture of Miley Cyrus. The epilogue is that just now, after I thought I’d escaped that picture, it just came up in an online ad.
Please, oh please, get a new Marketing team, Smile Train.
