Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
Feb
4
Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
“Where Do “Oak” Babies Come From…?”
“Where do “Oak” babies come from? “Oak” doctors, of course!” – Billboard in a large metropolitan city advertising the local “baby” hospital.
There are 27 comments to this post.
Jadzia@Toddlerisms had this to say,
Feb 4, 2012 @ 4:41 am (Quote)
I read it as sort of creepily insinuating that the doctors were involved in the conception process. And now I’ll be excusing myself to go bleach my brain.
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Kit had this to say,
Feb 4, 2012 @ 5:58 am (Quote)
This reminds me of a hospital advertisement here. The ad is actually for a laproscopic spine surgery and it says “The best surgery is less surgery.” The thing that makes it ironic is that this hospital is known for the highest csection rate in the city 40%+. Apparently less surgery isn’t best when it comes to birth.
As for the OP, I didn’t know doctors made my babies either, I find that creepy in many ways.
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Liz had this to say,
Feb 4, 2012 @ 6:49 am (Quote)
The thing I don’t get about advertising fails is how so many people involved in the process of brainstorming, creating, desinging, printing, approving, and then installing did not catch the stupidity/creepiness of the ad. There have got to be at least 20 people who saw the ad before it went public andnobody said, ‘Hey, that can sound inappropriate. Maybe this is a bad idea.’
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Nica Reply:
February 4th, 2012 at 8:08 am (Quote)
I work in advertising/marketing and this gem would have been laughed off the brainstorming table…
What were they thinking???
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Jane Reply:
February 4th, 2012 at 8:15 am (Quote)
When I wrote ad copy, there weren’t that many people involved, to tell you the truth. At least one ad got all the way to the customer before the company owner (my boss’s boss) even saw it. So she’s presenting this full-page four-color ad to a customer who had give us a truckload of money to spearhead an ad campaign that was VERY important to his company, and she’d never seen the actual ad.
The customer was going over the ad with her and halfway through her head snapped up and she said, “This is really good. Who wrote this?!” (Somehow the customer didn’t react in horror.) I’d turned in my copy to the ad rep, who had given it to the graphics people to lay out.
In a smaller in-house operation where there isn’t an ad agency involved, your ad copy might well be generated and approved by exactly one person.
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Mamaspud had this to say,
Feb 4, 2012 @ 7:52 am (Quote)
Thanks MOSW for fixing the typo in the title.
In the advertising world, with all those people looking at that ad campaign and going over it, wouldn’t at least ONE be a female? Who had a baby at least ONCE? Wouldn’t she notice this was completely stupid??
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Melissa D. had this to say,
Feb 4, 2012 @ 8:01 am (Quote)
This is my post. The local hospital, of course, is not “oak”, but another floral name. When I saw this, I had to pick my jaw up off the floor of my car. I then called my husband, who works for said hospital on another unit and told him about it. He was equally stunned–”not our finest hour” was his response. This was on one of those new LED signs, so it was about 30 feet high and brightly lit. I sent an email to their head of advertising (who is a woman), telling her that there are several ways to read the ad, and that none of them are good. It came down in tne next few days (although the LED signs are usually short-lived) and I’ve never seen it elsewhere. By the way, this well-known local “baby” hospital has a less well-known c-section rate of 37%.
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Alyson Miers had this to say,
Feb 4, 2012 @ 8:30 am (Quote)
The ad makes perfect sense for someone who views childbirth as something that a doctor does, while the child’s mother is just sort of in the room at the time. That mentality actually has a lot of explanatory power for many L&D practices, truth to tell.
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Doula had this to say,
Feb 4, 2012 @ 8:33 am (Quote)
This reminds me of a book I came across recently, written in the ’50s. After talking about how all the various animals came from a mother and father, it asks the (child) reader, “And where did you come from? Why, your mother got you at the hospital!” It was stupid then, it’s stupid now. We still have a long way to go. *sigh*
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Reminds me of an ad for one of the 4 local hospitals, “Hospital Name” Babies Rock, as if the babies belong to the hospital. Not the hospital I gave birth in.
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Add Your Comment.
Don’t quite understand why the title is different than the quote, but I get what it’s saying. Someone should get some spray paint, cross out “doctors”, and put “Oak ‘MOMMIES’ of course!” Unless, you know, EVERY child-bearing woman in that town has a doctorate…
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