I Could Use Some Sponsorship

So the biennial celebration of American capitalism’s worldwide success – the Olympics – is on again. Coke, McDonalds, Home Depot, AT&T – all brought to you courtesy of NBC.

Once in a while you see an actual event. And, on occasion, you’ll see an athlete that does NOT represent America. (Allez, Latvia!)

The athletes are laden with sponsorship stickers and patches. I think the most effective sponsorships are the ones for things like short-track speed skating or snowboardcross, which resemble nothing so much as NASCAR scrums. Who would remember J.R. Chelski? You would, however, remember him if he had a huge sponsorship patch on his butt. (It’s interesting that the Juicy Couture company, already emblazoning the word “Juicy” on the backsides of millions of young women, hasn’t gotten in on this.)

Ultimately the commercials take center stage a lot of the time at the Olympics. (They do for the Super Bowl, too, but that’s a one-day event. One. Long. Tedious. Day.) Athletes need the sponsorship dollars because, let’s face it, curling isn’t exactly starting their own professional league in this country anytime soon. For the best to compete against the best, they need a little help.

However, one of the commercials is making me even crazier than usual, which makes me almost criminally dangerous. It’s not the Subway ad featuring a Hindu deity – although I can just imagine if they put Jesus advertising a Five Dollar Foot Long and the hue and cry it would engender. This worst offender is a gauzy one, with slow motion action of children, maybe pre-teen to tween, taking part in Olympic sports: a little girl is getting ready to figure skate, a little boy is putting a mouthpiece in his mouth in preparation for playing goalie, there is a lineup of young kids taking their marks in speed skating. The money shot is a young boy, about ten or so, at the top of the ski jump hill, which then cuts to an anxious-looking mother, standing and looking up, much like Glenn Close did in “The Natural.”

And the tag line is: Procter and Gamble: the Official Sponsor of Mom.

I will give you a moment to get your outrage under control.

Then another moment to have you tell me what you did so I can get mine under control. I can only keep up the criminally crazy for so long.

The issues that I have with this nonsense are legion. Sure, I understand the marketing ploy: moms do most of the laundry and do most of the childcare and make those purchasing decisions and all that noise. (Oh, that NOISE NOISE NOISE NOISE!) But that marketing ploy is as insulting to me as a commercial showing a poor woman driver would be to a mom. I have heard plenty of tales of moms who get up early and ferry their future Olympian to the rink or the gym. I have also heard plenty of tales of dads who coach teams and individuals.

So, could someone tell me this: why is the mom the only one watching the pee-wee ski jumper? Unless she’s a single mother, the likelihood of a supportive father is pretty high. (Maybe he’s buying the Budweiser or parking the GMC Truck, which, according to the ads, seem to be what men are interested in, rather than their kids.)

But what troubles me more than that is the continued hoary assumption that the world of my kid’s parents is the same as the world of my parents. There are still a number of stay-at-home moms, but as a recent Pew Research Center study showed (“Women, Men, and the New Economics of Marriage), many families are now made up of parents who both earn incomes – and the number of women who are the principal breadwinners in the families has increased by over 400% in the last forty years. In particular, in this recession, a lot of women who were originally stay-at-home moms have reentered the workforce in large numbers as the unemployment rate for men is 10% and for women is 7.9%.

What this means is that many more parents have to do that which makes most marriages work: compromise. Moms may not have the opportunity to solely stay home and care for the kids anymore, if dads are under- or unemployed. But in order for the income level to remain decent, and thus for moms to work, dads need to pick up the slack at home. That means, dads: do the laundry, the dishes, the cleaning, the baths for the kids. Pack their lunches. Fold their clothes. Keep it up, and do it right so the media can’t mock you for your often undeserved ineptitude. And, then, sponsorship might come your way, and recognition of your contributions and purchasing power will come from Madison Avenue. (Although I suspect if you are one of two dads, or a single father, you will still have to go to the back of the corporate bus.)

However, digging deeper into this ad campaign, there is something that is more annoying, not because it’s a fallacious statement but because it’s dishonest.

The ONLY thing Procter and Gamble is sponsoring is NBC’s broadcast of the Winter Games. Leaving aside for a moment the whole why-aren’t-they-sponsoring-entire-families, a sponsorship assumes, by definition, that the sponsor is providing goods and services to the sponsee, often for publicity purposes, but not at any cost to the sponsee. The last time I checked, most parents who use Tide, Ivory, or any other fine, name-brand, Procter and Gamble products, who didn’t use the far cheaper Target or drug-store generic, didn’t get them for free, but had to pay for them.

So doesn’t that make Parents the Official Sponsor of Procter and Gamble?

I know, I know – it’s all marketing. And I’m sure these commercials have been focus-grouped and run through layers upon layers of market testing. I should know better and keep my crazy in check. But culturally, dads are given short shrift in their contributions to parenting. At one time, it may have been taken as an article of faith that dads earned the money while moms raised the kids. But these days, it’s far more unusual to find dads that DON’T change Pampers than to find those that do.

And Pampers, by the way, is a Procter and Gamble product.