Everybody Is Sick Of The Bonds Baby Search
Stupid babies.
The Bonds Baby Search is either the most irritating thing on your Facebook feed, or a series of words that holds absolutely no meaning for you. It depends entirely on what stage of their life your friends are at; I, for instance, am perhaps one year off being flooded by baby pictures. But I can feel it coming. I can feel it.
The annual event is part baby beauty competition and part insidious, exploitative marketing campaign, a description which makes its unequivocal success year on year seem kind of weird. Any parent around Australia is invited to submit a photograph of their Bonds-adorned child — three years old or under, and (ugh) size three or under — and then invite their friends, family and the public to vote for him or her.
This year, there are 29,490 babies in the competition, all of whom had absolutely no idea what was happening.
The prizes? Bonds products, a professional photo shoot, and “the chance to feature in the next Bonds Baby campaign”. Which is a pretty cheap way of hiring a model, and especially ludicrous when you consider that all cute babies look the same anyway (and all non-cute ones look like tiny alcoholic middle-aged men).
It’s understandable, then, that the campaign is experiencing a bit of a backlash this time around. News.com.au called it “evil genius” which “naturally lends itself to social media spamming on an epic scale”. Mamamia published a snarky guide to taking the winning photo: “The best headbands easily outsize your baby’s infant skull by a ratio of at least 2:1; the more lurid and less organic-looking the better.”
And while last night’s The Feed held off from going as full-blown alarmist as Daily Life — who on Monday called the site an “[oasis] for paedophiles and mentally ill people who steal baby photos” — their takedown is pretty damning all the same.
–