It was dark when I reached hour ten of casting the babies. The auditions came one after the other in a steady loop. “Nice eyes,” I said, nodding to the screen, “But the head. Is the shape right?”
My art director shrugged. We didn’t have to worry about offending the talent — none of them could hear us. They were in Canada, delivered to us on a large monitor. Babies in the United States are unionized and, therefore, less budget-friendly. So we usually outsourced the babies — casting in Mexico, Poland, or in this case, Toronto, where actors under two were less likely to have a SAG card. Our advertising agency was tasked with the almost religious duty of selecting Gerber babies, and I had been involved in that process for four years, ever since I joined the agency in 2018.
Besides casting babies, my job was to write these campaigns and their associated social media ads, billboards, and television commercials — more writing than you’d expect given the talent can’t talk.
Babies in the United States are unionized and less budget-friendly.
I still have my casting notes from this time. The most cutting comments, like which babies might have weird feet or a drooping lip, were never recorded. We didn’t need to write those down — those babies were never getting the gig. But for our favorite babies, we noted their strengths, pried into their weaknesses, and gathered ammunition for the eventual negotiation between the agency, the director, and the clients:
Laniyah: Not great self-feeder, but the LICKS.
Ethan: I’m pro-bald.
Ivy: Good feeder, but not convinced on the look
There’s an unwritten rule in baby commercials that you never put the babies in socks. Their little feet are too cute to be covered up. So of course, I was also scanning for any malformed toes. Almost all the talent was fine in this category.
Baby commercials are about families, and families are about mothers. When the strategy departments in my agency descended on the creatives to kick off a new campaign, they came armed with data about the consumers we were speaking to. Women were unilaterally the decision-makers in the baby category, and that influence correlated directly to profits. The agency created mother “personas” — strategic frameworks for our typical consumers. They gave these mothers names like Caitlyn and calculated which other brands they liked, where they went to school, what excited and agitated them. Women determined what was aspirational and, therefore, what was purchased.
“Aspirational” was an important word at the agency. It encompassed a wide spectrum of desire: an item over your budget but well within your daydreams or an affordable luxury that made you feel richer than you were. Or it could also be a version of yourself just outside of reality, an elevated self with no wrinkles and no mortgage. In America, our desires may differ, clashing from block to block and state to state. But our aspirations seem remarkably similar, covering us like a flat blanket that was not hard for us to predict or manufacture.
At the agency, we were a handful of creatives in our twenties and thirties, mostly white. All of us lived in New York, two of us were gay, and none of us had children. Very few of us were even married. And yet, it was not difficult to choose the set dressing, the clothing, the music, the lighting, the cameraman, or the babies that would create an “aspirational” family for our millions of diverse consumers.
I remember a moment on set, after the babies had been cast and the script was locked. I pulled aside a make-up artist and directed her to cover a small hickey on the neck of one of our on-camera mothers.
Looking down at the mother’s bare left hand, I whispered, “And get her a ring.”
Desires are about the things we want. Aspirations are about the things we fear. Ugliness, loneliness, poverty, difference. The job of turning products into solutions is easy because our fears are much more alike than our desires. We can forgive a certain flatness in the way those solutions look — the gently lit baby in the too clean living room — because of the safety they offer.
The main shot in this commercial had to do with kale. A bundle of raw kale was supposed to erupt out of the baby food and then disappear in time for the talent to take a bite. We had gone back and forth at the prop table to choose the hero bundle of kale, and now that it was too late to change it, the client didn’t like it. We had chosen dinosaur kale, which was dark and glossy. The client decided at the last minute that this kale looked menacing, and they much preferred the more common “curly kale” we had discarded.
Desires are about the things we want. Aspirations are about the things we fear.
It took two account supervisors and a producer to convince the client our kale would work. Details like this matter when you’re remaking the world. The wrong thing — foreign kale, a hickey — can pull you out of the dream world of safety and bring you back to yourself. And that’s a world where diapers cost $44.99 and our brand recently had a heavy metals poisoning scare.
The frictions between fantasy and reality remain carefully contained on set. There is always a woman (technically, this could be someone of any gender, but I only ever saw a woman in the role) who is called the baby wrangler. Her job, above all, is to be someone whom babies are innately drawn to. Then, she uses an arsenal of toys, keys, feather dusters, and laser pointers to stand behind the scenes and grab the attention of the on-camera baby to get them to smile. The baby’s real parents are also on set, but it is usually the baby wrangler who does the dirty work of getting that golden look and avoiding meltdowns. In the world of baby marketing, the sweaty labor of mothering is outsourced to the baby wrangler.
Even the product is sprinkled with organic sugar each time we go to feed the talent. This helps create the coveted “bite and smile.” There is no ugliness, no loneliness, no poverty, no difference.
Or rather, difference is carefully calibrated. I have had few experiences more mentally challenging than getting client approval for the perfect matrix of ethnicities in a 16-baby cast. We needed to check the typical boxes of white, Black, and Hispanic, but the more “ambiguous” babies we could cast, the better. If a baby could read to one consumer as Hispanic, Middle Eastern to another, and mixed race to a third, this was a perfect baby. Aspiration reflects you back to yourself, stripped of specificity like a trick mirror that shows you a stock image.
In Poland, where I shot another more ambitious Gerber commercial later in my career, achieving this matrix was close to impossible. There were simply too many white babies and mothers. I had to have a stilted call with our Warsaw-based team about why we could not use Photoshop to make the hand of a white model a few shades darker.
Our perfect babies ended up as internet flotsam.
Once we wrapped on set and the official commercial was made, the job was not done. We delivered unending “cut-downs”: smaller clips scavenged from our main footage to live across social media. These babies, once heroic under a full constructed set of six bespoke rooms, became banners that populated on webpages across the internet. Artificial intelligence almost certainly makes most of these now, but as little as six years ago, they were made by hand. My hands.
We juiced these babies for as much as we could to justify the price of the job (often over $500,000 and touching $1 million in some cases). Our perfect babies ended up as internet flotsam, floating across slop articles and scrolled past without a thought, while at the agency, we moved on to the next set. We walked away knowing the cycle is unending. The desires our products court are insatiable — and the fears they assuage always come back.
Gillian Goodman is a freelance journalist and writer based in New York. Her reporting has been featured in Democracy Now!, Truthout, The Intercept, Heeb, The Current and Prism Reports among others and her poetry is published in Notch Magazine. She covered the 2024 presidential election from coastal Georgia.
This story was the winner of our “the way we work” essay contest in collaboration with Dirt media. This story was co-published and supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project’s James Ledbetter Fund.
Photographs courtesy of the author.
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