#TeamBreastfeeding
Every August the whole category turns to face the same person. World Breastfeeding Week arrives and brand after brand talks to the mother. Tell her it is natural, tell her it is beautiful, tell her the small things she is getting wrong. She was never the one who needed convincing. She is already up at 3am doing the work. The brief called it an awareness problem. The real problem was that she was doing a two-person job alone, and every film kept explaining it back to her as if the fix were also hers to carry.
So the campaign stopped talking to the mother and turned to the man standing next to her, the one doing very little, mostly because nobody had told him there was anything to do. #TeamBreastfeeding argued that feeding a baby is a job for two, and it argued it in fathers' own voices instead of the brand's, which matters, because a company telling men to help, sounds like a lecture; while a new father saying he takes the night shift so his wife can sleep, sounds like a friend. The appetite was already sitting in the research: eight in ten fathers said they wanted to help, and three in four mothers said nobody had ever shown their partners how.
My job was to make his part real instead of decorative. "Be supportive" is not an instruction anyone can act on, so the scripts handed him specific, unglamorous things to do, the night feed, the bottle, the actual feeding of expressed milk, all of it built around the one product that turns a father's good intentions into something he can physically do, the breast pump. I wrote him plain and a little sheepish, a man saying "parenting is called teamwork for a reason" to a friend rather than to a camera, and the discipline was to never let him become the hero of it, because a film that congratulates a man for turning up insults the woman who has been there all along. He had to read as useful, not saintly. The father-led films carried it, one of them past 160,000 views, and getting an Indian living room to nod along to that idea is the part I am proudest of.
#TeamBreastfeeding
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