New York Times: Brands and Marketers Embracing and Engaging With Dad Influencers

Open up your Sunday edition of The New York Times Business section and you might be surprised to find the feature story is about the recent Dad 2.0 Summit that we attended in Houston a few weeks ago. The event billed as “an open conversation about the commercial power of dads online, as well as the opportunity to learn the tools and tactics used by influential bloggers to create high-quality content, build personal brands, and develop business ideas.”

We are thrilled to be part of a time when there is a changing perception of the face on fatherhood to a more nurturing, confident, hands-on dad who does grocery shopping, laundry, shuttles the children to school and extracurricular activities, and is not afraid to be on the floor engaging with their children. We are proud to be a voice for parents as we redefine what it means to be a “good dad” in the 21st century. And, we are excited to be in the mix during a time when brands see a ripe opportunity to market to our demographic. We love the title of Hannah Seligson’s piece, Neither Moms, Nor Imbeciles, and believe it’s a must read for people that consider themselves a parent blogger, a dad-influencer, and especially brands that are seeking the opportunity to embrace and engage in the dad space.

The piece provides some insight from some of the loudest and most influential dads we know as well as some of these dads who have strategic positions with some of the larger marketing/public relations companies:

“The payoff is huge if you get dads right,” says Jim Lin, vice president and digital strategist at Ketchum Public Relations in San Francisco, a blogger at The Busy Dad Blog and a father of two.

To put it another way, while the mom space is crowded with players, the dad space has room for more. So there is big money to be made, both by companies looking at fathers as consumers and by daddy bloggers looking to ride a wave of brand sponsorship just as mommy bloggers have.

An example of the current state of affairs on marketing to fathers:

“There is considerably more time, attention and money spent understanding how ‘she’ buys versus how ‘families’ buy — and certainly more than ‘he’ buys,” Mr. Kercinik says.

“We are just at the hello stage on this journey to reach dads,” says Barry Calpino, vice president for breakthrough innovation at the Kraft Foods Group. “Ninety-nine percent of the conversation is ‘she,’ ” he says.

The piece continues with some tangible examples of the direction we are headed from the title sponsorship of an amazing brand like Dove Men+Care that are already capitalizing on a tremendous opportunity (since 2010, it’s a $100 million dollar brand where 75% of their customers are fathers)…to some of the projects that Charlie Capen, How To Be A Dad, has participated in using sponsored content with Honda, Clorox, and Kia.

For the past year, we have participated in several sponsored opportunities (ie this with Britax or this with Time To Play) with brand-integration projects and have found it to be a positive experience. We realize that stories like the one in the NY Times today, the increasing frequency from mainstream media focusing their lens on fatherhood beyond Father’s Day, and annual networking experiences like the Dad 2.0 Summit will continue to open doors for dads and brands to work together on a more permanent basis….and that is something we are jazzed about!

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