There are over 4 million babies born in the United States every year. Out of those 4 million, it’s estimated that between 12 to 18 of them are stolen from the hospital they were born in. It’s an ultra-small percentage of the whole, but it’s a big deal when it happens, so many hospitals are now using a new product to make sure no babies get taken from their maternity ward.

It’s basically an anti-theft device the baby wears around it’s ankle. However, there isn’t just one standard type of device, different hospitals are using different forms of the same idea. For instance, in Norway, all newborn babies are outfitted with a type of anti-theft alarm that consists of a tiny chip embedded in the baby’s ankle bracelet and a matching chip embedded in it’s mothers hospital bracelet. If the two chips are separated by more than a certain distance, the alarm goes off. On top of that, if the baby’s bracelet is removed, the hospital goes into “lockdown” mode, where the elevators and doors all automatically lock – to prevent baby theft.

Some hospitals in Ottawa, Canada outfit their newborn babies with a small GPS locator and alarm device. Their ankle bracelet is designed to flash every three seconds and set off hospital-wide alarms if the baby leaves the ward or if the device is severed.

The US has been doing this for a while now, and most large hospitals here apparently have a system similar to the Norwegian one, where the whole hospital goes into “lockdown” if the baby theft alarm goes off.

This year’s E-Trade Super Bowl commercial featured a talking baby sitting in front of the computer doing stock trades. The commercial was a huge success for E-Trade on several fronts.

The Cute Baby Hook

In my last article I described the Humor Hook ad strategy for viewer engagement. While this E-Trade commercial certainly includes humor, it’s main “hook” is what I refer to as “The Cute Baby Hook” – it works as an ad strategy because everyone loves cute babies. Just like the Humor Hook, The Cute Baby Hook creates positive associations with the company product. But it also runs the same risk: the cute baby might overshadow the product and make it forgettable.

E-Trade solved this problem very simply by making it’s product (online stock trades) the main activity of the baby. The humor hook combines merges with the cute baby hook in the very activity that E-Trade wants you to remember: online stock trading.

Do you see how this is a brilliant move by E-Trade? Everyone is going to remember the cute talking baby and what the cute talking baby was doing. He was doing an adult activity (which contributes to the humor hook) which is the activity being sold.

So not only do we associate online stock trading with the positive attributes of cute babies (forget the diapers, E-Trade didn’t include them), but we are also being reminded of the simplicity of online trading (if a baby can do it, so can I).

Brilliant use of the humor and cute baby hooks… brilliant work from E-Trade all around.