Fathers Seek Advertising That Does Not Ridicule

This is an image that many fathers who attended the Dad 2.0 Summit — a meeting of so-called daddy bloggers and the marketers who want to reach them — have come to revile. They are proud to be involved in domestic life and do not want to serve as the comic foil to the supercompetent mother.

In the past, consumer-product marketers weren’t all that concerned with what fathers thought — women, after all, make the majority of purchasing decisions for households. But men are catching up: In 2012 men spent an average of $36.26 at the grocery store per trip, compared with $27.49 in 2004, according to data from Nielsen. Companies see an opportunity to reach a new demographic.

The bloggers, for their part, are using their influence to change the way marketers portray them. “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.

THE 200 or so bloggers and media professionals who attended the second annual Dad 2.0 conference in Houston from Jan. 31 to Feb. 2 were mainly in their 30s and 40s. They tended to wear well-fitting jeans, button-down shirts and blazers, and they were quick to whip out pictures of their children on their iPhones.

The 44 brand representatives at the conference tried to project a hip blend of parenthood and masculinity. At one point, Dove Men+Care, a Unilever line of deodorants, soap, shampoo and other products, set up a traditional barbershop at the Four Seasons Hotel, where the conference was held. The same space became a whiskey bar one night, complete with bracing free samples. Dove, which paid six figures to serve as the conference’s main sponsor, also offered daily sword-fighting lessons with Steven McMichael, who trained the actors in “The Hobbit.”

Another sponsor was Honda, which offered test-drives of some of its 2013 models, including, of course, a minivan. Kraft was there, with taste tests of cheese-laden meals. ConAgra Foods, which makes things as diverse as Swiss Miss and Hebrew National hot dogs, played to more traditional notions of what men enjoy by featuring cheerleaders in short skirts at its booth. On the other hand, it also sponsored an event called the Great Dad Cook-Off.

Representatives of Maclaren, the stroller maker, did not have a booth, but they came to the conference this year to do reconnaissance. “Maclaren is eyeing the dad market,” says Shanin Molinaro, the company’s global vice president for marketing. The company, she says, has taken note of evolving parental roles, including a rising number of stay-at-home fathers and fathers in same-sex marriages. Just this year, Maclaren came out with a new stroller, the BMW Buggy.

Dad 2.0 is owned by XY Media, a start-up company based in Houston that advises brands on how to appeal to fathers. The conference’s founders are Doug French, 47, who has two sons, 10 and 7; and John Pacini, 40, who has a son, 11, and a daughter, 7. They saw an opening in the market after they packed sessions on fatherhood-related topics at the Mom 2.0 Summit in New Orleans in 2011. That conference was founded, conveniently, by Mr. Pacini’s wife, Carrie Pacini.

One of the biggest laments among bloggers at this year’s Dad 2.0 Summit was that many marketers continued to portray fathers as babbling buffoons who need constant supervision. “Dads are seen as heroes as long as their kids don’t drown in the swimming pool,” says Mr. French, who has a blog called Laid-Off Dad.

Last year, the daddy blogosphere erupted when Huggies released a commercial that showed a group of fathers and their babies, with a voice-over that said, “To prove Huggies diapers and wipes can handle anything, we put them to the toughest test imaginable: Dads, alone with their babies, in one house, for five days.”

The daddy bloggers were led by Chris Routly, 37, a stay-at-home father in Portland, Ore., who blogs at The Daddy Doctrines. He started a petition calling on Huggies, which is owned by the Kimberly-Clark Corporation, to pull the ad.

“The verbiage was implying that dads need the help of a special product to overcome our incompetence,” says Mr. Routly, whose sons are 4 and 2.

The petition on Change.org drew 1,300 signatures, but Mr. Routly closed it after a Huggies representative called him to solicit advice about making the company’s marketing more acceptable to fathers.

Huggies replaced the commercial with a spot that had already been shot, with a different voice-over: “To prove Huggies diapers can handle anything, we asked real dads to put them to the test — with their own babies, at naptime, after a very full feeding.” The subtle difference in wording implied that fathers were discerning diaper experts, rather than neglectful idiots.

Kevin Brown, who oversees commercial programming for the Huggies brand in Neenah, Wis., attended the Dad 2.0 Summit and said his company learned something. “Dads do not want to be treated differently, and they do not want to be treated foolishly,” he said. “We are better marketers because of what happened last year.”