A friend of mine worked at Procter and Gamble when they hit on the idea of giving away baskets of baby-related freebies to new moms. The idea was that a couple days after the family went home and they needed more diapers, mom would send dad out with the package from the freebies and say, "More like these, please." It's pretty clever, and I'm cool with it — especially now that the whole thing is handled through brokers who take products from a variety of vendors, with input from maternity wards.
That, I think, is a pretty good way of marketing to new families. It doesn't compromise privacy, it gives them something they need, and it doesn't force them or lock them in. It's informative, useful, and respectful (provided that the marketing makes it clear that there's no medical endorsement of these products).
Compare that to this: a service that sneakily gets moms to agree to a "free baby photo" while they're signing all their necessary medical forms on the morning of their delivery. The company that takes the picture then sells your contact info to anyone who'll buy it.
On the morning of the delivery, the nurse hands a sheaf of forms to the mother-to-be. Buried within is a release form offering a free portrait of the new baby. Mom is wired to three different machines, having her pulse and blood pressure measured automatically while two others sensors detect uterine contractions and the baby's heart rate and another chattering electromechanical behemoth plots a seismograph of both…
…[T]he photo enterprise is run by a third party, Growing Family. They'll shoot a picture of your munchkin, in exchange for his or her name and birthdate and your full name and address…
Growing Family will use your information from time to time to promote additional products, services, rewards and special offers from Growing Family Network and its select Network Partners.
Another friend of mine had his baby daughter die from crib-death a few weeks after she was born. For years afterward, he and his wife got a steady stream of marketing materials, including ghastly "birthday cards" from marketers who'd bought the information that they'd had a baby, but never received the message that the baby had died. Needless to say, when their next baby was born, they never, ever bought products from the companies that ghoulishly continued to market to their dead daughter.
(via A Whole Lotta Nothing)
Update: Andrea sez, "The free baby photos are worse even than that — they also aren't free. That was me, drugged up after the birth of my daughter, still got an IV in, filling out a stack of paperwork with the free photo release in the middle. Then six weeks later I got a bill for $50 from the photographer! Fortunately they backed down very quickly when I called to complain."
