Little Babies Ice Cream

I have not been able to stop watching these advertisements for the last few days. The ad is for Little Babie’s Ice Cream, an Ice cream chain in Philadelphia, USA.

There are a few reasons I am so fascinated by this advertisement the first being a curiosity into the why of it. Director Doug Garth Williams was specially selected by the owners of the Ice cream shop to create an advertisement. According to Williams, the brief was an open one so he had quite a lot of freedom with the concept.

When asked how he managed to get his clients on board, Williams claimed that they did not take much convincing at all; "The reason the owners approached me in the first place was that they knew if they gave me freedom on this project I would give them a concept that would stand out and have a good possibility of going viral on a tight budget.”

 Ahh, now it makes more sense.. Little Babies Ice Cream needed a viral video. Shock content videos are typically the ones to catch fire in the cyber world and because of this little one minute ad, suddenly 10,651,403 people are looking up Little Babies Ice Cream. And to be honest, the website does impress.

  

I took a peek through the website to see if it was a real business and it appears to be. One thing I did find unique about Little Babies Ice Cream is their interesting selection of ice cream flavours:

Initially, Doug Garth Williams came up with two ideas: "We were originally going to shoot one commercial but I came back to them with two treatments. One was this wide eyed androgynous anthropomorphic ice cream creature, confronted with an existential dilemma. The creature has all of the normal self-preservation instincts, but at the same time is made of this unimaginably delicious and addictive ice cream. The question is 'Would you eat yourself?' And the answer is 'Yes. You would. You just taste too damn good.”

Here is the video for the first idea:

 

 

"The other was an apparently endless loop of those same sentient ice cream beings locked in an infinite cycle of gleeful cannibalism - consuming and being consumed. I sent them my two treatments and they quickly approved them both. They were behind my vision for it from the beginning.”

So Little Babies Ice Cream most likely gained a much higher count of clientele simply because of the viral sensation of their advertisements. Everything about the videos screams creepy: the suggested cannibalism, the monologue (“I eat little babies.. ice cream” “We love to lick” etc), the deep pedophelic voice growling that ice cream is a “feeling”, and of course the out of key ice cream truck music. From a marketing standpoint, this advertisement is quite a genius idea.