The New York City subway system, that great democratic leveler where hedge fund managers and hot dog vendors alike are reduced to waiting on a platform for a train that may or may not arrive, has long presented a particular challenge to parents navigating its depths with strollers. The elevators, when they exist, are often out of service. The escalators are rarer still. What remains are stairs — many, many stairs — and the hope that a stranger might offer to help.
Mother New York, the agency known for work that tends to find the human-scale problem inside the urban condition, has developed a campaign that attempts to address this gap in metropolitan courtesy. The effort trains men to assist mothers carrying strollers up subway steps, a task that sounds simple until one considers the particular geometry of a collapsible Bugaboo, a diaper bag, and a moving toddler.
The campaign, which might be described as equal parts public service announcement and gentle social engineering, arrives at a moment when brands have grown fond of inserting themselves into civic life. (Whether the subway-riding public was asking for such insertion is, perhaps, beside the point.)
Mother, which has been part of the independent agency landscape since its London founding in 1996 and established its New York outpost in 2003, has built a reputation for work that sits at the intersection of cleverness and sincerity — a neighborhood that is more difficult to locate on the creative map than it might appear.
The training itself reportedly covers the etiquette of offering help without presumption, the mechanics of stroller-lifting, and the general principle that cities work better when their inhabitants occasionally acknowledge one another's existence.
Details on which brand commissioned the work were not immediately available, leaving open the question of whether this represents cause marketing, public relations, or simply an agency with a soft spot for exhausted parents.
In a city of eight million people, some of them are bound to be climbing stairs.
Original story published in adage.com: "Mother New York trains men to help NYC moms lift strollers up subway steps - Ad Age"