There is a room in our house our son has barely slept in.

We built it in the months before he arrived, the way you do when you have time and nerves and a list. He sleeps in our room instead, in a Moses cradle. Australian health guidance recommends keeping your baby in the same room as you for at least the first six months. That free, public advice was nowhere near the top of anything that reached us while we were building a room.

He will grow into it. The category that spent real money reaching us that year will never learn the room had to wait, or what got used in its place. I have spent the weeks since coming back from leave working out how a category this well funded learns so little about what happens next.

We were given a lot, most of it by people who already had children. They told us what had gone wrong for them the first time, then handed over the fix. The advertising was selling bouncers, pram rockers and a rocker for the Moses cradle, a rocking device for something that already rocks. We bought none of it.

Our gifts were unusually well chosen, because the people giving had used the things themselves, recently enough to remember which ones earned their place. In first-year gear (the nursery furniture, the bassinet, the rockers and the pram) the most accurate information sits with people who have just finished with it.

Reviews, parenting forums and paid creators already put experienced parents in front of new ones. None of them is built to collect the verdict of someone who has just finished, has nothing to sell and knows what never came out of the box. Couples who know recent parents get that verdict over dinner. The rest get the advertising and nothing else.

‍

The Category Spoke To One Of Us And Heard From One

Jade, my wife, led the research, which is why the emails came to her. In shops the questions went to her too, with me standing beside her.

I noticed all of it and did not like it. That did not make me research harder; it made me do less. I took the role I was handed and resented it, a combination that asked nothing of me. Every question that went past me landed on Jade, with the work of answering it attached. I let that happen, every time.

The category's part shows up in its own sales documents. Around 240,000 New Parent Bags go out in Australian maternity wards each year, a day or two after birth. The usual defence is that the bag goes to whoever is on the ward. That holds at the moment it changes hands.

Yet the document that sells access to those bags never uses the word dad, or the word father. Its audience page is headed "Connecting with women across various touchpoints every month". That is a choice, whether or not anybody remembers making it.

Sophia Harris and colleagues at UNSW Sydney compared 105 fathers and 203 mothers using an Australian perinatal mental health service. One father in five had been referred in by his partner. Of the 203 mothers, only one had been referred by their partner. It is a different sector with the same shape. A service built around one parent turns that parent into a way in for the other.

In marketing, the parent a brand addresses is the one whose sign-ups and purchases come back to them. The other parent's silence never shows up as missing data, because nothing was sent for them to answer. We have received "primary target: mums 25 to 39" on briefs at this agency. I even wrote one of them.

The Ads Land Late And The Knowledge Lands Later

The heavy marketing landed in the last two or three months before the due date, about when Amazon's registry completion discount opens. Registries run off the due date and sampling programs off gestational weeks. The category reads a biological clock and reads it accurately.

It assumes the decision is still open when it arrives. In our house it had closed months earlier, when we bought the big things during the end-of-year sales. Whatever we bought after that would have counted as persuasion. The category's own numbers would have told it the timing was working.

Since January, every new bassinet sold in Australia has had to carry a warning against using it once the baby begins pushing up on hands and knees. The law requires the warning on a label permanently attached to the bassinet, not on the box or the product page. Buy one boxed or online and you meet it once it is home.

Second-hand ones are exempt from the standard. A bassinet that arrives through somebody who has already used it does not have to carry a warning at all. The person handing it over knows the window anyway, because they reached it.

A year on, you are out of the segment. Here at least, nobody surveys you anymore, though you are still buying presents for other people's babies.

‍

One Registry Already Asks What Went Unused

Babylist in the United States is a registry too. This year it asked 6,700 parents what they regret registering for. The answers included "a swing or bouncer that baby hated" and "a bassinet or lounger with a very short useful lifespan".

By its own figures, it reaches roughly a fifth of American births. Australian retailers run gift registries. None has built one into anything like Babylist.

The Moses cradle will go to somebody else's bedroom with a note about what to ignore and when to stop using it. That note will reach one household. The ward bag alone reaches 240,000.

‍

Two Dates Tell You What Your Dashboard Is Measuring

Write down two dates for your own category. One is when your customers find out whether the thing worked. The other is when they drop out of your data. If the first comes after the second, your numbers are measuring persuasion and calling it usefulness.

Then ask the customers your CRM has just marked lapsed what they actually used, what they would skip and when they made up their minds. Ask everyone who used it, which here means both parents, because the brief only ever named one of them. Put the answers in front of the people still deciding, months before the weeks everyone crowds into.

Some will tell you to skip your product. Whatever survives that question has earned the next sale. Couples with nobody to ask will hear the verdict from you instead.

My next brief gets a second line under the target, identifying who has just finished with this and what they told us.

The best media buy in any category with a finish line is a customer who has just crossed it.