images and video: Johnson’s
Marla Brock is used to people doting over her baby, Monterey, because she’s the new face of Johnson’s Baby Wash.
Have you seen this delicious commercial? If not, click on it now, and you’ll see what we mean.
The first time Brock saw the commercial, she became emotional.
“I saw it late at night and everyone had gone to bed and there I was, you know, 10 o’clock at night and I just started crying,” she said.
Taped when she was just three months old (Monterey is now nine months old), it’s no surprise some of baby Monterey’s cutest moments were unscripted, but Brock said she still did her best to get her to move in certain ways.
“There was an infant massage coach actually stand offset adjacent to me telling me how to rub her feet,” she said. “There was moment in the commercial where the foot spreads and there’s a certain pressure point that I touched to make that happen.”
Kelly Gottfried helped lead the creative team for Johnson’s “So Much More” campaign and called Monterey “captivating” and “mesmerizing.”
“She draws you into the camera, and she looks up and everyone can relate to her and immediately connects,” Gottfried said.
She said they’ve heard parents say it brought tears to their eyes.
“To me, it’s definitely resonating to parents,” she said.
Johnson’s auditioned nearly 200 babies and selected 14.
“It was like no other audition I’d ever seen before,” Brock said. “There were mothers everywhere. And they all had their tubs. We were instructed to bring our own plastic bathtub because we’d be washing the baby on camera.”
Gottfried said Monterey was “absolutely” a unanimous choice.
“One look and we knew immediately we loved her,” she said.
Two babies were chosen to represent each of the “So Much More” campaign’s seven global markets. Monterey appears in nearly each one — a broader appeal for America’s changing face.
Brock said her husband is from Canada, and white.
“And he has blonde hair, blue eyes, so she certainly picked up some of his features,” Brock said.
Monterey’s ethnicity is not immediately apparent and Brock said perhaps when people look at her, they see themselves.
“I think there’s something inherently beautiful about her because people can connect with her,” she said.
