Evian Babies Boogie On

The Evian babies campaign just doesn't get old.

The spot (above) featuring pint-sized roller skating whirling dervishes to promote the water brand's "Live Young" theme has racked up nearly 40 million views, and that's just the international version. It's one of the most popular brand campaigns to ever hit the web.

The challenge: how to top an award-winning, widely viewed, iconic campaign?

The roller babies were actually a follow-up to the brand's 2008 water babies spot above. Now, the French water brand is in the sticky situation (as with most things to do with babies) — how to nurture growth?

Rather than try to outdo their roller babies success, they've been shedding the rollerskating onesies and taking the babies into t-shirts. Actually, onto t-shirts. Last summer, Evian put their baby images on t-shirts (called "Baby Inside") that were sold at Colette in Paris as a limited collection:

The idea may not have had the "wow" factor of the original campaign, but it was intended to bring the babies down to earth, so to speak, and get the concept of "you feeling young" to be more prominent, and personal. The brand's marketers also created in-market events to keep the momentum going.

Now Evian is taking the "Baby Inside" t-shirts to video, in a "Let's Baby Dance" campaign that just broke on YouTube:

The idea is to make the t-shirt babies dance through clever editing that mimics stop-motion animation. This new campaign will run on television in the United States this summer. Evian also will blow out the concept across YouTube, with several language versions created to target viewers in markets including Belgium, France, Germany, Israel, Russia, and Switzerland.

Of course, Evian isn't the only brand with a baby fixation. In the US, E*TRADE has made its name with a series of hilarious commercials, particularly for the Super Bowl, featuring adult-smart "talking babies" to reinforce its financial services brand.

Surprisingly, Michael Aidan, global general manager for Evian in Paris, told the New York Times that Evian has used babies in its advertising around the world since as early as 1935. The latest campaigns, he says, are intended to convey the idea that "the baby is in you."

As for the ongoing use of babies, Aidan says, "It's true that in the end babies stay magical and powerful if you find an original way of using them." Apparently, that's what Evian has been able to do for over seventy years.