The Origins of the Baby on Board Fad

Recognize the name Michael Lerner? If you are a movie fan, you might. He played Mayor Ebert in that big budget American version of Godzilla. But that's not the Michael Lerner to whom I am referring. The Michael Lerner I'm talking about is the guy you need to either praise or damn for inventing one of the most omnipresent fads in American automotive history. Homer Simpson and his barbershop quarter even wrote a song in honor of this sign. The song, and the sign, were titled Baby on Board.

Of course, to say that Michael Lerner invented the Baby on Board sign is like saying that Thomas Edison invented the movie camera. The William Dickson of Baby on Board was named Tony Pintsoupoulos. But Tony was no marketer and so he came to his friend Michael Lerner for some advice. Lerner took the idea and ran and the rest is marketing history. Michael Lerner, in one of those strange commingling of irony and coincidence, had no children himself, but he recognized the value of keeping them safe from insane drivers. Well, maybe not insane drivers, but certainly drivers who were willing to pay attention to the fact that the car ahead of them carried a child. Lerner formed the company Safety 1^st with the express intent of marketing the little diamond-shaped yellow signs. In just two years Lerner's company had brought in over a million dollars and that was by selling his Baby on Board signs for just two bucks a pop. Of course, it didn't take long for the Baby on Board to be replaced with any number of knockoffs.