Huggies — Sound of a Hug (Canada)
PLATINUM — 2026 Marketing Makes a World of Difference™ Awards
Huggies transformed the familiar comfort of a parent’s heartbeat into a personalized sleep experience designed to help soothe babies—and give parents something useful in the moments they need it most.
Submitted by UM Canada
Winner’s Citation
For transforming an emotional brand promise into practical utility—using sound, technology and personalization to create an experience parents could incorporate into the everyday ritual of settling their babies.
How It Makes a World of Difference
Every baby brand talks about care, comfort and reassurance. Huggies faced a more interesting question: Could the brand do something useful with the idea it had long stood for?
The opportunity began with something both emotional and elemental: the heartbeat.
Research behind the initiative identified the sound of a parent’s heartbeat as a familiar source of reassurance for babies. At the same time, younger parents were already turning to podcasts, music, sleep apps and voice assistants as part of their daily routines.
That intersection of human instinct and everyday technology inspired Sound of a Hug.
Rather than simply communicating the comforting power of a hug, Huggies translated it into sound. Parents could enter their heart rate on the Sound of a Hug platform and generate a personalized sleep track matched to their own beats per minute. They could then combine that heartbeat rhythm with music, white noise or gentle soundscapes, creating more than 50,000 possible variations.
The experience was also available through Alexa, allowing tired, busy parents to activate it hands-free. Spotify, TikTok and parenting creators helped people discover the idea, but the media wasn’t simply there to carry a message. It helped deliver the experience itself.
The Difference Marketing Made
Marketing didn’t simply communicate the comfort of a parent’s heartbeat. It turned that idea into something parents could actually use.
That is what makes Sound of a Hug more than an emotionally appealing campaign.
Huggies could easily have created advertising about the science and emotion of hugs. Instead, marketing helped turn the brand’s promise into a tool designed for a real moment in family life: settling a baby.
The distinction is small but important.
The parent wasn’t simply an audience for the message. The parent became a participant in creating the experience, using something uniquely their own—their heartbeat—to personalize what their baby heard.
And media moved beyond messaging to become a form of service: something capable of providing value rather than simply asking for attention.
It is a particularly clear expression of an idea increasingly visible in the strongest marketing:
Don’t simply tell people what your brand believes. Do something useful because of it.
Results That Make a Difference
Parents did more than encounter Sound of a Hug. They used it.
Among parents who began generating a sleep track, 79% completed the experience. Across web and Alexa, 7,597 experiences were initiated. And Alexa recorded 2,878 activations from 1,329 unique customers, indicating that some parents returned to use the experience again.
The initiative also generated 3.3 million earned impressions through influencer activity, while 80% of influencer recipients shared content. Brand studies reported gains in unaided recall across Spotify, Meta, YouTube and Amazon.
But for MMWD, the most interesting result may be the simplest one:
Marketing created something that could become part of a parent’s actual routine.
A brand associated with hugs found a way to extend the idea of a hug beyond the product, beyond the advertising—and into an experience a parent could choose to use.
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