Grieving mum's pleading open letter to tech companies about baby ads

A mother mourning her stillborn baby has penned a heart-wrenching open letter to tech companies, urging them to update the algorithms they use to target online advertisements to pregnant women.

Gillian Brockell, a video editor for the Washington Post, tweeted the note on Tuesday, addressing it specifically to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and data company Experian.

“I know you knew I was pregnant,” she begins, retracing her online steps that would lead tech companies to that conclusion.

“It’s my fault, I just couldn’t resist those Instagram hashtags — #30weekspregnant, #babybump. And, stupid me! I even clicked once or twice on the maternity-wear ads Facebook served up.”

The Washington native goes on to mention her baby shower, which was heavily documented on social media, and her all-too-telling Google searches, such as “holiday dress maternity plaid” and “babysafe crib plant.”

“I bet Amazon even told you my due date, January 24th,” she wrote.

But that’s when things took a turn. Gillian describes in her open letter the process of realising something was wrong.

“Didn’t you see me Googling, ‘Is this Braxton Hicks?’ and ‘baby not moving’?,” she implored.

“Did you not see the three days of silence, uncommon for a high-frequency user like me?”

She referenced the many keywords that advertising algorithms could have picked up on to understand her condition had taken a tragic turn — terms like “heartbroken,” “problem,” and “stillborn,” as well as all the teardrop emoticons her friends used when she finally announced that her baby had died in utero.

“Is that not something you could track?” she asks.

Gillian describes the crushing realisation that her online experience was becoming a daily reminder of her loss.

“Let me tell you what social media is like when you finally come home from the hospital with the emptiest arms in the world, after you’ve spent days sobbing in bed,” she begins, before explaining that she’s still being served ads for maternity clothes, nursery “tchotchkes,” strollers that grow as the baby does (“mine will forever be 4 pounds, 1 ounce,” she says) and unsolicited parenting advice, like how to get a baby to sleep through the night (“I would give anything to hear him cry at all,” she writes).

She attributed “the lowest tracking blow of them all” to Experian, though, which sent her an email reminding her to finish registering her baby to track his credit throughout his life. “I never ‘started,’ but sure,” she writes, referring to “the life he will never lead.”

She finishes her note with a plea.

“Please, Tech Companies, I implore you,” she writes. “If you’re smart enough to realise that I’m pregnant, that I’ve given birth, then surely you’re smart enough to realise that my baby died, and can advertise to me accordingly, or maybe just maybe, not at all.”

The moving note has since been shared more than 23,000 times and has 2,100 comments from people sending their condolences to Gillian and commiserating with the mum’s frustration.

The note even found its way to Rob Goldman, who is a vice president of advertising at Facebook, who replied publicly on Twitter. He sent his condolences for Gillian’s loss and offered a suggestion.

“We have a setting available that can block ads about some topics people may find painful — including parenting,” he wrote, noting that the tool is still a work in progress and he welcomes any feedback.

Gillian responded that she’d since been shown how to turn off the ads, but “it’s too confusing when you’re grieving. That’s why I was suggesting a keyword like ‘stillborn’ triggering an ad break.”

On Nov. 30, Gillian posted the heartbreaking announcement that her baby — a son she named Sohan Singh Gulshan — was stillborn. “Unbeknownst to us, something went wrong a few weeks ago, he stopped growing and then passed away,” she wrote.

“The doctors have an idea of what happened and are hopeful we’ll be able to try again in the future. But right now, we are devastated.”

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