PARENT MARKETING: AMERICA'S BABY BOON - Targeting parents is big business in an otherwise flat US market.

Yet the ads are just as likely to be for SUVs and printers as for baby wipes. Jim Edwards reports on this expanding sector.

With adspend so flat in the US during the past two years, one area stands out for bucking the trend. Marketing to parents has grown as if it were occupying an alternative universe where the recession, the war and the 11 September attacks never happened. Media targeting parents has experienced double-digit, multimillion-dollar growth.

Take Parents magazine. In 2002, it took dollars 151 million in ad revenue, according to TNS Media Intelligence/CMR. In 2001, it saw dollars 130 million, which was up from dollars 122 million in 1999.

Parents, owned by Gruner & Jahr, is not alone. Parenting, owned by Time Inc, went from dollars 96 million in 1999 to dollars 133 million in 2002; and American Baby, owned by Meredith Corp, went from dollars 55 million in 1999 to dollars 88 million last year. And spend across all the parent-oriented titles rocketed from dollars 399 million in 1999 to dollars 576 million in 2002.

At the same time, the category itself got thicker. Three years ago, CMR tracked only seven parenting titles. An internet search this year reveals 14 such titles, including such obscurata as Epregnancy, Fit Pregnancy and Baby Talk.

To put the scale of the business in perspective, consider that the top men's magazine in the US is Dennis Publishing's Maxim, a category killer with a circulation of about 2.5 million, which generated dollars 30 million in paid-copy revenue last year. But the headline-grabbing Maxim is eclipsed by the rarely talked-about Family Circle, owned by G&J, which generated dollars 62 million from its circulation in the same period. While Maxim drew in dollars 179 million in ad dollars last year, its elder-and-better went to the bank with dollars 253 million.

Over the same gloomy period that saw ad executives selling their beach houses, a cottage industry of parent-marketing consultancies has grown up to advise clients and agencies on how to reach moms and dads. Those shops include Forty Weeks, based in Washington DC, and BSM Media in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.