Why the Best Nursery Ads Never Needed a Child's Face

On August 19, 2026, the President signed an amendment to the Act on the Care of Children Under Three. If you handle marketing for a childcare facility, here's the part that matters most: starting September 1, 2027, nurseries, children's clubs, and childminders will no longer be allowed to publicly share images of the children in their care. The law adds one more clause: “even where the parent has given consent.”

This isn't a “fine, we'll just delete the reel” kind of ban. If a facility doesn't remove the violation after being notified, the case can end with it being struck from the register. In other words, with the business shutting down.

The industry's immediate question was: “So how are we supposed to advertise now?”

I have a perverse answer: if the lack of photos of children makes it impossible for you to advertise your nursery, then up to now you've been taking a shortcut. Advertising with someone else's children.

A childcare facility doesn't need to show the children in its care to promote itself effectively. It never did. The lawmaker took away the industry's easiest content format and, in the process, handed it a lesson in creativity. Alcohol brands did the same homework thirty years ago. In their case, it ended with the Bols sailboat. But let's take this step by step.

What does the law actually say?

The ban applies to:

• entities operating nurseries and children's clubs,
• entities employing childminders
• self-employed childminders.

Eventually it will also cover day-care points. None of them will be allowed to publicly share the likeness of children in their care – on the facility's website, on social media, in a promotional leaflet, or on a billboard featuring “our little ones.” Parental consent doesn't open any loophole here. The lawmaker closed it outright.

It left two exceptions, though.

The first is a child who's merely “a detail of the whole” – a non-dominant element in a photo of a gathering, a landscape, or a public event. Lawyers will recognize a construction borrowed straight from copyright law.

The second exception matters more in day-to-day work: photos can still be shared, but only with the parents of children enrolled at that specific facility. A closed app, an electronic diary, a private group – those all stay in place. A photo update for mom and dad: yes. A photo update for the algorithm: no.

The rule didn't come out of nowhere. During the debate over the law, several figures came up: 81% of children have a digital footprint before their second birthday, roughly 500 million photos of children go online every day, and about 65% of facilities were publishing images of the children in their care on open channels. Parents also talked about discounts on enrollment offered in exchange for image-rights consent, and about hints that a child without such consent would be left out of group photos. As if reluctance to appear in the company's reel were a parenting flaw.

Poland isn't a pioneer here. France already passed a law protecting a child's right to their own image back in 2024. In that debate, a far less flattering argument came up too – one much darker than nurseries' marketing headaches: a large share of the photos circulating on pedophile forums originated from material adults had posted in good faith.

So this isn't a rule aimed against facilities. It's aimed at treating other people's children as a free stock-photo bank. And – even if the people running social media accounts might disagree today – it's a rule you can learn to like. Especially once you realize that advertising with photos of the children in your care was never a great idea to begin with. Regardless of the ban. From a purely strategic standpoint. Why? Because a photo of a child in care wasn't doing most of the jobs a nursery ad actually needs to do. So what are those jobs?

A parent isn't buying photos

A parent choosing a nursery isn't collecting photographs of other people's children. They're trying to make one of the harder decisions: who to trust with their own child for several hours a day.

For them to choose your facility, four things need to happen in their head.

• First, they need to find out you exist.
• Then understand what you offer.
• Next, feel that their child will be happy with you.
• Finally, they need a reason to trust you.

None of these steps requires showing the children in your care.

Step 1: get found by the right people

Byron Sharp and researchers at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute call this mental availability: a brand should come to mind the moment a need arises. For a nursery, both that person and their need share one thing in common – a postal code. Your customer isn't “a parent in Poland.” It's a parent living within a few kilometers of you.

That's why social media is a fairly weak tool for building local awareness. A reel can rack up a hundred thousand views, but if ninety-nine thousand of them come from outside your neighborhood, congratulations – that number won't help you fill your groups. The algorithm optimizes for reach, not for neighborhood.

A billboard in a subdivision of single-family homes can outperform that reel by an order of magnitude, because every single day it's seen exclusively by the right people. A citylight ad near a pediatric clinic works the same way, as does a poster at a childbirth class or a community midwife's office, a parent-friendly café, a playground, or a facility-branded car circling the neighborhood.

If a new housing development is going up nearby, talk to the developer. They have exactly your target audience, and the message “nursery 300 meters from the development” works in their favor too.

The most important digital tool turns out to be the least glamorous one: your Google Business Profile. A parent typing “nursery + neighborhood name” isn't killing time in a queue. They're actively looking for a facility. It's hard to find a customer with a clearer buying intent. Up-to-date hours, photos of the rooms, responses to reviews, and complete information make up your first line of advertising. The child doesn't even need a walk-on part.

Step 2: show the category

A nursery ad works the same way. A parent needs to understand, in a split second, that they're looking at a place for young children. You can send that signal with a stock photo, an illustration, an AI-generated graphic, a color, or iconography. You don't need to show a child who actually attends your facility.

IKEA sells several hundred chair models, but one is enough for a billboard. That's because the ad isn't meant to replace the catalog. It just needs to send a simple signal: “This is where you buy a chair.” The store handles the rest.

No one enrolled their child in a nursery because they recognized little Johnny from down the street on a flyer. The category signal is a convention. It always was.

Step 3: let them feel their child will be happy here

In psychology, there's a concept called the affect heuristic. Put simply: we feel something first, then find a reasonable-sounding justification for it afterward. A parent doesn't choose a nursery purely on a spreadsheet. They also choose with their heart.

Where do you get that emotion without laughing children in the shot? From the same place good advertisers have always gotten it: light, color, sound, and story.

An empty, sunlit room scattered with building blocks says “this is where play happens” better than a posed group photo. Children's laughter in the background of a reel isn't a likeness. A caregiver describing a day at the facility – from the morning greeting ritual to the after-lunch nap – builds a parent's peace of mind, because it answers the question actually on their mind: “What's happening to my child while I'm not there?”

Step 4: borrow trust

Robert Cialdini ranked authority and social proof among the strongest levers of influence. A stranger's child in a photo is neither an authority figure nor proof of anything to a parent. A recognizable adult – that's a different story.

A local journalist, a coach from the neighborhood sports club, or a mom whose opinion carries weight in the local parents' group can transfer some of their own trust onto your facility. Adults can still consent to publishing their own likeness, so parent testimonials with a name and a face attached remain legal – and powerful – material.

Starting in 2027, there will be an additional building block of authority. The law introduces mandatory care and nutrition standards. A facility that not only meets them but goes further can point to something concrete. And something concrete reassures a parent far better than one more photo of a child holding a building block.

Six ways to advertise without showing a child's face

This is where it helps to borrow from brands that have managed for years without showing their customers – sometimes for legal reasons, sometimes for image reasons, and sometimes simply because they had a better idea.

1. Show the work, not the maker – the LEGO method

LEGO has advertised itself with builds, not builders, for decades. In the Creator archetype, the work matters more than the person who made it.

A nursery gets this kind of material every single day, for free: drawings, chestnut figures, puzzles, a tower of blocks that miraculously survived until snack time. A “gallery of the month's work” says more about a facility than a group photo. It shows development and activity – not just the fact that there are, in fact, children in the building.

One hygiene note: show the work, not a caption with the child's full name.

2. Invent your own hero – the McDonald's method

Happy Meal ads have run on cartoons and characters, not children sitting at a table, for years. We call this kind of brand character a brand hero – or simply a mascot. I wrote about this tool separately.

The mechanism is simple: the hero's adventures let you talk about the product and its strengths, and the audience builds a bond with the character instead of with a random model in a photo. The Polish market knows the power of this trick well. Heart and Reason sold internet plans; Little Hunger sold yogurt.

A facility can invent its own bear, dragon, or any creature that fits its name. The mascot can walk parents through the rooms, try out the new playground, “eat” a meal that meets the nutrition standards, and explain what settling in looks like. Kids will love it, parents will remember it, and the lawyer – a rare luxury in marketing – won't break into a sweat.

3. Shift the context – the Haribo method

Haribo has been running its “Kids' Voices” concept since 2014. On screen we see adults – German farmers, Japanese sumo wrestlers, British police officers, and, in the Polish version, chess players. They talk about the candy in children's voices.

Forty ads were made across nineteen markets, and Kantar ranks the campaign among the top one percent most effective ads it has ever tested. The idea relies on a context shift: we hear one thing, see another, and the brain happily stitches together the missing meaning.

Polish advertising has a tradition in this discipline, forged by the ban on alcohol advertising. The country watched the “Bols sailboat” regattas with Captain Baranowski, and spots for the “Leisure Horseback Touring Club” – WTK Soplica, for short. Everyone knew exactly what was being sold. That was the whole point.

A more recent example is the animated Braveran campaign, featuring a “real man” who knows what to do when a branch won't catch fire. Here's the funny part: the ad is animated (see point 6 below), so someone filed a complaint claiming it was aimed at… children. The Advertising Ethics Commission dismissed the complaint, praising the “subtlety and cartoon form.” Formally, the ad is about a campfire. The viewer's brain does the rest, politely.

How do you translate that to a nursery? An adult can read a “review” of the facility in a child's voice. A caregiver can narrate the day “through the mouth” of a three-year-old. Parents can answer the question “How was your day?” the way they imagine their child would answer it after a day at the nursery. The child's perspective stays; someone else's likeness disappears.

4. Make an adult the hero – the Allegro method

One of the most moving Polish ads about a child barely shows one at all. In “English for Beginners,” Allegro follows an elderly man learning English for two and a half minutes. We only learn why in the final scene. All the emotion that supposedly can't be built without children is carried entirely by a grandfather.

A facility has exactly the same material to work with: the emotions of adults who love children. You can show a mother's face as she picks up her child after the first day of settling in. A grandmother's pride during a performance – with the camera pointed at the audience, not the stage. A caregiver explaining why she's done this job for fifteen years.

A parent isn't entrusting their child to a logo. They're entrusting them to a specific person. They want to know that person's face, voice, and way of thinking. Adults – unlike the children in care – can consent to having their likeness published.

5. Show the space and the process

Hotels have been selling rooms with no guests in them for a century. Montessori schools have been showing materials and rooms, not children's faces, for just as long.

A well-photographed room, a virtual tour of the facility, the kitchen, a menu that meets the new nutrition standards, a close-up of paint-covered hands framed so no one can be identified – every one of these answers a real question a parent has. What does the place look like? What will my child eat? What will they play with? How does the facility operate?

A photo of someone else's child answered none of those questions.

6. Draw your own world – the Nike method

For the 2014 World Cup, Nike released “The Last Game”: a five-minute animated film produced by Wieden+Kennedy and Passion Pictures. Production took eight months. Ronaldo, Neymar, Zlatan, Rooney, Ribéry, and Iniesta saved football from a sinister Scientist cloning players.

Notice the paradox. The brand had access to some of the most expensive sports likenesses in the world, and yet it didn't show a single second of live-action footage. The animation wasn't a cheap substitute for photography. It let Nike tell a story that an ordinary photo shoot couldn't have carried.

Even closer to our topic is Headspace. The meditation app built its brand on soft, stylized characters depicting emotional states. Consistent illustration, zero photos of real people. And Headspace is selling exactly the feeling a parent choosing a nursery is looking for: calm.

Chipotle used animation to tell a farmer's story in “Back to the Start.” The film proved that a drawn format can carry values and genuine emotion, not just a joke. It racked up 4.3 million views in its first week.

A nursery doesn't need eight months of production or contracts with Ronaldo. It can do this far more cheaply: build its own illustration style inspired by the language of children's books, produce animated reels about a day at the facility, or create AI-generated graphics in a single consistent aesthetic. Parents recognize the convention of book-style illustration instantly. A consistent style becomes a brand asset in the process. A competitor can buy the same stock photos, but not the same world.

One important caveat: an animated portrait of a specific child is still their likeness. This isn't about running photos of children in care through an AI filter – it's about creating stylized, generic characters. Nike could animate real footballers because it had their consent and contracts.

A constraint is a brief – use it

The ban on alcohol advertising gave us the Bols sailboat, which the industry still remembers decades later. Haribo walked away from the obvious image in a category aimed at children and created a concept that – according to Kantar's research – ranks in the top one percent of ads. A hard constraint can work like a good creative brief: it removes the shortcut and forces an idea.

The ban on publishing children's likenesses doesn't kill nursery advertising. It kills its laziest version – the one where someone else's child worked as a free source of photography.

Before you plan your facility's communications for the coming year, answer four questions:

1. Do the right people within a three-kilometer radius know you exist?
2. Do they understand what you do in a split second?
3. What does a parent feel when they come across your communication?
4. Who does that parent trust, and who can vouch for you?

None of them is answered by a photo of a child. They're answered by an idea. And ideas, unlike image-rights consent, don't need a parent's signature.