My wife is one of those mommy bloggers you hear about all the time. She’s also a big advocate of the minivan (yeesh) and since the birth of our first child – years now – she’s been putting on the pressure to crimp my suburb-hating, minivan-loathing, “Please don’t bring it up again” style.

This morning she sent me a mashup of our two faces, courtesy of the Volkswagen RoutanBabymaker3000, which lets you “Make a Baby Without Actually Making a Baby,” all in the name of subtly promoting “German-tuned suspension and European styling” in a minivan model I normally wouldn’t consider.

The father, husband and marketer in me immediately jumped on the site, and all three of us were impressed. After you upload your face and your partner’s face and help it identify your facial features, the VW site incubates you a nice little mashup of yourselves and then gives you the opportunity to e-mail, download, embed or put your Routan Baby on your Facebook profile.

Pictured above is the social media love child of Coco and Stingray. We named him StiCo. Kind of gives you shivers, doesn’t it?

Mashups certainly aren’t a new concept, but this is a clever approach to marketing the new Routan to web-savvy parents who may not consider themselves “minivan people” and perhaps aren’t moved by traditional automobile marketing efforts like television commercials.

Coincidentally, only after doing research for this post did I watch the TV commercial and understand the commercial buy and theme behind the campaign: women are having babies in order to have an excuse to buy the vehicle.

My wife learned of the promotion from other moms, who are organically spreading the promotion on message boards like BabyCenter.com and also on their own blogs. She e-mailed me the jpeg of our Routan Baby, and I immediately forwarded it to my office colleagues, who in turn started making their own Routan Babies. There’s your viral component.

Time will tell if the VW Routan becomes part of our new car consideration set, but I know we’ll be talking about it at dinner tonight – and that’s a win in my book.