ABSTRACT
Commercial marketing to children is by no means a new phenomenon. Indeed, historical studies show that children have been a key focus of interest at least since the inception of modern mass marketing. This chapter provides a critical account of contemporary debates about children and consumer culture. The increasing risks and uncertainties of the children's market place a new premium on knowledge. Conventional advertising (for example, on television) is in decline, as marketers seek to employ new methods such as viral advertising, 'advergaming', peer-to-peer marketing and social networking. Children's involvement in consumer culture is a profoundly ambivalent phenomenon. The market clearly does have a considerable power to determine the meanings and pleasures that are available to children, but children themselves also play a key role in creating those meanings and pleasures, and they may define and appropriate them in very diverse ways.
