Branded

Full Title: Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers
Author / Editor: Alissa Quart
Publisher: Basic Books, 2003

All
teenagers want relationships with cool adult professionals and are flattered to
be taken seriously by marketing thirtysomethings. Morphing into paid trendspotters,
they are a symptom of the way brands corrode childhood and channel incipient
idealism and imagination into advertisement campaigns that aim solely to
reflect a magnified mirage that fails to exist outside of the digital studios
that produce them. They make children want to chase a dream that cannot be
realized. American children first became a target audience in the Fifties when
television industrialists frightened parents into buying electronic babysitters
for latchkey offspring. By the Sixties, youth was equated with hipness,
vernacular and futurity; youth trends were reflected in the greater use of
color, new materials, and decorative treatments. In less than two decades
thereafter, kid business rocketed into an entirely new orbit influencing and
dictating family purchases. Between the late Eighties and the late Nineties,
corporations spent twenty times as much on direct marketing to children. At the
turn of the Century, the median age for a first solo purchase dropped to eight
years old. Today, nine in ten kids request brand-specific products. All
children watch way too much television and, by extrapolation, the fabulous lifestyle
sold through them through the media.

Branded:
The Buying and Selling of Teenagers
takes a critical look at what happens in our cinema halls, our schools, our
malls and, most of all, in our homes to our children. Bombarded by
media-manipulated imagery and propelled into the citizenship of retail, the
helpless automatons are spiraling willfully into worlds
of credit-card debt, omnipresent material deficiencies, and challenging body
imagery. Alissa Quart entertains the reader with bizarre tales from the world
of burgeoning juvenile cosmetic enhancement surgery and overeager vendors
hawking their wares in ostentatious party circuits. However, most of the
observations seem to rely on anecdotes and cited published literature, and
nearly all of it (excepting a very slim section on Tony Hawk’s video game and
ephedrine supplements) is focused on girls. It is as if boys are absolutely
unaffected by the merchandising volley served up with an unhealthy dose of
corporate greed. The more innovative sections dealing with the branding of
University culture, the sneak attacks into our schools, and the abrupt harvest
of young auteurs make fashionably late appearances as the text reaches its
breathy end. We get few facts and more anecdotes, but the reader is almost
certainly left thirsty for solutions and optimism. And perhaps a fizzy green
drink that will make you score hoops. Every time.