This essay draws on a range of archival sources, including those at: the New York Public Library, and its specialist Science, Industry and Business library; the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Business History, at Duke University, North Carolina; the Paley Center for Media, New York City; and the UK’s History of Advertising Trust. I would like to thank the librarians and archivists at each of these locations for their help, particularly Rebecca Federman at the NYPL, Josh Rowley at Duke, Jane Klain at the Paley Center, and Eve Read at HAT. This work was made possible through the award of a Leverhulme Trust Emeritus Fellowship grant, 2019-2021.

References to press reports and trade papers are given in the footnotes. Other references are as follows:

Alexander, Alison, Louise M. Benjamin, Keisha Hoerrner and Darrell Roe (1998) ‘“We’ll Be Back in a Moment”: A Content Analysis of Advertisements in Children’s Television in the 1950s’, Journal of Advertising, 27(3): 1-9

Asquith, Kyle (2015) ‘Knowing the child consumer through box tops: data collection, measurement, and advertising to children, 1920–1945’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 32(2): 112-127

Barcus, Francis E. (1962) ‘Advertising in the Sunday comics’, Journalism Quarterly 39: 197-202

Buckingham, David (1995) ‘The Commercialisation of Childhood? The Place of the Market in Children’s Media Culture’, Changing English 2(2): 17-40

Buckingham, David (2011) The Material Child: Growing Up in Consumer Culture Cambridge: Polity

Buckingham, David (2014) ‘Selling youth: the paradoxical empowerment of the young consumer’, pp. 202-221 in David Buckingham, Sara Bragg and Mary Jane Kehily (eds.) Youth Cultures in the Age of Global Media Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Cohen, Lizabeth (2003) A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America New York: Vintage

Cook, Daniel T. (2000) ‘The other “child study”: figuring children as consumers in market research, 1910s-1990s’, Sociological Quarterly 41(3): 487-507

Cook, Daniel T. (2004) The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer Durham, NC: Duke University Press

Cross, Gary (1997) Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Engelhardt, Tom (1986) ‘Children’s television: The shortcake strategy’, in Todd Gitlin (ed.), Watching Television New York: Pantheon

Fox, Stephen (1984) The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and its Creators New York: William Morrow

Gamble, Margaret and Nancy Cotugna (1999) ‘A quarter century of TV foods advertising targeted at children’, American Journal of Health Behavior 23(4): 261-267

Gilbert, Eugene (1957) Advertising and Marketing to Young People New York: Printer’s Ink

Grumbine, E. Evalyne (1938) Reaching Juvenile Markets: How to Advertise, Sell, and Merchandise through Boys and Girls New York: McGraw Hill

Hajdu, David (2008) The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux

Helitzer, Melvin and Carl Heyel (1970) The Youth Market: Its Dimensions, Influence, and Opportunities for You New York: Media Books

Hendershot, Heather (1998) Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation Before the V-Chip Durham, NC: Duke University Press 

Jacobson, L. (2004) Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century New York: Columbia University Press

Kern, Rebecca (2015) ‘”And now bringing you the good life – a word from our sponsors”: the changing face of television advertising from the Sixties to the present day’, in Brian Cogan and Thom Gencarelli (eds.) Baby Boomers and Popular Culture Santa Barbara: Praeger

Kline, Stephen (1993) Out of the Garden: Toys and Children’s Culture in the Age of TV Marketing London: Verso

Lord, M.G. (2004) Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll London: Walker Books

MacDonald, Dwight (1958) ‘A caste, a culture, a market’, Parts 1 and 2: New Yorker 34: November 22^nd and 29^th

Marsh, Jackie and Bishop, Julia (2013) Changing Play: Play, Media and Commercial Culture for the 1960s to the Present Day Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press

McNeal, James (1991) A Bibliography of Research and Writings on Marketing and Advertising to Children New York: Lexington Books

McNeal, James (1992) Kids as Customers: A Handbook of Marketing to Children New York: Lexington Books

Melody, William (1973) Children’s Television: The Economics of Exploitation New Haven: Yale University Press

Munn, Mark (1958) ‘The effect of parental buying habits on children exposed to children’s television programs,’ Journal of Broadcasting, 2(2): 253-258

Osgerby, Bill (2002) ‘”A caste, a culture, a market”: youth, marketing, and lifestyle in post-War America’, in Ronald Strickland (ed.) Growing Up Postmodern: Neoliberalism and the War on the Young Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield

Pecora, Norma Odom (1998) The Business of Children’s Entertainment New York: Guilford Press

Reid-Walsh, Jacqueline and Mitchell, Claudia (2000) ‘”Just a doll’? “Liberating” accounts of Barbie-play’, The Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies 22(2): 175-90

Sammond, Nicholas (2005) Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child Durham, NC: Duke University Press

Scanlon, Paul D. (1969) ‘Oligopoly and deceptive advertising: the cereal industry affair’, Antitrust Law and Economics Review 3: 99-110

Schneider, Cy (1987) Children’s Television: the Art, the Business and How It Works Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Business Books

Seiter, Ellen (1993) Sold Separately: Parents and Children in Consumer Culture New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press

Spigel, Lyn (1992) Make Room for TV Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Spring, Dawn (2011) Advertising in the Age of Persuasion: Building Brand America 1941-1961 New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Wells, William D. (1965) ‘Communicating with children’, Journal of Advertising Research 5(2): 2-11

Willett, Rebekah, Chris Richards, Andrew Burn, Jackie Marsh and Julia Bishop (2013) Children, Media and Playground Cultures Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan