Recent Top Secret Communiqués have implied that my generation is aswim in a sea of branding unimagined by preceding generations. Nike-XBox-Britney, oh my.

One can successfully argue that we are aswim in a surge of media heretofore unseen, but I don’t think there are necessarily more brands than before. The mid-century decades were not a less branded time. I think about my conceptions of those decades, and what I see is children playing in the vacant lot in their Converse All-Stars. I think of kids eating boxes of Cheerios so as to send in the box-tops for an Official Lone Ranger Frontiertown Cutout (or, for an additional ten cents, one’s very own Lone Ranger Atomic Bomb Ring). I’m thinking of the whole nuclear family gathering around the radio and early TV: Kraft Television Theater. Colgate Comedy Hour. Coke Time. Bob Hope on The Pepsodent Show. Fibber McGee and Molly, sponsored by Johnson Wax. The Shadow knows… right after this message from Perfect-O-Lite*.

This would have been the first hard-core wave of daily, consistent marketing directed at children. (Hollywood's marketing departments could only hope for weekly trips to the theater, at best.) This new wave of marketing subtly demanded that kids listen to the show, which meant that they would want the toys, which meant that they would pester their parents to buy the sponsor’s products so as to have box tops to send in.

As you might suspect, there's some Foucault that applies to this:

Let me offer a general and tactical reason that seems self-evident: power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms. … For it, secrecy is not in the nature of an abuse; it is indispensable to its operation. (Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol. 1, 86.)

These early product tie-ins created a way for brands to hide right in the open. They presented an insidious power, one that masked itself behind children’s enthusiasm (and one that never underestimated the power of children’s whining.) And they enabled the gentlemen of advertising to create a generation of children who expected such things, who found them right and good, and who in turn spawned my generation. And you're right - we have never known another world.

*And, as far as I know, branded products were all that was available. Generic products didn’t become available until the 70s. I’ve grown up completely saturated with advertising and media, but I’ve also never known a world where there wasn’t some cheaper alternative around.