Buy, Buy Baby

This slender volume tackles a couple of the most insidious examples of marketing to children: “educational” products that lack any educational research supporting them, cartoon branding of products and the involvement of very young children in marketing. Thomas interviews industry insiders to understand and explain how decisions about children's TV, children's books, children's characters and even preschool curricula are influenced by money making decisions. Some of her research is truly eye-opening - for instance that young children can recognize characters but not truly follow plot or context and this makes them extremely vulnerable to branding.

However, for such a small volume, I would hope it were crammed to the brim with commentary on marketing to children. Instead, she gets side tracked with the topic of screened media (important in its own right, but not central), and feels the need to repeat several points throughout the book. I also wish she would have spoken a little bit about the Gen-Y parent. She seems to think that all of the current parents are Gen-Xers. I personally missed Gen-X by a handful of years and was still well into my 20's when this book came out. Surely Gen-Y parents warranted at least a sentence?