Advertising: A New Market: Kids

Television also brought a particularly malleable class of consumers to the marketplace: children. Not that weaning Americans on the corporate teat was particularly new, but television delivered a young audience in a way that radio or magazines just could not. In the 1950s, Howard M. List, then advertising manager of the Kellogg Company, was pleased to report: “With television, we can almost sell children our product before they can talk…. In the old days, children ate what their mothers bought; now the kids tell their mothers what to buy.”