Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (review)

A number of mass market books warn parents and the public of the dangers of commercial children’s media, youth culture corporate branding, and the marketing of childhood and advocate ways to take back childhood. A smaller group of scholars are attempting to parse out the interaction between children and consumerism in a more complex and detailed fashion. Kids Rule!, a study of the Nickelodeon network and its children’s programming from the 1980s to 2005, offers a detailed analysis of the Nickelodeon branding strategies and suggests the need to rethink how commercial media defines citizenship and children’s participation in consumer citizenship. Rather than assume that corporate branding and marketing strategies victimize innocent viewers or romanticize a pre—mass media image of childhood, Banet-Weiser accepts the dominant nature of media in late-capitalist societies and argues the need for greater understanding of the complexities and contradictions of children as active consumer citizens.

The book chronicles the rise of Nickelodeon in the early years of cable television when the Reagan Administration’s broadcast deregulation combined with grassroots media activism, especially around children’s programming, to produce utopian rhetoric around cable’s promise of serving the public interest through the free market strategy of unlimited channels. While cable initially offered the possibility of commercial-free programming based on subscriber revenues, by 1983 under Geraldine Laybourne, the Nickelodeon network began accepting ads. At the same time it appealed directly to kids rather than to their parents and defined itself as a “kids only” zone. In 1987 Viacom, one of the largest media conglomerates, took over Nickelodeon. Yet Nickelodeon continued to claim an underdog or rebellious identity for itself and appealed to kids to identify as victimized by adults and traditional media by incorporating an “us versus them” theme to their programming, ads, and promos. Nickelodeon defined its mission in political terms: respect for kids, kids’ empowerment, a “Declaration of Kids’ Rights,” and even referred to itself as “Nickelodeon Nation.” This rhetoric implied an offering of social and political power and gave Nickelodeon the opportunity to claim a unique and alternative space for kids, but at the same time it was creating its “brand,” in effect the “product” that it was selling to advertisers. As Banet-Weiser notes, “Nickelodeon crafts the definition of a contemporary empowered kid, so that what it means to be empowered is to be a ‘Nickelodeon kid’” (83).

At the same time the network developed unique and engaging approaches to children’s television including extensive use of focus groups, featuring strong female protagonists, presenting ethnically and racially diverse casts, and producing a news program, Nick News, that treated children as mature participants in world events. Part of Nickelodeon’s brand was a focus on “girl power.” In the early 1990s Nickelodeon adopted an overtly pro-girl stance, which produced a significant change in the representation of girls on television. “But in the early twenty-first century, that stance had been depoliticized and utilized as a particularly effective niche-marketing strategy” (139). Likewise, Nickelodeon’s urban, hip programming that featured multicultural characters appeared “cool” and “authentic” but provided more market strength for Nickelodeon than social awareness for its viewers. As Banet-Weiser argues, the network provided greater representation of female, African American, and Latino characters, but despite greater visibility and more positive role models, the Nickelodeon programs rarely addressed social issues around gender and race and thus rendered activism around feminism and civil rights irrelevant while maintaining a brand identification with postfeminist “girl power” and multicultural urban authenticity. Nickelodeon promoted irony and “camp” aesthetics as another component of its brand in programs such as SpongeBob SquarePants. While irony is an important part of contemporary youth culture and camp developed as a social critique of assumed social norms, these forms of humor have lost much of their political impact once commodified and incorporated into the Nickelodeon brand. SpongeBob SquarePants presents transgression in a playful, non-threatening way in order to sell Nickelodeon as an alternative...