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Marshmallow Power and Frooty Treasures: Disciplining the Child Consumer through Online Cereal Advergaming

Over the last decade, major food corporations have increasingly turned to the World Wide Web to market food to children, largely through interactive product-themed websites and digital games. This paper offers a critical look at the marketing stories, digital environments, and advergames found on two websites marketing sweetened cereals—Frootloops.com and Luckycharms.com—to argue that online cereal marketing disciplines the child (as) consumer/commodity through an immersive simulation of cereal marketing narratives. Both Frootloops.com and Luckycharms.com represent cereal as a valued (treasured, magical) item, and reward players not just for consuming/manipulating the desired food item, but also for mastering the marketing narratives/discourses guiding online play. Players are disciplined (through play) into a potentially unhealthy nutritional logic in which the most nutritionally bereft food items are most valuable and the consumptive possibilities are endless.