The adult–child coach in television commercials

Abstract

This article reflects upon the cultural logic of television commercials in which children promote products for adult use. Studies of ads that assume traditional family structures inform our exploration of the adult–child reversal that these texts depict. A close reading of 26 commercials broadcast on Israeli television during 2012–2017 identifies three narratives: in the subordinate worker, adults take orders from middle-class children; in the illiterate father, fathers rely on the literacy of their children; and in the shortsighted investor, adults learn from child financial coachers how to plan for the future. Drawing on Goffman’s observations on generational hierarchies, we distinguish the first and second “carnivalesque” narratives, embedded in conceivable scenarios, from the third, improbable, “simulacrum” narrative, which uses children to infuse neoliberalism’s ambiguous fluidity with efficacy and hope. Dismissing precarity, the adult–child financial coacher is emblem of the entrepreneurial self: direct, realizing, bold, and forever young.